Alan Clements of Vancouver, British Columbia has fought for many causes, but one that he has embraced dearly has been the fight for freedom. For Clements, freedom is the right of people to think, to speak, to print and to
Alan Clements of Vancouver, British Columbia has fought for many causes, but one that he has embraced dearly has been the fight for freedom.
For Clements, freedom is the right of people to think, to speak, to print and to gather.
Freedom will be among many topics Clements will take up during a solo performance at 8 p.m. on Oct. 25 at the Kilauea Theater.
“Spiritually Incorrect” is an improvisational “spoken word” performance that has combined comedy, drama, satire, art and activism, Clements said in an telephone interview with The Garden Island news from Vancouver, B.C. where he currently lives.
The elements of the play are drawn from his own experiences in life. Clements is a human rights advocate, personal friend of Burma’s Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, author, performing artist and comic.
The benefit performance will be held in honor of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of a non-violent movement for human rights and democracy in Burma in the late 1980s.
Partial proceeds from Clements’s performance also will go the Garden Island Arts Council. The play began in 2000 and the Kaua‘i performance will be Clements’s 52nd.
Clements hopes that the messages the audience members will receive will help them to lead fuller, more informed and enlightened lives, to the betterment of Kauai’s society and beyond.
“The core message for me is celebration of freedom to challenge apathy, cynicism, freedom to engage beauty and adventure and freedom to celebrate who we are, as we are, this moment now,” Clements said.
Parts of his performance will deal with issues he believes is close to the hearts of all people – freedom and a desire to lead full, unencumbered life.
Freedom is a “natural urge within the consciousness to know its own nature, and to peak its liberation from all obstacles,” Clements said.
Freedom is tied to the United Nation’s declaration of human rights, a document listing 31 inalienable rights, Clements said. The rights are the “framework for civilized and dignified human co-existence,” Clements said.
“They constitute human freedom, regardless of political persuasion, nationality, religion or race, whether they are young or old, female or male,” he said.
The inalienable rights set forth by the United Nations for all nations to follow deal with the “freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom to publish across all frontiers, freedom to congregate,” Clements said.
The world would become a place of lesser meaning without the practice of those basic rights, he said. “You take away those basic human freedoms and humanity suffer its greatest losses,” Clements said.
Clements said he is an “advocate of participatory democracy.” “When people preface human rights at the level of perception, I call it liberation through living,” Clements said. “This is the full improvement of non-transcendental spirituality.”
The “celebration of freedom” allows people to look inward and take stock of themselves and to appreciate who they are and what they have, Clements said.
“The celebration of life allows us to humorously and satirically look at our fundamental frailties and foibles,” Clements said.
People should be able to laugh at themselves, and “if they don’t, they run the risk of solidifying themselves into the statutes of their own persona,” Clements said.
It would be best for people to put down their guard and just be themselves, allowing them to enjoy who they are and for others to appreciate them, Clements said.
Another part of Clements’s performance also deals with the “invocation of innocence and adventure, that we return to a wide-eyed, open look at the magnificent madness of this mystery called life,” he said.
“I don’t teach or lecture in my performances,” he said. “I take the position of Oscar Wilde (poet and playwright), when he remarked how profoundly touched he was that audiences came out to overhear how he spoke to himself,” Clements said.
Clements said audience members won’t see only one side of him. “I let people in on how I talk to my own soul, the good, the bad and the decadent,” Clements said.
Witnessing tragedies on the world stage of politics helped him form his current-day philosophies on life, Clements said.
Clements was in Burma (Myanmar) in the late 1980s when the government in that southeast Asian country instituted a brutal repression against a burgeoning pro-democracy movement.
Clements wrote “The Voice of Hope,” an internationally acclaimed book of conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi.
Kyi is the daughter of the late Burmanese nationalist leader, General Aung San, whose resistance against British colonial rule help lead Burma to independence in 1948, according to a Web site.
Forty years later, Aung San Suu Kyi became the leader of a burgeoning democratic movement that led to the formation of the National League for Democracy.
Although her party won by an overwhelming majority in national elections in the early 1990s, the military regime refused to step aside, resulting in her house arrest until 1995.
She still faces restrictions on her freedom to move and speak in her country, where oppression of pro-democracy activism continues, according to a Web site.
In the 1990s, Clements also went to what was then known as Yugoslavia. By 1992, the Yugoslav Federation was falling apart, as nationalism replaced communism as a dominant force in the Balkins.
Both in Burma and in what was Yugoslavia, Clements said he witnessed brutality he will never forget.
“It was a beautiful tragic experience,” Clements said. “How do you fathom the loss of industrialized murder?”
Clements was born in Boston and attended the University of Virginia to study international relations and law.
Clements said he went to India in 1975 and then to Burma in 1976, where he found “my spiritual” home,” a place where he found a form of mediation that was “clean, direct, simple and immediate.”
Clements became the first American to be ordained a Buddhist monk in Burma. He is the author of “The Next Killing Fields?” and co-author of Burma’s “Revolution of the Spirit.”
Clements’s most recent book is called “Instinct for Freedom — Finding Liberation through Living.” It will be available at Saturday’s performance on Kaua‘i.
Over the years, Clements has been interviewed on ABC’s Nightline, Talk to America, BBC and for the New York Times, London Times, Time and Newsweek magazines and by other media.
Advance tickets for Clements’s performance on Kaua‘i can be bought at the Kilauea Theatre’s box office for $20.
For more information on the performance, call 828-0438 or go to http://www.kilaueatheater.com. Performances also are planned on O‘ahu and Maui.
