Hayavadana

Hannah Baird, Will Leach & Laura Jane Watling in  Hayavadana.  Photo: Natasha K. Stone

For the last few weeks, I've been working at East 15 Acting School (not in East 15 these days, but Southend, of all places).  They have a fantastic BA course in World Performance, which moves away from the Stanislavski-based conventions of drama schools, to take in a much broader range of forms and styles, with a particular emphasis on Asian theatre.  In previous years, Kristine Landon-Smith, David Tse and Janet Steele have been among the directors asked to direct the final-year shows - so I was very honoured to be approached this time.  As much as anything, it's a wonderful space for me to experiment with texts and styles that interest me for the company.  Girish Karnad's Hayavadana is a play that has fascinated me for some time, so it was wonderful to work on it with such an enthusiastic and appropriately trained group of people.

Here's what I wrote about it for the programme:

Hayavadana: the Hybrid Horse

“Mixture is how newness comes into the world”

(Salman Rushdie)

It’s self-evident that Hayavadana is a play about hybridity: a man has a horse’s head; friends find themselves sharing bodies, heads and a wife; the elephant-headed god presides.  What is perhaps less immediately obvious is that the play is itself a hybrid.  The main plot gives the appearance of being an Indian folk tale, but is in fact a European story, written in 1957 by Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads.  The sub-plot of Hayavadana himself is Shakespearean: there’s a clear nod to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the man with an equine head; and Girish Karnad has acknowledged that the idea of a second plot “to tell the same story twice” was directly inspired by Shakespearean models.

The hybridity of the play lies in the fact that these European models are presented through a form derived from the Indian folk theatre, and particularly the Yakshagana of Girish’s native Karnathaka – a form filled with dance, music, narration, ornate costumes and make-up.  The play makes a case for the Indianess of Indian theatre – as Girish put it in a (hitherto unpublished) interview with me: “I felt it had to be held out as an agenda, as a manifesto, to say ‘I’m now going back to folk theatre’ and using folk theatre conventions to show that one could do something sensitive, intelligent, acceptable to an educated, intelligent audience in terms of that form.”  The play touched a nerve when it was first seen in 1971: India was slowly finding her feet after the process of decolonization, and there was a need simultaneously to relate Indian culture to the influences of an ever more internationally connected way of being, and to reassert the value of traditional forms that had been dismissed as primitive or shallow under colonialism.

Hayavadana’s hybridity finds a way of addressing a contemporary Indian audience that straddles the colliding worlds of the post-colonial.  Bringing it to Britain is an experiment in doing the same thing.  For us, this production has been about addressing the hybrid, intercultural nature of our own contemporary condition; embracing the complexity of a society shaped by multiple cultural influences; looking at what the encounter between Europe and Asia can say to our own post-colonial space; exploring how a quest for completeness can reflect our own national conversation.  We have done this against a background of scaremongering about immigration, and electoral gains for the radical right both in Britain and across Europe.  This is theatre that feels very immediate, very pertinent, very necessary.

And so it has been a deep joy for me to work with students from East 15’s World Performance course – because these young actors are capable of making the theatre our society needs.  It is not going to be enough for the actor of tomorrow to deliver naturalistic western text and psychological realism: indeed, I would say that to restrict our theatre to these approaches would be a betrayal of the international audience we now address that amounts to cultural imperialism.  The actor of tomorrow needs to embrace the glories of non-Western forms – Yakshagana, Jingju, Bunraku, Bharatanatyam – and to generate new energies through their collision with our own, more textual traditions.  These young actors are eager to learn from the Other – and in so doing, they show us the potential of tomorrow’s theatre to bring people together and regenerate our divided world.

Lucy in China

Shanghai Theatre Academy

Building on the success of Consumed, Lucy has just made a trip to China, to work on joint education and participation initiatives with our partners there.  Huge thanks to the British Council's Connections through Culture programme for supporting this visit!  As with most first visits to China, this was clearly an eye-opener for Lucy, and tremendously exciting!  Here are a few thoughts from her:

"Great first workshops - all female students, and despite being in essay session so very busy/tired- seemed to enjoy working with me. (Du Ping was worried they might not show as under lots of stress but had 14).  I decided to do similar workshops to those done in UK- so I could compare responses.  It was fascinating.  Stories of names were amazing - one person admitted her name is fake as she had to create a 'new' father  they invented to go on her papers so they could  travel to Korea. She uses her fake  name - her mother won't let her take her name as all women in her family have been unlucky (5 generations of single mothers).  One person's name was chosen from an ancient dictionary from the Ming dynasty- using lucky numbers.  One girl had a name meaning 'dawn'- but she kept being sick- so her parents consulted a name expert and changed her name to 'pure flowing water' - and when I asked her if her health  improved - evidently it had.  I had a teacher from the business faculty who joined us out of interest and she advised the girls that even if their parents aren't openly affectionate with them or tell them that they love them - their names chosen are  a reflection of their love!  I was slightly apprehensive they might take time to warm-up but they opened up immediately and it was a very lively session.  They were happy when I moved tables and told them to put notebooks away-  we were here to play!  I got a round of applause at end of workshop- (maybe that’s common here?- still nice though)"

"I was really sad to leave the students today- they too seemed so upset it was the last day. Despite all having major essays due tomorrow they were fantastic.  We were talking about dramatic action, and looking at wants and objectives-what we want now, short term future and end of life and what was stopping us. One girl, talking about the end of life, said she would like to look back and see she had regrets: I asked her if she meant no regrets, she said no, she is always a good girl, a good daughter a good student, always hands homework in etc. - just once she would like not to be, and to do something she could regret!

These students so need drama- they need to discuss their hopes and dreams, think about how human nature works. Many of them wanted to be dancers, musicians, composers but had long since given up their dreams so young - they enjoyed so much playing, talking, creating.  It was very moving.  I feel
very emotional thinking about them.  Both groups all girls - and so pressured.  Funnily going back to names- if fathers chose names they often chose names such as 'quiet beauty', (who quietly and shyly announced she didn't want to be quiet) or 'gentle flower': if mothers chose names they often seemed to go for 'reach for the sky'. One girl said her name had male and female characters and people often wrongly thought it meant her parents wanted a boy: in fact her mother wanted her to have the characteristics from a man that combined with the female character would help her to succeed."

"I had three hour session with Shanghai Theatre Academy this morning - Daniel [Shen Liang] said he'd never seen such a fast paced workshop before!  Students were lovely- they liked doing more than talking, so we mainly stuck to practical stuff.  At least two students are interested in the internet project - so I am meeting them with Daniel tomorrow afternoon.  I have also agreed to meet British student who was working there who is about to undertake her MA….might just squeeze in a morning sight sighting…"

Which Way China?

Serge Soric and Song Ru Hui in Consumed

The tour of Consumed came to an end at Chickenshed, our local theatre.  Big experiment for them, as they've not received shows before - and lovely to see that it was such a success there.  One of the reasons we got such good audiences was that Lucy and her team had been working with the Youth Theatre there on the Intercult project - so there was already a lot of engagement with the play's areas of concern.  And we were able to to show the young people's work as part of the Which Way China? day we presented on the Saturday, as a sort of symposium around the production.

Last week, I went back to Leeds University, for another symposium, this one around Staging China, with lots of scholars and theatre-makers from China and across the world.  So I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the wider issues around the play.  Nice to do this at the end of a project - it reminds you of what the piece is actually about and why it matters to do it.

Consumed is about a globalised, technologically inter-connected world.  It is also very much about difference within that world, and the fact that China remains emphatically, powerfully distinct from the West in cultural terms.  That difference, as the conversations of the last couple of weeks have made clear, is not confined to language or culture in its narrow sense.  It runs through the whole way of thinking and being.  So people who imagine that China's rapid change is an evolutionary process taking the nation towards a Western model of liberal democracy are profoundly mistaken.  China will go her own way - and our task is to find how to live with that.  The intercultural theatre we are making with Chinese artists is a cultural experiment around a much larger political question - how do we, as distinct cultures, jointly inhabit this connected, globalised space?  How do we live with difference?

The Leeds conference threw some of the differences into very sharp relief.  On the first day, there were two acting workshops - one with Zoë Waterman, who was Greg Doran's assistant on the RSC's Orphan of Zhao, the other with Tian Qinxin, Artistic Director of the National Theatre of China.  The RSC workshop was, I suspect, intended by the organisers to be about the approach that had been taken to The Orphan of Zhao - after all, the conference was about Staging China.  In fact, it was about the RSC's approach to Shakespearean text, with very little acknowledgment that many people in the room spoke very little English, or (perhaps more interestingly) viewed English as a second language, and English culture from the outside.  I had a lot of fund playing Benedick in Much Ado, but, as so often with the UK theatre establishment, I felt the real questions were simply being avoided.

Tian Qinxin was extraordinary.  She is a small, soft-spoken woman, who habitually dresses in an old-fashioned Chinese scholar's robe, and little round glasses.  Her workshop consisted largely of provoking us to be expressive in a whole range of different ways.  "Be an apple.  Express it through your eyes.  Can your partner tell whether you are a red apple or a green apple?"  "Look through the seats.  See through the walls.  See outside.  You must really look - not pretend to look".  "He was good.  Everybody else was very bad."  The model of "director as master", which is very prevalent in Chinese theatre, and which I recall from Zhang Ruihong, was clearly there.  But so was a great humour, and a real passion to teach what she was aware was a culturally specific approach.  The RSC workshop began by disclaiming that it was Western.  It was.

So often the West assumes that its way is "universal", and that it is the yardstick by which other cultures must be measured.  That is what we have to move beyond.  There is no universal and there is no yardstick.  There is simply flux.

Lepage's Cards - intercultural devising and technology

Cards

Well into the second week of our tour of Consumed, and I'm sitting in the Rich Mix, during the fit-up for tonight's show.  So far it's been a fabulous journey, with terrific reviews and an ecstatic response from the audience.  On Tuesday night we were in Leeds, with an audience largely composed of Chinese speakers.  It was fascinating to sense the show changing because of the languages spoken in the auditorium.

Last night was a night off, so I went to see Tony Guilfoyle, who was so central to the devising of Consumed, in the Robert Lepage production Cards at the Roundhouse.  Tony was fascinating as ever, playing a former gambler, whose life is collapsing around him.  It's probably the strongest storyline in a mesh of different plots characteristic of Lepage.  Tony's presence in the play, plus it's multilingualism, its use of technology (less so than in some recent Lepage shows) inevitably invites comparison with our own work - though in many ways it couldn't be more different.

It seems to me that Robert is increasingly interested in form, rather than necessarily working from content.  His interview in the programme is almost entirely about the challenges of working in the round, and what impresses about the production is its staging.  Tony showed me the rabbit warren under the stage afterwards - the technicians race around on little trolleys, and move the revolve lying on their backs.  The actors pop up from under the stage - emphasising the verticality of the circular space.

For us too, form was very much a start point: Consumed is in many ways a response to new technologies, and I wanted to express that through a multimedia form that enabled us to dialogue with the technology.  Multilingualism was also a formal start point (necessitated by the casting), which also came to be part of the meaning.  I tend to feel that's the key in this kind of work - form and content operating in close dialogue with one another.  Our theatrical decisions coming to reveal meaning.

The amazing Song Ru Hui

Song Ru Hui.  Photo: Richard Davenport

I've known, and worked with Song Ru Hui since 2009, when we started the development process for Re-Orientations in Shanghai.  That makes this period of rehearsal for Consumed the fifth block of work we've done together in four years.  It's a fascinating and evolving creative collaboration, made all the more intriguing and challenging by the fact that we don't speak the same language.

Consumed was Hui's idea.  She'd been excited and stimulated by the devising process around Re-Orientations, and wanted the opportunity to develop a new piece with a smaller cast, working on similar lines but with more depth for specific characters.  We've ended up with a three-hander: Hui and two men.

The workshop process in Shanghai last year was actually quite complex for Hui.  Her training and method as a performer is very Stanislavskian - she needs to know everything about a character before she can play her.  That's almost diametrically opposed to my devising approach - where we create scenes, events, happenings - and slowly hang them together until a storyline emerges.  For me, the character is the person who does those things.  The psychology emerges from the events, rather than being there to motivate them.

But the dramaturgical period since the workshop has allowed a strong story to emerge, with three clear characters, each of whom has a very carefully worked out journey.  Our rehearsals over the last few weeks have been about charting that, in a way far closer to Hui's accustomed approach.  And the results are very remarkable.

Serge Soric and I were discussing her acting on the train after rehearsals last week.  It's not just a Stanislavskian, absorbed performance.  At the risk of sounding pretentious, it's a transcendent happening.  I've no idea whether Hui is a religious or spiritual person in any way - although I do feel that she emerges from a heritage of Buddhist culture which empowers the internal life.  It seems to me that acting, for her, is not a craft or a discipline so much as a spiritual practice, a way of being.  More than any actor I have ever worked with, she transforms on stage, becoming more than herself. She takes her art to another dimension, and so transforms the space around her. 

Rehearsing China - and the French Revolution

Zhou Enlai

When Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, he famously replied that it was too early to say.  A scholarly figure, like the Platonic philosopher king Mao, Zhou watched history with the same sharp eye he brought to bear on the present.  It informed and directed his view of future policy.

The same, it would seem, is true of his successors in what, elsewhere in the world, has become an altogether less studious age: one which tends to ignore history, or at best to prostitute it to patriotic indoctrination in the style of Michael Gove.  In China, however, John Gray reports in this weekend's Guardian that the new leadership around Xie Jinping have been making an avid study of Alexis de Tocqueville's book on the origins of the French Revolution: L'Ancien Régime.  Well they might.  Tocqueville pointed out that the French Revolution exemplified an important pattern in world history: namely that revolutions tend to occur not in times of despair, but when things are actually "getting better" in terms of economic growth, and particularly when they are getting better for one section of society more rapidly than for others.  Judged by these criteria, contemporary China, with its meteoric growth and ever-widening inequalities, would seem to be ripe for a revolution emerging from the peasantry.  This insecurity in the leadership, coupled with their enormous power, makes sense of much they are doing in terms of policy.

I have argued before in this blog that the globalisation of economics does not imply any inevitable liberalisation or westernisation of Chinese society.  Indeed, the financial crisis of 2008 may have pushed things in precisely the opposite direction.   Following the collapse of the Western banks, China no longer felt that the West was the model with which it had to catch up.  Rather, China could go it alone, creating a new model of state-sponsored capitalism.  This, to my mind, serves to underline the increasing emphasis on the distinct nature of Chinese culture which the regime is keen to promulgate both to its own people and overseas.

And Chinese culture is indeed distinct.  During this first week of rehearsals for Consumed, I have been reminded time and again that the Chinese colleagues we are so lucky as to have with us do not think about this art of theatre in quite the way we do.  In terms of making exciting intercultural performance, that is, of course, a huge advantage.  It would be very dull if cross-cultural work simply blanded everybody out, a cultural equivalent of global mass-production.  This week has seen us moving the Chinese and Western elements in our play further away from one another, looking deliberately for the differences, and so for the drama.  The fact that it's all expressed through the web, Skype, video and the other accoutrements of a global economy makes it all the more potent.  These forms which seem to bring us closer are in fact the media that most clearly expose our fundamental difference.

Week 2 starts tomorrow.  I can hardly wait.

Mo Yan and me

The picture isn't Mo Yan, of course.  That's Ning Li, the famous Chinese actor, who I picked up at Heathrow on Friday evening.  Tomorrow, I'll meet him at Tara Arts to start rehearsals for Consumed.  A couple of days later, we'll be joined by Song Ru Hui, on her third Border Crossings trip to the UK.  And this is our third production in collaboration with a Chinese company and leading Chinese artists.  It's a pretty important line of work.

So - I've been keeping a very careful eye on the way the media has been responding to the new-found fame of Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  We were in Shanghai in 2010, when it was announced that the Peace Prize had been awarded to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".  The TV screens went blank, and the firewalls went very high.  Some days later, there was an outbreak of calculated news coverage: the West was interfering in China's internal affairs, ran the official party line. No such fury over Mo Yan: the Chinese government has been delighted by the prize, and he has emerged as a national hero.

The response of the Western press, and especially the British, has been rather different.  Here, Mo Yan has been castigated as Beijing's poodle, condemned for not being a dissident, accused of acquiescing in totalitarianism.  Here, it would seem, we expect Chinese artists to be political rebels.  Nothing else will do.  The reviews of Mo's new novel Pow! have uniformly commented on what isn't there.  For example, Chris Cox in the Observer says that "Pow! doesn't land any blows on the Chinese regime."  Well, why should it?  Do we castigate Rose Tremain because she doesn't make overt attacks on David Cameron?

Actually, I suspect Mo Yan is a more political writer than the Western press, in search of heroic dissidents, has realised.  The clue is in the name.  "Mo Yan" is a pen name: it means "say nothing".  It is an echo of the advice that the writer's parents gave him during the Cultural Revolution.  It suggests the means whereby he has survived and thrived in a state which is not always friendly to freedom of expression.  In order to be subversive, art does not have to be direct.  In fact, direct criticism of government is close to suicidal in many parts of the world.  Magical realism, a genre close to Mo Yan's heart, was invented in Latin America as a means to cloak the political in fantasy and so to survive.  And by drawing so much attention to his "saying nothing" as to make it his own name, Mo Yan invites us to look under the surface of the novels for meanings that may not be immediately apparent, least of all to the naive Westerner in search of dissident heroes.

Pow! is about a young boy, Xiaotong, his village in modern China, and the prevailing obsession with meat.  This, in itself, is a central issue in the cultural change now sweeping the country: what was until recently a largely vegetarian society has become seized by the desire to consume meat as a mark of wealth and economic success.  The shift is having profound and damaging consequences for the global food chain and eco-system.  It is, in fact, one of the biggest problems confronting the contemporary world.  It is also symptomatic of the materialist drive which is possessing modern Chinese society.

Of course, Mo Yan, saying nothing, does not attack the regime that has encouraged all this.  He portrays the absurdity of the world he lives in and leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions.  This kind of empowerment could itself be regarded as an attribute of democracy.

Will our new play be similarly subversive, in a similarly subtle way?  We aim to take it back to China later in the year, and that does mean we have to reckon with the censor.  And yet, in 2010, we were able to show work there that treated the Cultural Revolution, the single child policy, homosexuality and infanticide.  We made no overt statements of our position, but rather opened the possibility of debate; and that, I think, is what theatre's role should be.  Consumed is about the current moment: it deals with high finance, corruption, greed, and consumerism.  It is also about the web.  None of this makes it an attack on Beijing - but it's no cosy bit of toadying either.