'Witness'ing the Interplay Between Arts and Rights

“Aspirations in the Arts and Humanities are not an indulgent form of free play for the benevolent or indulgent imagination,” Director of the Humanities Center Homi K. Bhabha said in his opening remarks for “Witness,” an event organized by the Center, featuring Toni Morrison and Yo-Yo Ma. “Rather [artistic] interpretation is an act of empathetic intersession, a way of giving voice to another place, person, or period, and setting the stage in their interest.”

Co-sponsored by the Office of the President and Provost, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, the American Repertory Theatre, and the Office for the Arts at Harvard, “Witness” was held on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “[The event is] an opportunity for us to come together as a community in celebration, commemoration, and meditation, not a performance” A.R.T. director Gideon Lester said, “Our intention is to invite representation across the arts and humanities... and stimulate the visual landscape of your imagination.” Aided by world-class artists like Ma, Morrison, and dancer Damian Woetzel, “Witness” aimed to verify the powerful outcome of a union between the realities of the human condition and the creative, artistic manifestations of a living, aspiring soul, in addition to the potential of art to transform human relations.

Woetzel, introduced by Bhabha as “one of America’s premier dancers, and the only one with a degree from the Kennedy School,” was perhaps the manifestation of the spirit behind the ambitious evening. A beloved former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, upon retiring he pursued both public and artistic administration. Woetzel lightheartedly led the gathered congregation in the famous opening passage of George Balanchine’s ballet “Serenade.” Woetzel explained Balanchine had set the ballet, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s glorious “Serenade in C Major,” on 17 novice ballet students.

The program called Woetzel’s segment a “balletic invocation of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in... its benefits.” The audience was amused and moved as they participated in the “rehearsal” and “performance,” evoking Bhabha’s remarks on the value of participation in communitarian artistic and humanistic pedagogy. Each participant stood with one arm raised as though he were blocking the moonlight, brought his hand to the heart, and opened his arms to the heavens. In the ballet, this passage invokes the birth of the ballerina; here, the cello accompaniment of Yo-Yo Ma and flickering candles invoked the birth of an almost holy union of artistic commitment among individuals with different predispositions and brought fortitude to the power of art to coalesce.

President Drew Gilpin Faust was meant to read an excerpt from her book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” but, according to welcoming remarks, was indisposed. A substitute read Faust’s writings on the reality of war and the effect it has on American soldiers, transforming them into “different men... men required to deny, to numb basic human feelings at costs they may have paid for decades after the war ended.” As Yo-Yo Ma and Charlie Albright ’11 on the piano played an excerpt from “Quartet for the End of Time” by Olivier Messiaen, who composed the piece while held as a prisoner of war by the German army during World War II, the powerful expressiveness of the words and music were each individually amplified, demonstrating the ideal unification of literature, music, and the vivid imagery of first-hand human testimony and suffering.

Reverend Peter J. Gomes recited a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” quoting, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” a nod to artistic exploration of human sentiment.

Following Gomes, an array of speakers took the stage to read excerpts from various national outcries against injury and injustice, reading first in their native tongue and then the English translation. Readings varied from “Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared” to excerpts from a student declaration distributed at Tiananmen Square to a selection from W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Human Rights for All Minorities”; countries from Iran to Hungary to Africa were represented, and all were accompanied by an appropriate musical interlude.

Lastly, the honored guest of the evening was introduced: Toni Morrison, the Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning author who “refuses to tell the story simply in black and white” Bhaba said and who “offers this country the opportunity for truth and reconciliation.” In a soft and almost timid voice, Morrison read from her most recent novel “A Mercy,” which explores the condition of slavery set in the 1680s and powerfully raises some of the most profound questions about human rights in our own time; thus, it was the appropriate closer for the evening.

Quietly chilling evocations and depictions of women were painfully authentic and for all their beauty, threatened to deprive all present of any glimpse of hope had it not been followed with Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s “Night Music: Voice in the Leaves.” A piece of chamber music at times dark but mostly exuberant, it was commissioned in 2000 for the Silk Road Ensemble, who performed it here.

Bhabha recalled his inspiration for “Witness”: a Somalian exile who, upon landing in prison, remarked “I have all the time in the world to remember every book I ever read and spend as long as I like exploring it from every angle in my imagination.” This in turn “strengthened [his] resolve and ability to stand resolutely against the dictatorship and to keep [himself] alive.” To represent in the world of arts and humanities the lives of others who are “hidden from history” is to recognize the ephemeral power of the imagination.