APAM so far

I'm in Adelaide, during its buzziest time of the year, the Festival period. Huge thanks to Arts Projects Australia and the Australia Council for this one - they've invited me here for APAM, which is a "Performing Arts Market". At times, this is every bit as crazed, commercialised and un-creative as it sounds - with much talk of "buying" and "product" - but it is also a chance to meet some amazing artists and cultural workers, see some remarkable shows, and hold some very important conversations, particularly about the next Origins and indigenous Australian involvement. I've re-connected with some of our key collaborators and advisors from previous years, including Rhoda Roberts of Dreaming Festival fame, David Milroy, who is here with his latest piece Waltzing the Wilara, and Michelle Broun from WA's Arts team. Other people who've been on the radar for a while include Marrugeku - I met Rachael and Dalisa years ago in Perth when they were performing the great Incognita, and more recently saw Dalisa on her home territory of Broome (where the work is deeply rooted). They're currently creating a new piece for her to perform solo - which sounds more manageable than their usual vast-scale performances. And I've made some very exciting new contacts, including Rachael Maza from Ilbijerri, whose piece Jack Charles v the Crown is an exciting example of the autobiographical genre. Rachael is working with a really edgy political theatre group called version 1.0 on a new play about a notorious death in custody on Palm Island. I saw version 1.0's play The Disappearances Project, which deals with the effects on families of missing persons cases, and I cannot wait to see how they come together with indigenous artists.

The other highlight for me so far wasn't to do with indigenous work at all - although it certainly crosses a great many borders in very radical new ways. This is a company called Back to Back, which is built around an ensemble of people who are perceived to have a learning disability. When I told Rachael Swain how powerful I found their work, she said that she thought they were the most important company in Australia - which, coming from her, is one hell of a compliment. Their piece is called Ganesh versus the Third Reich (there's a "versus" theme here....), and it deals with the Indian god's need to re-appropriate the swastika for its original, sacred meaning. The story opens up all sorts of debates about rights of representation and self-representation, appropriation, perception..... It's coming to LIFT later in the year, and needs to be seen.

Posh and period

Bingo is one of the best plays of the last hundred years. Most of Edward Bond's plays are pretty good - but the Trilogy around Shakespeare (Lear, The Sea and this one) are truly amazing. It's also a very complex piece, and one that needs a clear, rational production to make sense. I saw a brilliant production of Bond's Restoration some years ago with Simon Russell Beale and my chum Vivienne Rochester, which was set on an empty white space, blazingly lit, with only occasional, very specific props, each of which glowed with economic and dramatic significance as a result. The new production, at the Young Vic, which I saw on Saturday, is in a very different style. In fact, it looks like a Sunday-night BBC period drama. As the photo shows - there are period costumes and heavy detail in the set and props. It all weighs the production down, so that it feels lacking in the mental energy Bond requires.

There is a lot of this sort of thing about, of course. Downton Abbey; Birdsong; Upstairs, Downstairs..... all of them are dramas to fuel the heritage industry. Never mind the way the Dickens anniversary has been treated. It feels as if the past has been appropriated by the right - and culture has become the repository of the worthy and dull. We've got posh and period mixed up with profound. It's a very strange thing to happen to somebody so avowedly of the left as Bond - but he's been packaged up as part of the 2012 heritage industry.

I recall, during the Thatcher years, Salman Rushdie commented on the preponderance of Raj nostalgia in books, TV and film (Passage to India; Jewel in the Crown; The Raj Quartet...). It happened, he pointed out, just as a right-wing government was reasserting British imperialism elsewhere. Today's manifestations of heritage culture have a similar background, though closer to home. The TV dramas celebrate the aristocracy just as a cabinet of Etonian millionaires squeezes the country dry - and even theatre, that most democratic form, is starting to serve up productions of socialist plays that make them cosy, nostalgic, and in thrall to the establishment.

By the way - I also think the Young Vic has one of the best programmes of any theatre I know - and I love most of the work there (including the current Changeling). So please nobody take offence - but I do think this debate needs to be opened up.

Sgint

I don't think I'd ever seen a play in Welsh before. Sgint, which was thankfully super-titled, is a verbatim piece based on interviews with people in Carmarthen about their lives since the financial crisis kicked in. Good to be reminded that there are places outside London, outside all sorts of mainstreams, that are really bearing the brunt of the current lunacy.

I went along to see it in Cardiff, because the producing company, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, is doing some amazing work in developing Welsh language theatre. I've thought for a while that Welsh and Scots Gaelic should be part of the Origins Festival - indigeneity close to home. Talking to Arwel and Elen, the directors, I sense a certain trepidation at the potential romanticism and exoticism of categorising the Celts alongside indigenous peoples from elsewhere. But there are very clear similarities of experience - the suppression of language and culture, the socio-economic marginalisation, the potential for new identities within both larger and smaller, more defined, political structures. It slowly turns into a worthwhile conversation - one we can develop as their new projects come along. At the moment, they are very focused on Elen's Welsh-language production of The Tempest for the 2012 Festival. We talk about my Indian Tempest and Toufann. Amazing how that play can resonate in so many contexts. But I do wonder how Elen will deal with the centrality of language to the piece, and the fact that the main language of the play is that of the coloniser, Prospero, and not the colonised Caliban. Will be fascinated to see!

Plymouth

Just got back from a very interesting couple of days at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. Faith Collingwood, who works in the Creative Learning department there, has been talking to us for some time about the possibility of collaborating on their Dare to be Different project for young refugees and asylum seekers. Since Plymouth became a dispersal centre in 2002, there's been a huge influx of displaced people into the city, and a lot of tensions as a result. On Tuesday night, I was able to watch the group in action. They're mainly from Africa, mostly in their teens, and full of energy. There's inevitably a certain insecurity around culture and language, but also (very pleasingly) a security and indeed a pride about who they are, about cultural identity. It was almost like being back in Botswana at times. But much colder.

This morning I met with Faith and her colleagues to talk through ways in which we can collaborate around May and June - so there might be quite a few Plymouth trips coming up. Then whizzed across town to the main theatre for a meeting with David Prescott, who programmes the Drum and is very interested in Consumed. So interested that he gave me some very good ideas on its artistic development, actually!

Kampnagel

I don't often fly to Europe for the day, but when a theatre like Hamburg's Kampnagel calls, you tend to go! Helen and Dani from the Indigeneity project and I went out there to talk about another indigenous festival, being planned there for next year. I first got wind of this when Rosanna Raymond introduced me to her friend Yuki back in September. Yuki is collaborating with the Kampnagel's Artistic Director, Amelie Deuflhard, to bring a range of New Zealand and Pacific work to Germany during 2013. Even better, the dates are close to the ones we have in mind - so it looks like we can share some artists, and really make the most of the intercontinental airfares.

The venue is stunning: no fewer than six theatre spaces in a converted crane factory, plus huge public areas. There's a deliberate roughness, with bare walls - it's functional and tough, without a hint of luxury. And yet you can really feel the possibility of celebration there. For Amelie, like myself, exchange between artists and between artists and communities is central to the idea of a festival. I wonder if we might be able to do even more than share artists - perhaps we can develop some of the work in collaboration???

Our Māori Heritage Project is entering its last stages; and on Tuesday night Joel, Gabrielle and I went along to Ngāti Rānana at New Zealand House to recruit likely interview subjects for the Oral History work. Gabrielle and Rosanna have been working with young people in schools on Māori culture, including visits to Hinemihi and the British Museum, and now they are ready to talk to some elders about the experience of migration and making a life in the UK while sustaining a Polynesian culture and identity.

This week we said goodbye to Aike Broens, our Dutch intern, who has been a great help to us in the office for the last five months. Her internship was part of her college work, so it was important to structure it towards learning outcomes - Carissa did that brilliantly, so we got the most out of one another! Here's part of Aike's report on her time with us, which includes a sneak preview of some future work....

"Since the development of the [mentoring] project alongside the new theatre production called Consumed started when I first came in I could be part of almost every stage of its development. I was given so much freedom and responsibility I actually experienced what it was like to set up a project from the beginning. The general idea for a mentoring project with both Chinese and English young people was already there but the rest still needed to be filled in. And so I designed and developed most of the content of the project alongside Carissa. I actually thought of the name ‘The Flip Flop Scenario’. It started with research into the Chinese community, research into other linked projects and research into funding possibilities. Then we set up the basic description, the aims and the budget.... Then we worked on the things that were still missing such as an education pack and a case for support. Carissa let me do the first thinking again and we discussed the content of each product and then I started working on it. I learned to be very independent and to follow my own instinct but also be able to get criticism and improve my work. When leaving the company I felt that Carissa and I really left a good project outline for the company to continue and I can actually see what my influence was and put a stamp on it in general."

Thanks Aike - we will miss you!

Caravan

Sheelah and I went to Brighton on Tuesday for the Caravan symposium on touring overseas. Always interesting to compare notes with other people, and to hear what the funders have to say! The eye-opener on the funding side was, of all things, UK Trade & Investment, which turns out to be willing to support theatre, like any other business, as it "exports" its work into "new markets" - which is one way of describing what we do.... At a time when most government departments and the prevailing economic discourse seems to think of the arts as nothing but a drain on resources, it was very refreshing to hear from a civil servant who was viewing theatre as a way of improving the nation's balance of payments!

This view, like most of the others on display through the day, still regards other countries as places to which existing work should be taken, rather than places where it can be made collaboratively. I was pleased to hear Tim Crouch talking about his own doubts when he first started international touring; how he felt that there was something rather colonial about "exporting British culture", and how this led to his piece called ENGLAND. I like his work very much - The Author is stunning - and ENGLAND deals with so many of the discomforts of cross-cultural communication. Interesting how the artistic work and its business framing conspire together to create meaning.

Of all the funders present, it was actually the EU Culture Programme which seemed to me to offer the most progressive and exciting models. Perhaps that's why they supported our biggest project yet. There are many pitfalls around European bureaucracy, but somewhere at the heart of it there is a trans-national idealism of intercultural collaboration which we have to access and capitalise upon.

2011

The end of a rather wonderful year for us at Border Crossings. The highlight, of course, was the Origins Festival back in the summer, with the amazing theatre of Noel Tovey and Robert Greygrass, great concerts at Rich Mix and on Hampstead Heath (with Pacific Curls a particular highlight of both), and a film programme which earned two Critics' Choice mentions in Time Out, plus one in the Guardian. The legacy of the Festival is still continuing into 2012, with our Māori Heritage Project developing further into oral histories and a new website. So watch this space....

It's also been a year in which we've been able to grow and develop our organisational base, thanks to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's support, with Lance Bourne, Carissa Lynch and Sheelah Sloane as core team members at various points through the year, plus a really exciting selection of international interns. There are a great many new initiatives underway for 2012 - the first of which will be a devising workshop in Shanghai, with our old friends at SDAC, developing a new production. The work we did in Botswana during 2011 will be built on as well, with some exciting plans to help develop the theatre scene there.

Looking at the arts elsewhere, the most inspiring theatre I've seen during the year has been in the form of pieces dealing, in some way or other, with the processes of healing we need to undertake in today's world. Peter's new piece with Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Desdemona, is one really powerful example, and debbie tucker green's brilliant new play, Truth and Reconciliation, is another. My other theatrical highlights also followed the theme, though perhaps in more oblique ways: Marc Bathuni Joseph's Red, Black & Green: A Blues, which I saw in San Francisco, and ATC's production of The Golden Dragon.

San Francisco also gave me the chance to see my film highlight of the year - If Not Us, Who? - which I very much hope will get a UK release in 2012. Among mainstream films, the best by far was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This morning's Guardian includes my books of the year - but rather heavily edited - so here's the full version:

I read Amy Waldman’s The Submission (Heinemann) in the USA around the time of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. In the midst of uncritical collective self-pity, it was refreshing and invigorating to encounter this penetrating and complex novel. There are no heroes and (more importantly) no villains here – but a Dickensian nexus of interconnected characters, each striving to achieve and express some kind of identity in a world that militates against the creative impulse. The Raw Man by George Makana Clark (Jonathan Cape) brings a powerful and unique new voice to the African novel. The narrative moves beautifully between mythic and realistic dimensions, denying, as African thought does, any distinction between the two. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero Books) is a brilliant, succinct and brief analysis of the social, political and psychological structures at work today. It’s the best, and most deeply disturbing account I’ve read of the appalling state we are in.

Moving away from the arts to wider questions: the last month of the year has given me the chance to think a bit more about identity politics in relation to two small, comparatively new countries. The Platform for Intercultural Europe held its 2011 Practice Exchange in Slovenia - an interesting contrast to the one we hosted in London in 2010. In this small state, which emerged from the former Yugoslavia, the impulse towards generating a national identity seemed to be a negative factor - one which was causing a lot of concerns for minority groups like the Roma and the Muslims (although the latter are themselves predominantly Slovene). I was left feeling that we need to move away from the nation as the means to self-definition, indeed that we should be moving away from identity politics altogether, since identities are by their nature forms of closure, which prohibit fluidity and undermine the possibility of change and flux. And then, I went to Mauritius for Christmas with our family there (hence the picture). And, in this emerging multicultural nation, the converse seemed to be the case. Because everything was provisional, developing, unfinished, nothing was really being achieved. Because culture was perceived as being outside the space, there was an inherent alienation. Because nationhood and the defining force of national identity, the language, was being denied, there was division and communalism rather than the true intercultural space which Mauritius could become.

It's a complex set of questions. Hopefully the new initiatives for a drama course at the University of Mauritius will allow us to engage more in this during 2012 and beyond.

Happy New Year, everyone.