Tradition and Betrayal

Here’s a list of words:

Tractor

Traitor

Traduce (a bit Shakespearean)

Betrayal

They all come from the same root - the latin ‘tradere’ - to hand across.

The other word that comes from same root, and which links them, is ‘tradition’.

‘Traditional’ is seen as opposite to ‘modern’, or ‘innovative’. If we’re being encouraged to buy something the seller wants us to believe is an innovation, we’re told that traditional ways are out of date. If we’re being told to do what we’ve been told, we’re encouraged to stick to ‘the traditional ways’ of doing things.

‘Tradition’ is a weapon.

It’s also complex.

Tradition requires both aspects of the list of words above. It needs to be honoured and brought forward, and equally needs to be betrayed. By doing things the way they were done in the past, we bring forward the wisdom of our ancestors and learn what they discovered. We refrain from continually ‘reinventing the wheel’.

However, if we refuse ever to innovate - and embrace the innovation of others - we condemn the practices of the past to irrelevance. They become practices of an era which no longer exists.

A traitor to a tradition is just as much a traditionalist as a adherent of a tradition.

A tradition is an innovation that worked, and has become frozen in time.

Hokusai, the Japanese wood-block printer, whose image ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ is one of the most recognisable images a human has ever created, is the symbol of the Japanese wood-block tradition. Except he wasn’t. He was sacked from the studio where he worked for breaking its rules (which he would have experienced as a source of huge shame), and, throughout his life he surreptitiously integrated European innovations into his art, despite the fact that Japan was firmly closed off from the rest of the world at that time and such cross-fertilisation was firmly frowned upon.

Yet his work - innovative and rebellious - was superb. He is now the very guru of the tradition he once gently betrayed.

This is another tradition we need to acknowledge - the tradition of betrayal. In the 60s the great Polish theatre visionary Jerzy Grotowski suddenly found his work had become all the rage, with small companies all over the world springing up and claiming to do ‘Grotowskian’ work. Most of it appalled him. He thought it was utter rubbish. Perhaps as a a direct response he said this: ‘If you wish to do Grotowski’s work, you must do your own work, for that is what Grotowski has done’. (That may not be an exact quote - I can’t remember where first I read it).

He’s pointing to another vital tradition, that of doing your own thing. Yet Grotowski’s traditionality was not a disconnection from the past, however radically innovative his work was. He was trained in the tradition of Stanislavski in Moscow (another radical whose work became frozen into the past by some who followed him.). Grotowski claimed - perfectly reasonably - that his work was the systematic development (we could say ‘essential betrayal’) of the work of Stanislavski, just as Hokusai’s work was an essential betrayal of what he first learned to do.

We are all part of multiple traditions of reproduction and betrayal.

As Northern Ireland teeters towards conflict again, with the Orange Order demanding their right to march through an area where they are not welcome, where residents are still traumatised by the violence and murders that took place 30 years ago when that march last took place, they claim they are reasserting their tradition. Actually they are wanting to reproduce what happened 30 years ago, not what happened 10 years ago (when there was no march), nor what happened 200 years ago (when the road was not even there to march down). They have taken one particular moment that suits their contemporary agenda and claimed it to be ‘the way things have always been’. They are demanding the right to their ‘tradition’ while entirely ignoring what a tradition actually is - an interplay of repetition and change.

In every culture and in the life of each one of us, this interplay is one of the dynamics of growth and renewal. When do we stick to the ways of doing things that we know, and when do we innovate? When we innovate, can we recognise it not as ‘something new’ but as an evolution of what we already know? Can we welcome those who break the rules, however uncomfortable that makes us, knowing that unless people break rules, traditions fossilise into irrelevance.

I’m not a traditional artist. Except that I am.

I was not a traditional theatre worker. Except that I was.

I’m not a traditional person. Except that I very definitely am.

I suppose the question is not ‘are you traditional?’, it’s ‘which traditions are you choosing to honour?’. In this dynamic world, we need to embrace the simple (and etymological) fact - betrayal (change/innovation) and repetition are both essential aspects of tradition.

Warmest love to you