SUJET
Partie 1 - Expression écrite
Document A
Emotional rescue: how personal trauma has been turned into art.
Jonathon Young sits on a hard bed, the kind that speaks of institutions. Green light tinges the walls
around him on the stage. This is "the room", a space triggered by an event referred to as "the
accident" throughout his show Betroffenheit. "The night of the accident we're all asleep," his
character recites. "The alarm wakes me and ... I run. I'm the first on the scene and they're in there. I
try to help them get out but it's too late." Eight years ago, Young was on a family holiday north of
Vancouver when the cabin in which his daughter, 14, and two cousins were sleeping, caught fire.
Young tried to save them, but the flames were 150 feet high. All three children died. His show, a
dance-theatre hybrid, is an exploration of grief, suffering, trauma, addiction and recovery. To the
audience, it might seem an exercise in therapy as well as art. Yet Young says he did not set out to
create "anything therapeutic" with Betroffenheit (which translates loosely as "shock"). The idea
repels him. He and his co-creator, the choreographer Crystal Pite, were "insistent upon" that anti-
therapeutic intention, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do "the work that we need to do
with art, which is to balance the particular with the universal". How, night after night, can he repeat
a performance that renders his horrific experience freshly inescapable? "Everybody wants to know
that," he says. "Everyone is interested in the why and the howdoes-it-feel." He thinks this is
because, unlike a painter whose self-portrait is "fixed", he is "inside the self-portrait. I'm there on
the stage, appearing as though I am present and experiencing these events anew. But of course I'm
not." Only he can tell, he says, the lines in the show that truly come from his experience.
"Performance can be cathartic," Young says, sounding a little restless at the word. "But performing
this material doesn't feel especially cathartic towards the events that it stemmed from. I don't feel
any better about what happened. But do I feel more alive? Ye-es. Do I feel more present? Yes. Am I
panting for air and supercharged with blood and sweat and oxygen? Yes. Has progress been made in
my personal life? Yes, for a moment." But it never lasts, he says. He feels better and he doesn't; he
finds the performance cathartic and not.
• Which event led Jonathon Young to write this theatre show, and what did he hope to achieve by
writing and performing it ?
• What is Jonathon Young's view on using the creative arts as therapy to help people deal with
difficult emotions ?
Document B
Why climate action needs the arts.
Whether to engage in debate or change opinion and behaviour, arts can play a key role in the
cultural awakening of the masses to the perils of climate change.
"Art is not a mirror to reflect reality," wrote Bertolt Brecht," but a hammer with which to shape it."
His view was clearly shared by the judges of Anglia Ruskin University's recent sustainable art prize.
The winning piece was a large tombstone themed on climate change, blackened by oil and carrying
the words "Lest we forget those who denied." The fact that there were also the names of six
prominent climate sceptics on the tombstone led the Telegraph newspaper to denounce it as
"tasteless" and "obnoxious", and for one of those named, Christopher Monckton, to claim the
