I arrived in Aotearoa / New Zealand yesterday: I'm a guest of Creative New Zealand at the International Arts Festival in Wellington. The flight into the city was amazing: a clear summer's day, with a view over the South Island, complete with the Southern Alps stretching into the distance. The city doesn't feel like a capital - it's a sunny, relaxed space by a harbour, with virtually everything within walking distance. The perfect Festival city, in fact.
I'm typing this at the Te Papa Museum, where I've just met up with the Maori Director Arapata Hakiwai. He's very excited about Origins, and we talk about ways of collaborating in the future. This museum is built on Maori ideas - there's a marae, which is used very frequently, with ceremony being integrated into the use of the building. Some of the artists I already know, like Lisa, have their own contemporary readings of traditional architecture built into the fabric of the space. It even has holy stones buried in its foundations, and is lined up to the sea in an appropriate way for welcoming guests and the dawn ceremony of Matariki. Arapata tells me he's been in Chicago recently, advising on the placing of a marae in the museum there, and that this space is now being used for tribal councils by Native American groups!
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking
Ben Evans at Oval House has brought a show over from South Africa - I was at the Press Night yesterday. The company is Magnet Theatre from Cape Town. The play has a wonderful title - Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking - and that title is horribly appropriate to the theme of displaced people. As the richest country on the African continent (though I bet that's sometimes pretty hard to remember in Soweto), South Africa is the goal for most African refugees. I'd heard quite a lot about the Zimbabwean exodus to South Africa: the characters in this play come from a Francophone country - it's not specified which one.
And, in a way, that's my concern about the piece. It's very sympathetic in its portrayal of refugees, and it's very theatrical - but the characters are just refugees... we don't know from what, or from where, or how the political or cultural or social meltdown which displaced them occurred. And so the play becomes sentimental - it doesn't allow us to be moved to action, only to pity. It doesn't allow us to feel in any way implicated. And we are.
Because of this, all the theatricality (and there's lots, and it's impressive) doesn't really work for me. It's not in the service of real storytelling - it looks whizzkidding. I probably would be more positive about it, except that I've been studying a lot of work about refugees recently for a new MA Module I'm creating for Rose Bruford, and I've come to feel that contextualising the stories, as well as allowing the refugees to be heard, is crucial. The best example is Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravanserail. When I met her, she said that play was "A punch on the nose. For everybody."
Friday, February 19, 2010
Post-colonial Scotland, post-revolutionary China
Nisha and I saw David Greig's new play for the RSC at Hampstead. It's called Dunsinaine, and begins with the English army advancing towards the castle with branches in hand. So we're definitely post-Macbeth. I remember when we did Macbeth in Mauritius being interested by the fact that the colonialism actually comes at the end of the play, with Malcolm being swept into kingship by conquering forces. Most post-colonial productions, especially in Africa, make Macbeth the Mugabe-figure - but it's actually a bit more complex than that. Greig's play is concerned with the next stage - and the analogy with Iraq and even Afghanistan is very clear. You go in to topple a tyrant, you put in a puppet ruler, and the country degenerates into chaos.
My other little cultural treat this week was a Chinese film from 1964, called Two Stage Sisters. I went to see it because it's about Yueju, and Yueju before the Revolution at that. The film begins in the 30s, with a group of travelling performers in the countryside, and moves to Shanghai during the war years, ending after the establishment of the PRC. It was fantastic to spot the locations - especially the Peace Hotel and the wonderful Yi Fu Theatre - still today much as it was in the 40s. The revolutionary iconography is fascinating: early on, there's a moment when the main actress is strapped to a post, dressed in red, in a clear echo of The Red Detachment of Women, and near the end she's seen performing The White-Haired Girl. It's hardy subtle stuff: the last line is "Let us re-educate ourselves diligently, and always perform revolutionary operas". And yet, this film was banned in the Cultural Revolution. Apparently the fact that the performer who buys into decadence and capitalism is forgiven and re-habilitated was considered corrupt.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Everyclick
Here's a new easy way to raise money for Border Crossings that does not involve parting with extra cash.
Everyclick.com has launched a new way to donate – it’s been christened “Give as you Live”. It means you can search the web, shop on line from your favourite retailers, trade on eBay and raise money for Border Crossings.
You get great search results from Yahoo!, content from leading shopping providers and access to all eBay auctions. Every search you make creates a donation for charity.
Our special address is http://www.everyclick.com/border-crossings, all searches, shopping and eBay activity made from here will raise money for us.
Make sure you sign up so you can track your giving – it updates every 3 minutes, you’ll be amazed how quickly it adds up!
Everyclick has already raised over £1,022,751.47 for a wide range of charities around the UK, and Everyclick was voted website of the Year 2008 and has been recognised as a top 100 media tech company 2009.
Discover the new way to give to Border Crossings. Give as you Live.
Friday, February 12, 2010
11 and 12... and 14
A rich and fascinating couple of nights in the theatre, linked by West Africa and not much else. Peter Brook's 11 and 12 is based on the autobiography of the Malian writer Amadou Hampate Ba, and is largely concerned with debates (turning into conflicts) about how many times a particular Islamic prayer should be recited. Actually, there is only one scene in which you get to see any real conflict portrayed, so most of the time you have to take it on trust that what is being portrayed is a society in turmoil - it all looks and sounds rather peaceful and beautiful, with a wonderful Japanese musician sitting on the side of the stage, accompanying every action with a delicate soundscape. The main focus is on wise men sitting under trees, whose words may suggest that they are engaged in the world around them, but whose manner in performance implied to me that they were "rising above it". Whatever that's supposed to mean.
The best work I've seen by Brook has been fired by the energy of the immediate - like his Sizwe Banzi is Dead a couple of years ago (admittedly a bit late to protest against apartheid - but it felt like a lived piece of work). Where I part company from him is in his belief that there is something to be expressed through theatre that is "universal", and that stories from Africa and Asia are valuable not for what they say about the context from which they arise, but for "humanity". Of course, the West has much to learn from Africa (and vice-versa), but the reason for this is the difference between us, not the similarity. In his post-show talk (which was a tour de force, I may say), Brook explained that his first attempt to dramatise this story had been "very African", whereas now he was working with "humanity". In practice, this meant that the two wise men were played by Palestinian actors.....
Now - there's no doubt that these guys are very fine performers. But don't tell me they related to the story just because they were "human". And don't tell me that the audience simply read them as "human". Their presence was a clear and immediate reminder of another political conflict arising from a religious background. There's nothing "universal" about this resonance - and it's no less "spiritual" for that. Our spirituality is at its most profound when it engages with the actualities of our existence.
By contrast, I also went to the press night of The 14th Tale at the National. Rare to see the National take on something like this - a solo performance by a young black man, largely in the form of performance poetry. His name is Inua Ellams, and he manages to be very accurate in his portrayal of Nigeria, England and Ireland; of childhood and young adulthood; of family... and very funny indeed.
The best work I've seen by Brook has been fired by the energy of the immediate - like his Sizwe Banzi is Dead a couple of years ago (admittedly a bit late to protest against apartheid - but it felt like a lived piece of work). Where I part company from him is in his belief that there is something to be expressed through theatre that is "universal", and that stories from Africa and Asia are valuable not for what they say about the context from which they arise, but for "humanity". Of course, the West has much to learn from Africa (and vice-versa), but the reason for this is the difference between us, not the similarity. In his post-show talk (which was a tour de force, I may say), Brook explained that his first attempt to dramatise this story had been "very African", whereas now he was working with "humanity". In practice, this meant that the two wise men were played by Palestinian actors.....
Now - there's no doubt that these guys are very fine performers. But don't tell me they related to the story just because they were "human". And don't tell me that the audience simply read them as "human". Their presence was a clear and immediate reminder of another political conflict arising from a religious background. There's nothing "universal" about this resonance - and it's no less "spiritual" for that. Our spirituality is at its most profound when it engages with the actualities of our existence.
By contrast, I also went to the press night of The 14th Tale at the National. Rare to see the National take on something like this - a solo performance by a young black man, largely in the form of performance poetry. His name is Inua Ellams, and he manages to be very accurate in his portrayal of Nigeria, England and Ireland; of childhood and young adulthood; of family... and very funny indeed.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Peter Brook
Peter Brook is in London at the moment - his production of 11 and 12 is at the Barbican this month, and there's also a retrospective of films. On Thursday I went to see his film about Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men, which he introduced himself - and today I've been at a lecture he gave for the Directors Guild.
I wrote a while ago in this blog about the importance of finding Elders in our culture, and receiving wisdom from them in the same way it's done among First Nations peoples. Peter Brook is certainly an Elder among directors. He's 85 next month. When I was just starting out, I was reading his books and studying his productions as "the model", and realising that all the model told me was that you had to keep changing, and that there was no specific doctrinaire method. It's amazing that he is still making fresh and challenging work - as I hope I will be in 40 years time.
Of course, this guru status isn't entirely a positive thing. The audience at this afternoon's lecture (which was actually more of a chat) was packed with famous faces - Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, Richard Eyre chairing it, Mike Leigh, Michael Morris.... so it was important that Brook didn't simply allow himself to be feted. Asked how he'd liked to be remembered, he replied that he didn't want to be remembered at all - except perhaps on a small scale by people he had worked with directly, and to whom he had passed on some sense of the craft. Of course, he will be remembered - if only for the books, which will doubtless be turned into "a theory" - but I think he's right to be cautious about this. Our art of theatre is ephemeral - and so are our lives. Maybe all the archiving and writing about theatre is actually just over-loading us. Maybe we need a little less theory and a bit more playfulness. On Thursday, he carried the same idea further, when Graham Sheffield introduced him in "god has condescended to come among us" terms, and the whole audience applauded for ages before he'd even said a word. That introduction and those applause, he said, were very dangerous. We must never elevate a human being to the status where what he says becomes something we will accept without question.
It seemed a strange way for him to introduce a film about the man he has acknowledged as a spiritual guru - but maybe appropriate for just that reason. Gurdjieff, after all, was a decidedly complex figure: I remember Robert Lepage's version of him as a naked devil shuffling around Tony as Frank Lloyd Wright in The Geometry of Miracles. Brook's Gurdjieff is very 1970s - a rebel determined to "seek truth" at any cost; and at times the film seems very dated and a bit pompous in its self-conscious spiritual significance. But it is also a thinly veiled autobiography, at its most interesting when it explores Gurdjieff / Brook's determination to keep looking for a better way of living, for something that feels deeply truthful, for endless journeying both physically and internally. It's also very clear that the artistic / spiritual search is not something which you can do alone. Gurdjieff's group of close friends work with him - and they are played by Brook's regular actors, like Bruce Myers and Natasha Parry. And the whole thing ends with Gurdjieff learning ritual dances, which look remarkably like the warm-up exercises at the Bouffes du Nord.
It's very true that you can't do these things on your own. I've been much helped by Paul coming into the company recently, and by the strengthening of the relationship with Polygon. But it's been a few months since I was in a rehearsal room, and I'm really missing the creative companionship of performers. The creative work is the real space where the search can be conducted.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Mrs. Mandela
It seems to be a bit of a Mandela moment. The tubes are covered with posters for the new film Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman will at last give his long-mooted performance as the great man. Relief that it's not a bio-pic: there's so much more the medium of film can do with a specific event. Which said, last night's broadcast of the BBC's Mrs. Mandela was a really interesting approach to the bio-pic problem. By avoiding chronology, the film was able to make powerful links between moments in Winnie's life - most strikingly at the end, when it cut between her being brutally interrogated by Swanepoel and her own attack on the child Stompie. Seeing the film took me right back into our own work on this material - some years ago now. The project, which is a music theatre piece, is still bubbling away on the back burner, and has a libretto - it just needs music and backing! Jeremy Silver, Eugene Skeef and I have had a few serious chats about it... Maybe now is the moment. But I am so snowed under with getting the Trilogy kick-started that I honestly can't find the time.
Like Mrs. Mandela, our piece begins with the iconic moment of Mandela's release. In our case, we also end with it - but hopefully the audience will view it very differently after what's happened in between. Many moments are the same - Swanepoel, Stompie, Mandela asking Winnie about the boy's death... But in our version the gritty realism of the film is replaced with the theatrical, as the form requires. My note to myself watching the film, and especially Sophie Okenedo's incredible performance, was to avoid any hint of sentimentality. Which is what the film did so well.
I've just come from a meeting with George Zhang, who runs the Confucius Centre at SOAS. He's excited by the exchange we're doing with China, and we're finding some really interesting ways to co-operate. He tells me that Shanghai was his home city - but that "The city of my childhood no longer exists". I ask him when he left, and he says 1971. That's right in the thick of the Cultural Revolution. "Yes", he says: "and we went back every year. It was quite a way to spend my formative years..."
Like Mrs. Mandela, our piece begins with the iconic moment of Mandela's release. In our case, we also end with it - but hopefully the audience will view it very differently after what's happened in between. Many moments are the same - Swanepoel, Stompie, Mandela asking Winnie about the boy's death... But in our version the gritty realism of the film is replaced with the theatrical, as the form requires. My note to myself watching the film, and especially Sophie Okenedo's incredible performance, was to avoid any hint of sentimentality. Which is what the film did so well.
I've just come from a meeting with George Zhang, who runs the Confucius Centre at SOAS. He's excited by the exchange we're doing with China, and we're finding some really interesting ways to co-operate. He tells me that Shanghai was his home city - but that "The city of my childhood no longer exists". I ask him when he left, and he says 1971. That's right in the thick of the Cultural Revolution. "Yes", he says: "and we went back every year. It was quite a way to spend my formative years..."
Sunday, January 24, 2010
I am Yusuf and This is My Brother
Friday was a very intense but inspiring day. During the morning, David Furlong from Exchange Theatre came to the office, and we talked about Mauritius. David first got on touch some years ago in response to the presence of Toufann on our website - he's a Mauritian actor, and there aren't exactly a lot of companies with links to the island! He's just been back - which we haven't done for about six years - and he's enthusiastic about the creativity there. That excites me for the planned trip later in the year.
Work with Gabrielle from Polygon on an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, looking at a Participation and Learning programme around the Trilogy; and with Paul on possible approaches to some core costs. The latter have become very crucial as the company grows, with the board working hard on strategies for expansion and the arrival of Paul and Gabrielle in the office. Change management seems to be what excites funders of core costs, and we have some quite productive phone calls. Paul goes off to draft an application.
I head down to the Young Vic, and grab some Chinese dumplings in the nearby restaurant before the show. A former student, Lucy, is sitting there, and in the absence of spare tables I ask if I can sit with her. She introduces her friend, who turns out to be the director Di Trevis - I've never met her before, but have admired her work for years (I remember her Arturo Ui at the National with Antony Sher with particular relish). These days, she's largely based in New York, with an emphasis on teaching.
The play is a production from Palestine, by a company called ShiberHur, which means "an inch of freedom" in Arabic. It's written and directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi, who did the wonderful Alive from Palestine in the same venue. This piece, I am Yusuf and This is My Brother, is about 1948, and the way its ghosts are still shaping Palestinian lives. It swaps between English and Arabic (often for no apparent reason), and, in performance, felt just a little dull and worthy. So I was surprised, as I read the programme-script on the train coming home, at just what a brilliant piece of writing it is. Somehow, the production has directed the poetry out of the play. There's little sense of the mystery, of the presence of the dead, of music and rhythm. But the play is quite wonderful.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Wise Thoughts
A very interesting meeting with Niranjan Kamatkar, who runs Wise Thoughts. We've known each other for a while - they used to be our neighbours in Chocolate Factory 2, and now they have an office above Wood Green Library. Wise Thoughts is an organisation for minority ethnic and minority sexuality people - and so particularly interesting to us as we prepare the Trilogy. Gabrielle from Polygon Arts (who is about to take some desk space in our office - making Wood Green more crowded than ever!) and I have been looking at creating outreach work around this, and we've had a chat with the Heritage Lottery Fund, who seem keen. Wise Thoughts are obvious partners, particularly since they run GFest every November - which could be a great platform for any work produced by people participating in the outreach project.
Niranjan is an incredibly committed activist. He tells me his priority for 2010 is called "LGBT Arts for All" - which translates as getting sexual minority work out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. Since all of our work is about opening up dialogues between the different groups in society, we can easily buy in to this.
I was wrong about China, by the way. The Mr Gay China event was closed down by the police. On a technicality.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
A bit more on censorship
Since I wrote about Chinese censorship the other day, the news has broken that Google may pull out of China because of attempts to hack into the gmail accounts of human rights activists. Having famously capitulated to the censor, Google is now saying that it wants freedom to publish as it will. You'll remember that access to this blog has been pretty erratic in China - at a rough guess it won't be very easy to find it today - the firewalls are up very high.
On the other hand, sexual morality just doesn't seem to be an issue any more. To underline what I was saying last time, a comment in Chinese has appeared on my entry "New Year blog". On closer investigation, it turns out to be a link to a Chinese porn site.
Happy surfing, everybody....
Monday, January 11, 2010
China and the censor
A fascinating video has appeared on the Guardian website, about China's first gay pageant - Mr. Gay China. Apparently it's even been given positive coverage on the English-language branch of state-sponsored media (not yet the Chinese-language branch). Following on from last year's events in Beijing, with people calling in public for gay marriage, it would seem that the tongzhi community is now very visible - almost mainstream in the cities, at least. It's an important moment to be showing the Trilogy.
We've been discussing the censor, who will be wielding the blue pencil before the plays are shown in Shanghai. None of the gay scenes are a problem - although we can't be explicit about it. The problem - as so often - is politics. In particular, the Mme. Mao scenes in Dis-Orientations will never pass the censor. I'm going to see if I can re-work them, so it's all done through the performance of A Doll's House - which might be theatrically exciting, and will allow a Chinese audience to make their own connections. We can point things for the UK audience with projected titles, and then cut them for China. Well - that's the hunch, anyway.
We've been discussing the censor, who will be wielding the blue pencil before the plays are shown in Shanghai. None of the gay scenes are a problem - although we can't be explicit about it. The problem - as so often - is politics. In particular, the Mme. Mao scenes in Dis-Orientations will never pass the censor. I'm going to see if I can re-work them, so it's all done through the performance of A Doll's House - which might be theatrically exciting, and will allow a Chinese audience to make their own connections. We can point things for the UK audience with projected titles, and then cut them for China. Well - that's the hunch, anyway.
Friday, January 01, 2010
New Year Blog
Happy New Year everybody! I'm typing this on my new iMac - which will hopefully contribute to the development of Border Crossings over 2010 and beyond.
2009 has been an amazing year for the company - by far our busiest to date, and one which has clarified and defined our aims and identity for the future. For a start, there's a completely redesigned website, courtesy of Sam Hope-Evans at Phuture Design, with social networking and all that jazz! Now the iMac's in action, we should be able to get much more exciting content onto the web, with more videos to whet the appetite for performances, screenings, publications, workshops and talks.
The fact that I can list all of these things as Border Crossings activities is largely due to the Origins Festival of First Nations, which was the biggest single event in an amazing year. Just to present so much work in those two weeks was incredible - but what was even more exciting was the way in which the programme managed to lay down a coherent vision in terms of political, spiritual, artistic, social and environmental thought. All of which has shown its importance more and more as the year has gone on, with the Copenhagen summit rounding it off convincingly. If a gathering of world leaders, with the express purpose of slowing climate change, can be so dominated by petty economic self-interest as to fail to produce anything of any value whatsoever, then boy are we in trouble. We have got to start listening to ways of living on this planet which present alternatives to the power of the market - and First Nations offer them. So there will be more Origins Festivals: and in March I am off to New Zealand to start working on the next one.
On top of that, much of the year has been spent working on the development of Re-Orientations, the third part of the Trilogy, which we'll be presenting next autumn. I can truly say that February and August of 2009 were two of the most extraordinary, creative and open times I can ever remember - and I think the play, which we showed as work-in-progress in early September, more than proves the point. There's still a lot to do before we can perform them, but the foundations have been soundly laid. So look out in the autumn in Soho and Shanghai!
Outside of the company, it's also been a rich year culturally. In my freelance work, I've particularly enjoyed directing my first Brecht, The Good Soul of Szechuan, for Rose Bruford College, and beginning to write MA materials for the same academy - a job I'll be continuing in January. At the theatre, the highlights for me were Complicite's beautiful production with Japanese performers, Shun-kin at the Barbican; the Toneelgroep Amsterdam's six-hour epic Roman Tragedies at the same, ever-fertile address; and the National's staging of Wole Soyinka's classic Death and the King's Horseman - amazing just to see the play at last, and especially so well done.
In film, the London Film Festival was a highlight again, with Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah the star event. Obviously a film for a future Origins - unless it's had a huge general release first, which is far from impossible, given the awards it's harvesting! I've also read some great books - all of which inform my work, and the choice of which is of course informed by the work. So, in the early part of the year, I read Xinran's China Witness while in China - making its insights into the lives of older Chinese feel all the more immediate and all the more poignant. This also helped me think more deeply about the theme of Elders in the Origins Festival: the way in which First Nations value their older people so much more than we do in Western societies - and the social meaning of that value. So it was also very warming to spend a series of summer afternoons in the garden reading Seamus Heaney's book of interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll: Stepping Stones. Here is the quiet wisdom of one of our own Elders.
I've also spent quite a bit of time with David Mitchell, whose novels combine plot-lines and locations in ways which I find very helpful in thinking about our own devised work. I thought Ghostwritten, his first novel, of some years ago, was even better than Cloud Atlas: and experienced quite a shock while reading Black Swan Green, which at times felt uncomfortably like my own autobiography!
Have a great year, everyone....
Monday, December 14, 2009
Red Shift
Emma invited Nisha and myself for dinner last night, to meet some other friends of hers. They were Jonathan Holloway, and his wife Jane. Jonathan is AD of Red Shift. I first saw his work as long ago as 1983 (!), when he directed The Duchess of Malfi at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a really important production for me then - formative in terms of my early voice as a director - so it's nice to be able to tell the director in person!
Much in common. Jane used to be General Manager of Opera Factory, so they know David Freeman, Susannah Self, Janis Kelly.... Jonathan is involved with Central and Middlesex.... It's kind of amazing we've not met before. It's particularly interesting to hear how he's fared with running a company over a quarter of a century. For a long time, Red Shift was an Arts Council RFO (regularly funded organisation), and was a client of the national office, running long tours on the small to medium scale. Then everything was devolved to the regions, and touring became far less of a priority. Jonathan decided he wanted to move into more specific forms of theatre anyway - and actually gave up RFO status as a pre-emptive strike against a likely cut. Now, like us, they rely on project grants and partnerships. Interestingly, he regards it as a liberation. Strange to hear when RFO status is regarded as your holy grail....
Much in common. Jane used to be General Manager of Opera Factory, so they know David Freeman, Susannah Self, Janis Kelly.... Jonathan is involved with Central and Middlesex.... It's kind of amazing we've not met before. It's particularly interesting to hear how he's fared with running a company over a quarter of a century. For a long time, Red Shift was an Arts Council RFO (regularly funded organisation), and was a client of the national office, running long tours on the small to medium scale. Then everything was devolved to the regions, and touring became far less of a priority. Jonathan decided he wanted to move into more specific forms of theatre anyway - and actually gave up RFO status as a pre-emptive strike against a likely cut. Now, like us, they rely on project grants and partnerships. Interestingly, he regards it as a liberation. Strange to hear when RFO status is regarded as your holy grail....
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Opera Jawa
I spent last night watching the DVD of Opera Jawa; one of the films which Peter commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Festival. Click here for a synopsis and a review by the ever-perceptive Tony Rayns, who also wrote about it for the Festival programme.
For me, what was fascinating about this film was the combination of traditional Indonesian performance forms with a contemporary setting, and with very strong social and political concerns. Like our Trilogy, this film draws off Hindu mythology and the danced and sung theatre forms of Asia, at the same time as confronting some of the contemporary issues in the region. In the Trilogy, I've been alternating scenes of naturalism with more fantastical, magical and mythological moments. In Opera Jawa, the film-maker Garin Nugroho makes no distinction between the mythic and modern worlds. His Ram and Sita are contemporary working-class Indonesians, and they sing and dance as well as make pots and ride bicycles. The film is through-sung, so totally operatic - the only spoken text emanates from a TV, which (with the multiple layering characteristic of this work) is a carved statue. I can learn something from Garin's approach: I should trust non-naturalistic styles as being capable of conveying everyday life as well as the dream - indeed, of showing what is magical and dream-like in our everyday lives. It's a beautiful film.
Annika, our intern, has got herself a permanent job in a casting agency. She's only been with us a short time, but did some terrific work: transcribing the Swedish sections of the Re-Orientations script, preparing sponsorship proposals, and more than doubling the number of friends we have on MySpace! Thanks and good luck to her.
For me, what was fascinating about this film was the combination of traditional Indonesian performance forms with a contemporary setting, and with very strong social and political concerns. Like our Trilogy, this film draws off Hindu mythology and the danced and sung theatre forms of Asia, at the same time as confronting some of the contemporary issues in the region. In the Trilogy, I've been alternating scenes of naturalism with more fantastical, magical and mythological moments. In Opera Jawa, the film-maker Garin Nugroho makes no distinction between the mythic and modern worlds. His Ram and Sita are contemporary working-class Indonesians, and they sing and dance as well as make pots and ride bicycles. The film is through-sung, so totally operatic - the only spoken text emanates from a TV, which (with the multiple layering characteristic of this work) is a carved statue. I can learn something from Garin's approach: I should trust non-naturalistic styles as being capable of conveying everyday life as well as the dream - indeed, of showing what is magical and dream-like in our everyday lives. It's a beautiful film.
Annika, our intern, has got herself a permanent job in a casting agency. She's only been with us a short time, but did some terrific work: transcribing the Swedish sections of the Re-Orientations script, preparing sponsorship proposals, and more than doubling the number of friends we have on MySpace! Thanks and good luck to her.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Paul Sirett joins Border Crossings
Paul Sirett, a leading dramatist with a special interest in intercultural theatre, is joining Border Crossings as Associate Director. Paul is currently International Associate at Soho Theatre Company, and Associate Writer at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. He was formerly Dramaturg at the RSC. Recent plays include: Bad Blood Blues (Stratford East), Running the Silk Road (Yellow Earth at BITE), The Big Life (Stratford East and Apollo West End), and Rat Pack Confidential (Whitehall, West End). Two volumes of Paul's plays have been published by Oberon Books.
Paul will be working closely with me to develop the company's programme and infrastructure. His wealth of experience will be invaluable to the company; and his inspiring work in intercultural theatre makes him an ideal member of our core team. Anyone who knows plays like Worlds Apart or Crusade will recognise his as a distinctive and perceptive voice, talking with humour and urgency about cultural cross-currents in the contemporary world.
Paul will be working closely with me to develop the company's programme and infrastructure. His wealth of experience will be invaluable to the company; and his inspiring work in intercultural theatre makes him an ideal member of our core team. Anyone who knows plays like Worlds Apart or Crusade will recognise his as a distinctive and perceptive voice, talking with humour and urgency about cultural cross-currents in the contemporary world.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Wangari Maathai
The British Council invites me to a lecture, in a series called Talking without Borders (logical enough I should be there, I guess). It's at the RSA, and is given by Wangari Maathai: the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, who in 2004 won the Nobel Peace Prize. She's on her way to Copenhagen, where she'll be lobbying at the summit on behalf of Africa, the forests and the poor.
The lecture is very good, although nothing she says is particularly surprising. There are some exciting new ways of putting old problems - I particularly liked her question as to how we can make a tree which is standing worth the same, economically, as one which has been felled. What is perhaps more striking about the evening is the way in which climate change activism has become establishment. You don't get much closer to the establishment than the British Council at the RSA, with the Acting Chair doing the introduction. Lots of the guests, who all toe the line, are people from embassies, government departments, quangos, even industry. The man sitting next to me turns out to run BP. "I'm interested in environmental issues", he tells me.
So - with Copenhagen on the way - the burning issue is surely not "there is an environmental problem", not "what can we do to solve the environmental problem?" but "why are we not acting to solve the environmental problem?"
The lecture is very good, although nothing she says is particularly surprising. There are some exciting new ways of putting old problems - I particularly liked her question as to how we can make a tree which is standing worth the same, economically, as one which has been felled. What is perhaps more striking about the evening is the way in which climate change activism has become establishment. You don't get much closer to the establishment than the British Council at the RSA, with the Acting Chair doing the introduction. Lots of the guests, who all toe the line, are people from embassies, government departments, quangos, even industry. The man sitting next to me turns out to run BP. "I'm interested in environmental issues", he tells me.
So - with Copenhagen on the way - the burning issue is surely not "there is an environmental problem", not "what can we do to solve the environmental problem?" but "why are we not acting to solve the environmental problem?"
Monday, November 30, 2009
Problems of a global audience
In this weekend's Guardian, there's an article by Pankaj Mishra which talks about the problems of writing for a global audience. Writers from non-Western countries, he suggests, may often end up perpetuating the exotic cliched way in which the West looks at their cultures, because that is what sells to the monied Western audience. So Cuba is sex and salsa, Africa is starvation and corruption, India is poverty and spirituality in equal measure. I've written a bit about this before, thinking in terms of the Indian novel, and how often it is actually written with an eye to British and American readers, for all its "authenticity".
Usually, this isn't an issue which affects theatre. After all, theatre tends to address a specific, often very localised audience, about particular issues and concerns. Often its power comes from its very specificity. But in the case of work created cross-culturally, and intended to be seen in more than one country, this is no longer so. And so, if we're not careful, the globalised cliches could easily sneak in through the back door.
The sentence in Mishra's article which set the alarm bells ringing ways near the end: "Perhaps, one day soon, a Chinese novelist aspiring for an international reputation will be able to steer clear of the misery of the cultural revolution or the massacre in Tiananmen Square (perennial favourites in the west). " Dis-Orientations includes (admittedly very subtle) references to both of these things, and the imagery continues into Re-Orientations. Does that mean we are simply doing what the West expects / wants us to do? I remember Wang Jue being worried that the image of China presented in the plays might be too negative (although I do feel there are many, many positive things we say about the culture). On the other hand, part of the point of this work is to deconstruct the exotic cliche of the Orient: if you don't show aspects of this, then you can't overturn it.
Usually, this isn't an issue which affects theatre. After all, theatre tends to address a specific, often very localised audience, about particular issues and concerns. Often its power comes from its very specificity. But in the case of work created cross-culturally, and intended to be seen in more than one country, this is no longer so. And so, if we're not careful, the globalised cliches could easily sneak in through the back door.
The sentence in Mishra's article which set the alarm bells ringing ways near the end: "Perhaps, one day soon, a Chinese novelist aspiring for an international reputation will be able to steer clear of the misery of the cultural revolution or the massacre in Tiananmen Square (perennial favourites in the west). " Dis-Orientations includes (admittedly very subtle) references to both of these things, and the imagery continues into Re-Orientations. Does that mean we are simply doing what the West expects / wants us to do? I remember Wang Jue being worried that the image of China presented in the plays might be too negative (although I do feel there are many, many positive things we say about the culture). On the other hand, part of the point of this work is to deconstruct the exotic cliche of the Orient: if you don't show aspects of this, then you can't overturn it.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tewanee Joseph
I was at the Canadian High Commission last night, to hear a talk by Tewanee Joseph. Tewanee heads up the Four First Nations groups who are hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This does seem to be a genuine embracing of the Aboriginal people and culture of Canada by the IOC - they really are the hosts, their protocols are really being respected, and there are real economic initiatives which are allowing them to generate a legacy for the Aboriginal communities. Hopefully the 2012 team will learn a bit from this achievement.
This morning, our new intern, Annika Magnberg, started in the office. She's from Sweden, and at the moment she's wrestling with how to turn three files into a single .pdf to send as a funding application. What a way to begin.
Good news from New Zealand - Creative NZ have invited me to the International Festival in March, and the British Council in NZ have agreed to fund the flight. This will be a terrific opportunity for Origins. What's more, I'll be doing some workshops with Taki Rua while I'm out there. Very exciting.
This morning, our new intern, Annika Magnberg, started in the office. She's from Sweden, and at the moment she's wrestling with how to turn three files into a single .pdf to send as a funding application. What a way to begin.
Good news from New Zealand - Creative NZ have invited me to the International Festival in March, and the British Council in NZ have agreed to fund the flight. This will be a terrific opportunity for Origins. What's more, I'll be doing some workshops with Taki Rua while I'm out there. Very exciting.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Karnad in Punjabi, Shakespeare in Dutch
Girish Karnad emailed from India to say that I should see Neelam Mansingh Chowdry's production of his play Naga-mandala (Play with a Cobra) at Sadler's Wells. It's a fascinating piece of work - though not perhaps at its best in this vast theatre, and definitely not helped by the worst supertitle operator in recorded history. But the play is so strange and wonderful, and the leading actors make the transitions between characters incredibly powerfully. Chowdry has expanded on the doubling already present in the text, so that the same actor not only plays the husband and the cobra, but also the playwright in the prologue. Similarly the "Story" is also one of two performers who play Rani - so that role is doubled in a different way. The production actually becomes about those layerings and correspondences. And so about theatre as life.
The amazing production of The Roman Tragedies which I saw at the Barbican on Saturday is also about theatre as life. Political theatre and political life, to be precise. It's a version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - all in six hours - by a company called Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove. I thought I was at least aware of the world's great directors - but his is a new name to me, and he is beyond doubt a really important artist. The production is "modern-dress" and multi-media - nothing new there - but in this case the use of video is so carefully shaped that it becomes about the way in which modern politics, modern life perhaps, is constantly performed from the camera, to the extent that only the image on the camera seems to carry any meaning. So, the scenes of private life (Coriolanus and his mother, Caesar and his wife) are filmed and relayed on TV and big screen - but all the scenes involving ordinary people, even soldiers, are cut. Not that there is any shortage of "the people" on display. The audience moves between their seats and the stage, where there are lots of sofas, and you can watch the highlighted action on a TV, as well as seeing the actors from another angle, choosing your own route of composition. This also means that you constantly see "ordinary people" in the play, consuming the action and so contributing to it. The form in which the theatre is used contributes to the meaning. There are no intervals as such, but lots of short breaks, during which sets are changed, and the audience buy drinks and food onstage, and contribute their thoughts on the show via a computer station - these are then relayed to the rest of us! So there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance.
I've been thinking about this production ever since. Wonderful to be stimulated so strongly and to have my faith in the power of theatre so powerfully renewed.
The amazing production of The Roman Tragedies which I saw at the Barbican on Saturday is also about theatre as life. Political theatre and political life, to be precise. It's a version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - all in six hours - by a company called Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove. I thought I was at least aware of the world's great directors - but his is a new name to me, and he is beyond doubt a really important artist. The production is "modern-dress" and multi-media - nothing new there - but in this case the use of video is so carefully shaped that it becomes about the way in which modern politics, modern life perhaps, is constantly performed from the camera, to the extent that only the image on the camera seems to carry any meaning. So, the scenes of private life (Coriolanus and his mother, Caesar and his wife) are filmed and relayed on TV and big screen - but all the scenes involving ordinary people, even soldiers, are cut. Not that there is any shortage of "the people" on display. The audience moves between their seats and the stage, where there are lots of sofas, and you can watch the highlighted action on a TV, as well as seeing the actors from another angle, choosing your own route of composition. This also means that you constantly see "ordinary people" in the play, consuming the action and so contributing to it. The form in which the theatre is used contributes to the meaning. There are no intervals as such, but lots of short breaks, during which sets are changed, and the audience buy drinks and food onstage, and contribute their thoughts on the show via a computer station - these are then relayed to the rest of us! So there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance.
I've been thinking about this production ever since. Wonderful to be stimulated so strongly and to have my faith in the power of theatre so powerfully renewed.
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Illegals
I was at the Rich Mix last night (London's most car-park like venue), to see a piece called The Illegals, presented by the Actors for Human Rights branch of Ice and Fire. It's a company with which we have a lot in common - so as much as anything I was glad to see them in action.
The play is verbatim theatre, based on interviews with "illegal immigrants". I'm not a great fan of verbatim as a form - just because somebody "real" has said something, it doesn't instantly become valid as dramatic dialogue - but this piece was skillfully composed from five very intense personal stories, intercut with quotations from the likes of Jackie Smith, John Reid, and the Border Agency. The collage effect was what gave it the artistry - official lines juxtaposed with human truths to make a very clear and powerful political point.
The actor who'd invited me, Jeremy Tiang, speaks the words of a Chinese man who came to England for economic reasons, and works in Chinese restaurants for incredibly low wages, in constant fear of the police, while sending money home for his children's schooling. The loneliness which came through was very touching. Then there's an Egyptian driver, whose passport has been with the Home Office for two years, so he can't even leave the country(!), a political refugee from Ethiopia who went underground when the authorities refused to recognise the nature of his persecution; and a woman with a similar case from Ecuador, who cleans toilets all night for a pittance. The last case is a woman from Guatemala, who was deported because she had too little money. As always, the border controls favour the rich. It's only poor people who have problems moving around.
The play is verbatim theatre, based on interviews with "illegal immigrants". I'm not a great fan of verbatim as a form - just because somebody "real" has said something, it doesn't instantly become valid as dramatic dialogue - but this piece was skillfully composed from five very intense personal stories, intercut with quotations from the likes of Jackie Smith, John Reid, and the Border Agency. The collage effect was what gave it the artistry - official lines juxtaposed with human truths to make a very clear and powerful political point.
The actor who'd invited me, Jeremy Tiang, speaks the words of a Chinese man who came to England for economic reasons, and works in Chinese restaurants for incredibly low wages, in constant fear of the police, while sending money home for his children's schooling. The loneliness which came through was very touching. Then there's an Egyptian driver, whose passport has been with the Home Office for two years, so he can't even leave the country(!), a political refugee from Ethiopia who went underground when the authorities refused to recognise the nature of his persecution; and a woman with a similar case from Ecuador, who cleans toilets all night for a pittance. The last case is a woman from Guatemala, who was deported because she had too little money. As always, the border controls favour the rich. It's only poor people who have problems moving around.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Interns and Architecting
We’re taking on an intern. This has worked well in the past, with both Wojtek and Roe being a huge help in the office and learning enough to move on in their chosen spheres. In fact, Wojtek went straight from us to being Administrator at Paines Plough. I think internships have to work in this way, as a genuine exchange, and they have to be a fixed term, allowing that exchange to happen. Otherwise it just turns into slave labour. We put something to this effect in the job ad. So I was a bit surprised on the morning of the interviews to get a very angry email from the first interviewee, saying that he wouldn’t be coming because he felt that unpaid work was morally unacceptable. He’s entitled to his opinion, of course – but I can’t really see why, under the circumstances, he applied for the job at all… Anyway, it puts me on my guard for the rest of the day, and I make sure that all the other interviewees are fully on board for the exchange, and that I am clear what they want to get from it.
I end up offering the internship to a young woman from
Long and creative discussion with Gabrielle from Polygon. We’re both very pleased with the work we were able to do together on Origins, and want to continue the association. Some very interesting ideas about keeping Origins moving until the next festival through the education work, and for ways of building on the education aspects of the Trilogy. We’re thinking about linking workshops in
I went to see Architecting at the Pit on Friday. It’s a piece about
Friday, October 30, 2009
Developing the board
Monday was a board development day. With new people on the board, it was important that we re-examined the role of the board in the company, and exploited its full potential. Jessica Stockford from Arts and Business agreed to facilitate the day. Her main remit is to work on governance in arts organisations, so we got lots of useful guidance on the duties of trustees, and the risks (!); but she was also very good at helping us to address our needs in developing the company. The scale of the projects we create now far outstrips the infrastructure, and we have to catch up. I think we have the right group of people to do that: the trustees are a very high-powered bunch, and they are very dedicated to what we're trying to achieve.
One thing which really surprised me was the emphasis placed on needing a written statement of our vision, mission and values. For a long time, I'd be tootling along, thinking that these things were self-evident. Clearly they aren't. If we're to focus the organisation, then everybody needs to know what it is we're trying to do. So - that's a first priority for me.
Two very useful meetings with potential funders. The Swedish Cultural Attache was very excited about the role of Teater Eksem in the Trilogy, and Creative New Zealand had lots of positive things to say about Origins. Apparently the report they received on it was one of the best they've EVER had!
One thing which really surprised me was the emphasis placed on needing a written statement of our vision, mission and values. For a long time, I'd be tootling along, thinking that these things were self-evident. Clearly they aren't. If we're to focus the organisation, then everybody needs to know what it is we're trying to do. So - that's a first priority for me.
Two very useful meetings with potential funders. The Swedish Cultural Attache was very excited about the role of Teater Eksem in the Trilogy, and Creative New Zealand had lots of positive things to say about Origins. Apparently the report they received on it was one of the best they've EVER had!
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Atom Egoyan and Warwick Thornton
On Friday night, I was at BAFTA, at the invitation of my old friend Atom Egoyan, to see his new film Chloe, and to listen to him deliver the David Lean Lecture. The lecture was filmed for a webcast, so you can see it if you follow the BAFTA link.
I've known Atom ever since we worked on Dr. Ox's Experiment at ENO, a full decade ago, and we've stayed in touch on and off ever since. He's somebody you can go back to, knowing they won't have changed in their friendship. He's also one of the most exciting and original thinkers, and brilliant film-makers / artists I've ever been lucky enough to encounter.
Chloe is, in some ways, familiar territory for the maker of Exotica. Julianne Moore plays a successful Toronto doctor, who becomes convinced that her husband is being unfaithful, and hires a prostitute to test him out. What's fascinating in this is the way in which different layers of fiction interact and begin to effect or become reality - fantasies and role-play turning into or creating truths. It's a clever game to play with a medium which, because of its photographic nature, we tend to take at face value. Atom exposes that. His world of performance as life and erotic tensions is something I've learnt from in terms of the Trilogy.
Saturday allows me the chance to meet another wonderful film director - Warwick Thornton. We screened his film Dark Science (scripted by David Milroy) as part of Origins, and now he's in London at the Film Festival, with his first feature Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah won the Camera d'Or at Cannes this year, and it isn't hard to see why. It's a painfully honest account of life in Aboriginal communities, touching on the poverty and violence, the petrol-sniffing, the exploitation of indigenous artists, the homelessness... and yet somehow still managing to feel life-affirming and ultimately hopeful. Warwick uses very little dialogue - and quite a proportion of what he does use is in Walipiri - but he employs an intense visual poetry and an incredible emotional engagement by the two teenage leads to move into a world of image, music and sheer intensity which is quite overwhelming.
Warwick is a large, solid Aboriginal man, with the self-deprecating humour characteristic of his people. Asked why there's so little dialogue, he recounts his own first teenage love, and his inability to speak to the girl. Asked about the actors, he simply says that he needed people who would be "with him" - people who came from the world he had experienced when he was young, and who had "done thirteen years of research on it". Their performances are hardly acting. Just living on screen - and telling us deeply uncomfortable truths.
I've known Atom ever since we worked on Dr. Ox's Experiment at ENO, a full decade ago, and we've stayed in touch on and off ever since. He's somebody you can go back to, knowing they won't have changed in their friendship. He's also one of the most exciting and original thinkers, and brilliant film-makers / artists I've ever been lucky enough to encounter.
Chloe is, in some ways, familiar territory for the maker of Exotica. Julianne Moore plays a successful Toronto doctor, who becomes convinced that her husband is being unfaithful, and hires a prostitute to test him out. What's fascinating in this is the way in which different layers of fiction interact and begin to effect or become reality - fantasies and role-play turning into or creating truths. It's a clever game to play with a medium which, because of its photographic nature, we tend to take at face value. Atom exposes that. His world of performance as life and erotic tensions is something I've learnt from in terms of the Trilogy.
Saturday allows me the chance to meet another wonderful film director - Warwick Thornton. We screened his film Dark Science (scripted by David Milroy) as part of Origins, and now he's in London at the Film Festival, with his first feature Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah won the Camera d'Or at Cannes this year, and it isn't hard to see why. It's a painfully honest account of life in Aboriginal communities, touching on the poverty and violence, the petrol-sniffing, the exploitation of indigenous artists, the homelessness... and yet somehow still managing to feel life-affirming and ultimately hopeful. Warwick uses very little dialogue - and quite a proportion of what he does use is in Walipiri - but he employs an intense visual poetry and an incredible emotional engagement by the two teenage leads to move into a world of image, music and sheer intensity which is quite overwhelming.
Warwick is a large, solid Aboriginal man, with the self-deprecating humour characteristic of his people. Asked why there's so little dialogue, he recounts his own first teenage love, and his inability to speak to the girl. Asked about the actors, he simply says that he needed people who would be "with him" - people who came from the world he had experienced when he was young, and who had "done thirteen years of research on it". Their performances are hardly acting. Just living on screen - and telling us deeply uncomfortable truths.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Chinese movies
I've been taking advantage of the London Film Festival to keep up my research on what's going on in contemporary Chinese culture. I saw two films at the ICA on Tuesday. The first, The Search, is from Tibet, and is interesting in a slightly academic way, as it deals with traditional theatre forms. It's about a director who is casting a film of the traditional opera Prince Drime Kunden. This is a fascinating legend, about a prince who gives away all sorts of things to the poor, including his own eyes. There's a lovely Jesus of Montreal-type moment when this is paralleled with modern medical donations (of which more anon) - but overall I found the film a bit underpowered, considering the depth of the culture and the magnificence of the landscape.
Feast of Villains, on the other hand, is an amazing piece of work. This is a very contemporary, urban film, about a young working-class man who is trying to get money to help his sick father be treated. He sells a kidney, illegally, and is ripped off by the dealer. What I found extraordinary was the degree of frankness with which this film, directed by the edgy indie Pan Jianlin, deals with some of the nastier aspects of contemporary Chinese society. The amorality on show is palpable - with criminal gangs and corruption in the system at every turn. It shows bribery, it shows insane bureaucracy, and even the "positive" aspects like increased wealth and glamorous bars are exposed as fronts for crime and prostitution. I had been worried that our productions might be felt to be showing too much of this - now I am far less concerned. If this film got past the censor, then our work, which is actually very positive about Chinese culture, shouldn't have any problem (in theory at least)! There's one moment when a criminal mastermind explains to his Japanese client that the government's human rights policy is making it much harder to get organs from executed criminals - and this is the only sign that the film comes from the supposedly repressive PRC. As so often, the Western view is proved wrong - or at least too simple.
But just because the film is edgy and honest didn't make it popular in China. I get talking to a Chinese film buff, who tells me "He got panned" (I don't think the pun was intended). Maybe it's not so much what the censor says, as what people want to believe about their society that counts. All the more reason why I need to make sure the Chinese characters are very sympathetic and recognisable, before we take them on complex journeys.
Oddly, the film which has so far reminded me most of our own work is actually from Palestine. Called Ajami, it's a brilliant interweaving of stories from Palestinian and Jewish families, full of surprising coincidences and moments of shock which make you realise how everybody in that society is locked in to a web of violence - whether they like it or not.
Feast of Villains, on the other hand, is an amazing piece of work. This is a very contemporary, urban film, about a young working-class man who is trying to get money to help his sick father be treated. He sells a kidney, illegally, and is ripped off by the dealer. What I found extraordinary was the degree of frankness with which this film, directed by the edgy indie Pan Jianlin, deals with some of the nastier aspects of contemporary Chinese society. The amorality on show is palpable - with criminal gangs and corruption in the system at every turn. It shows bribery, it shows insane bureaucracy, and even the "positive" aspects like increased wealth and glamorous bars are exposed as fronts for crime and prostitution. I had been worried that our productions might be felt to be showing too much of this - now I am far less concerned. If this film got past the censor, then our work, which is actually very positive about Chinese culture, shouldn't have any problem (in theory at least)! There's one moment when a criminal mastermind explains to his Japanese client that the government's human rights policy is making it much harder to get organs from executed criminals - and this is the only sign that the film comes from the supposedly repressive PRC. As so often, the Western view is proved wrong - or at least too simple.
But just because the film is edgy and honest didn't make it popular in China. I get talking to a Chinese film buff, who tells me "He got panned" (I don't think the pun was intended). Maybe it's not so much what the censor says, as what people want to believe about their society that counts. All the more reason why I need to make sure the Chinese characters are very sympathetic and recognisable, before we take them on complex journeys.
Oddly, the film which has so far reminded me most of our own work is actually from Palestine. Called Ajami, it's a brilliant interweaving of stories from Palestinian and Jewish families, full of surprising coincidences and moments of shock which make you realise how everybody in that society is locked in to a web of violence - whether they like it or not.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Roma of Edmonton
O Patrin did its final performance this morning at the Art Zone in Edmonton. And what a performance it was... The Art Zone houses a classroom for young Roma who don't have school places (why they don't have them was something I didn't discover). They come from Poland and Roumania, and there are interpreters in the classroom with the teacher. The youngsters all have a distinct Roma look, reminding me of Christopher Simpson when he played B in Double Tongue, and making the Indian origins of their people very clear, even after all the centuries. The girls wear long skirts, big earrings and have their hair tied back.
Although they had seen many puppet plays before (they apparently have these every week in the camp in Roumania), many of them had never seen live actors before. The English was something of a language barrier - though the Romany wasn't - but they seemed to understand very clearly what the play was about. Lots of this is down to Dan's physical approach to the direction, with the philosophical conflicts turning into real fights. When Rachel Drazek as Athalia enumerated the horrors perpetrated on gypsy people in the past, there was a real tension in the room. It was these people's families who had been victims of this forgotten holocaust. And the most extraordinary thing was that their response seemed to be gratitude to the actors for caring enough to tell the story.
Although they had seen many puppet plays before (they apparently have these every week in the camp in Roumania), many of them had never seen live actors before. The English was something of a language barrier - though the Romany wasn't - but they seemed to understand very clearly what the play was about. Lots of this is down to Dan's physical approach to the direction, with the philosophical conflicts turning into real fights. When Rachel Drazek as Athalia enumerated the horrors perpetrated on gypsy people in the past, there was a real tension in the room. It was these people's families who had been victims of this forgotten holocaust. And the most extraordinary thing was that their response seemed to be gratitude to the actors for caring enough to tell the story.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Before Tomorrow
Tuesday night saw the screening of Before Tomorrow at Canada House, in association with Origins. It's an amazing film - the story of an old woman and her grandson, who are the only survivors of a plague that hits an Inuit community in the wake of colonial incursions. It's full of beautiful imagery, and amazing social and cultural detail. And it brings a rare and distinct voice into the cinematic world.
I was asked to introduce the film, which was largely an exercise in contextualising, since I didn't want to tell the story. I talked about some of the exciting developments in First Nations film, particularly in Canada, and the power of DV to democratise the medium. I also talked about ten years of Nunavut, and the amazing success of that side of democracy - the way in which the Inuit have shown a real ability to bring the open debate of the tribal council into the institutional world of the 21st century.
Otherwise, this week is having its ups and downs. We've realised that the Trilogy is not going to get the UK tour we had hoped for - the recession has hit touring really badly. So - we've had to pull out of the Manchester leg of the work. Very disappointing all round.
On the plus side, O Patrin continues to wow young people all over London, and to engage them with Romany and First Nations cultures. Click here for a link to the Resource Pack, which is full of fascinating info and great pictures!
I was asked to introduce the film, which was largely an exercise in contextualising, since I didn't want to tell the story. I talked about some of the exciting developments in First Nations film, particularly in Canada, and the power of DV to democratise the medium. I also talked about ten years of Nunavut, and the amazing success of that side of democracy - the way in which the Inuit have shown a real ability to bring the open debate of the tribal council into the institutional world of the 21st century.
Otherwise, this week is having its ups and downs. We've realised that the Trilogy is not going to get the UK tour we had hoped for - the recession has hit touring really badly. So - we've had to pull out of the Manchester leg of the work. Very disappointing all round.
On the plus side, O Patrin continues to wow young people all over London, and to engage them with Romany and First Nations cultures. Click here for a link to the Resource Pack, which is full of fascinating info and great pictures!
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Canada, the Arctic - Howard Barker
I've been at Canada House quite a lot this week. On Monday, I was talking about Origins at an academic conference on Aboriginal Studies. I think the idea was that I should be a bit of light relief at the end of the day, after all the academic papers. As it turned out, this meant I had very little time available - so I extemporised as best I could, saying I would try to be like a First Nations person and not let the pressure of time get the better of me. I managed to talk about the Theatre and Healing workshop at least, and to make the crucial point that Yves and Catherine had been very generous with the Huron-Wendat culture, and had shown ways forward to people from a very diverse range of backgrounds. This points to the fact that scholars studying indigenous people can't just watch them from the outside, or look at the problems in the society and history in a scientific way. We are implicated in this - and so we need the healing too. So we should be doing more than learning about these people - we should be learning from them.
Tuesday night took me back there to see Atanarjuat - one of the films in the series about the Arctic that Canada House is showing in association with Origins. It's an incredible piece of work: with an entirely Inuit cast and director (Zacharias Kunuk), and in Inuktitut with subtitles. Imagine the organisational feat! But more than that, it is completely a film that emerges from the specific culture and landscape of the Inuit. It doesn't give cultural information as information - you just come to realise certain assumptions and ideas through the narrative itself. So, when a woman commits adultery, the man's wife says to her: "He's your brother-in-law. You're not even supposed to speak to him, never mind sleep with him."
Wednesday night, by way of contrast, takes me to Riverside Studios to see the latest Howard Barker play, presented by The Wrestling School. Chris Corner, the General Manager, is an old friend (he's administered several projects for us), and he's on fine form. In fact, I'm amazed to see from the programme that the Arts Council has cut its funding to this company, and it is now living off a private benefactor. In terms of production values and acting standards, it has done them no harm at all. In fact, the production is probably the finest I've seen from the company. The play itself, Found in the Ground, is very much in the vein of Barker's recent work - clearly about the process of ageing, and the fight to cling on to a sexual energy which goes with that. Barker has always associated sex and death - and he does it particularly violently here. Much of the play feels very ritualised, which is in keeping with its subjects, and turns it towards installation art. But I felt it lost its way when Hitler appeared as a rather benign character, chatting about art, and there were a great many false endings. Still - he is always incredibly brave.
At Riverside, I met up with Susie Self, who is a singer and composer, and was in Nixon in China in Greece. She saw the Re-Orientations showing, and is very excited about it. She's interested in writing music for us, and suggests that she try and do a couple of substitute bits for Re-Orientations, just to see if it works. From such beginnings.....
Tuesday night took me back there to see Atanarjuat - one of the films in the series about the Arctic that Canada House is showing in association with Origins. It's an incredible piece of work: with an entirely Inuit cast and director (Zacharias Kunuk), and in Inuktitut with subtitles. Imagine the organisational feat! But more than that, it is completely a film that emerges from the specific culture and landscape of the Inuit. It doesn't give cultural information as information - you just come to realise certain assumptions and ideas through the narrative itself. So, when a woman commits adultery, the man's wife says to her: "He's your brother-in-law. You're not even supposed to speak to him, never mind sleep with him."
Wednesday night, by way of contrast, takes me to Riverside Studios to see the latest Howard Barker play, presented by The Wrestling School. Chris Corner, the General Manager, is an old friend (he's administered several projects for us), and he's on fine form. In fact, I'm amazed to see from the programme that the Arts Council has cut its funding to this company, and it is now living off a private benefactor. In terms of production values and acting standards, it has done them no harm at all. In fact, the production is probably the finest I've seen from the company. The play itself, Found in the Ground, is very much in the vein of Barker's recent work - clearly about the process of ageing, and the fight to cling on to a sexual energy which goes with that. Barker has always associated sex and death - and he does it particularly violently here. Much of the play feels very ritualised, which is in keeping with its subjects, and turns it towards installation art. But I felt it lost its way when Hitler appeared as a rather benign character, chatting about art, and there were a great many false endings. Still - he is always incredibly brave.
At Riverside, I met up with Susie Self, who is a singer and composer, and was in Nixon in China in Greece. She saw the Re-Orientations showing, and is very excited about it. She's interested in writing music for us, and suggests that she try and do a couple of substitute bits for Re-Orientations, just to see if it works. From such beginnings.....
Friday, October 02, 2009
More on Brussels
There was a round-robin email asking for comments on the Culture Forum, so I've put in my tuppence-worth. The comments are all at http://www.culture.info/euforum, but here's the gist of what I said. First of all, I quibbled a bit with the "speeches by experts" format: a conference should involve far more give and take. The panels had been selected by the organisers, so the great revelation of "we all agree" should not have been so surprising. I much preferred the open debate which characterised the Platform for an Intercultural Europe event in June.
Which said, the fact that the DG went to such trouble to indicate its support for a cultural agenda and for the integration of cultural policy across EU actions was extremely positive. I think Steve Green was right to compare it with the situation at national level. In Britain, at least, we remain poor cousins of people with "proper Jobs", an add-on luxury which entertains and flatters the "real economy". This is likely to get worse, not better, after the next election. So let's be grateful to Europe for this.
On the catering - by the way - the sandwiches were not the greatest, BUT the breakfast pastries were lovely and the tapas with wine before the wonderful concert was terrific. Oh, guess what - sandwiches are English - croissants are French and tapas are Spanish. Subtext, surely??
Which said, the fact that the DG went to such trouble to indicate its support for a cultural agenda and for the integration of cultural policy across EU actions was extremely positive. I think Steve Green was right to compare it with the situation at national level. In Britain, at least, we remain poor cousins of people with "proper Jobs", an add-on luxury which entertains and flatters the "real economy". This is likely to get worse, not better, after the next election. So let's be grateful to Europe for this.
On the catering - by the way - the sandwiches were not the greatest, BUT the breakfast pastries were lovely and the tapas with wine before the wonderful concert was terrific. Oh, guess what - sandwiches are English - croissants are French and tapas are Spanish. Subtext, surely??
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
European Culture Forum
I'm in Brussels as a guest of the EU, for the European Culture Forum - a two-day bunfight involving policy-makers, producers, advocates and even the odd artist from all over Europe, plus a few from elsewhere. Given the importance of the European element in much of what we're doing at the moment, it seemed important to be here - and, well, they did ask....
Not that Britain is particularly well represented at this event - as so often in Europe, though it's not exactly very far by Eurostar. I bump into Yvette Vaughan-Jones from Visiting Arts, who was on the same (very early) train as me this morning. She knows she needs to ask me something, but the 4am start prevents her remembering what it was... I also have long chat with Deborah Shaw from the RSC, who I last met in Hong Kong. She runs the intercultural aspects of their operation, which at the moment seems to mean work with Russia (as witness the new plays just opened) and with the Middle East. She tells me that Arabic has no infinitives, so that when "To be or not to be" is translated, it comes out as "Shall we be or shall we not be", which makes the abstract question a whole lot more immediate, catapulting it into the political arena.
Not much coming from the stage is as exciting as this - though there are odd gems among the plethora of platitudes which tend to be obligatory on such occasions. The liveliest sessions are, predicably enough, the smaller ones - like a discussion of access and participation, or the session around the Platform for Intercultural Europe. Border Crossings is now a member of this Platform, and I spend some time discussing its implications with Sabine Frank (who runs it) and Chris Torch (from Intercult in Sweden). They are both very keen to integrate cultural action more fully into other aspects of policy (particularly social policy) - and I'm very enthusiastic about that. The one area where I find myself diverging from the Platform is when it states that "The potential lies in... highlighting similarities rather than differences between people." If you do that, then where is the drama? Without conflict, there is no cultural production, nor indeed any dialogue. This is a basic problem in a forum of this kind. We talk about the arts as a social bond, and indeed they are - but that must not blind us to the fact that they are actually about divisions and differences and conflicts and turbulence.
In the evening, there is a concert which makes the point very well. It's programmed, and mainly conducted, by the wonderful baroque specialist Jordi Savall. Watching him and his performers, it becomes very clear how dialogue is at the basis of all European culture. In the baroque, one instrument answers another, one phrase complements the next. It's a fallacy to see this music as still and beautiful - its beauty in fact lies in dynamism and change.
Not that Britain is particularly well represented at this event - as so often in Europe, though it's not exactly very far by Eurostar. I bump into Yvette Vaughan-Jones from Visiting Arts, who was on the same (very early) train as me this morning. She knows she needs to ask me something, but the 4am start prevents her remembering what it was... I also have long chat with Deborah Shaw from the RSC, who I last met in Hong Kong. She runs the intercultural aspects of their operation, which at the moment seems to mean work with Russia (as witness the new plays just opened) and with the Middle East. She tells me that Arabic has no infinitives, so that when "To be or not to be" is translated, it comes out as "Shall we be or shall we not be", which makes the abstract question a whole lot more immediate, catapulting it into the political arena.
Not much coming from the stage is as exciting as this - though there are odd gems among the plethora of platitudes which tend to be obligatory on such occasions. The liveliest sessions are, predicably enough, the smaller ones - like a discussion of access and participation, or the session around the Platform for Intercultural Europe. Border Crossings is now a member of this Platform, and I spend some time discussing its implications with Sabine Frank (who runs it) and Chris Torch (from Intercult in Sweden). They are both very keen to integrate cultural action more fully into other aspects of policy (particularly social policy) - and I'm very enthusiastic about that. The one area where I find myself diverging from the Platform is when it states that "The potential lies in... highlighting similarities rather than differences between people." If you do that, then where is the drama? Without conflict, there is no cultural production, nor indeed any dialogue. This is a basic problem in a forum of this kind. We talk about the arts as a social bond, and indeed they are - but that must not blind us to the fact that they are actually about divisions and differences and conflicts and turbulence.
In the evening, there is a concert which makes the point very well. It's programmed, and mainly conducted, by the wonderful baroque specialist Jordi Savall. Watching him and his performers, it becomes very clear how dialogue is at the basis of all European culture. In the baroque, one instrument answers another, one phrase complements the next. It's a fallacy to see this music as still and beautiful - its beauty in fact lies in dynamism and change.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Clive James and Australian Literature
I was invited to Australia House the other night for the launch of a new Anthology of Australian writing. It's a very exciting book - a fantastic range of different sorts of literature, and a clear decision to resist the "progress" narrative (which would have constructed Australia as Terra Nullius, waiting to be turned into the sunny happy land of today by the colonists...). However, Clive James, who was one of the Aussie luminaries paraded to launch the book, seems still to live under such delusions. Even though he was on a platform where his remit was surely to praise the book, he started laying into it for having "too much Aboriginal writing".
Now, what does this mean? Does it mean that there is too little "white writing"? But, of course, the idea of "white writing" is absurd - it ranges from James's own comic reminiscences to the profound engagements with history and landscape found in Thomas Keneally or Louis Nowra. But doesn't that rather explode the concept of "Aboriginal writing" too? After all, Jack Davis is not the 19th century Aboriginal woman Tasma, and she is not Sally Morgan, and Sally Morgan is not Lionel Fogarty. So was Clive James in fact saying that "once you've got one Aboriginal, you've got them all"? I suspect that is the logical conclusion.
Given that only 12% of the book represents the words of the country's indigenous people, it seems little enough to me. After all, what is Australian culture if it isn't Aboriginal culture?
Now, what does this mean? Does it mean that there is too little "white writing"? But, of course, the idea of "white writing" is absurd - it ranges from James's own comic reminiscences to the profound engagements with history and landscape found in Thomas Keneally or Louis Nowra. But doesn't that rather explode the concept of "Aboriginal writing" too? After all, Jack Davis is not the 19th century Aboriginal woman Tasma, and she is not Sally Morgan, and Sally Morgan is not Lionel Fogarty. So was Clive James in fact saying that "once you've got one Aboriginal, you've got them all"? I suspect that is the logical conclusion.
Given that only 12% of the book represents the words of the country's indigenous people, it seems little enough to me. After all, what is Australian culture if it isn't Aboriginal culture?
Monday, September 21, 2009
The Research Centre
On Friday, I was invited out to Royal Holloway for the opening of Helen Gilbert's new Centre for Research in International Theatre and Performance. I used to teach there quite a lot - but haven't been back for years, in spite of being in regular contact with Helen, and some contact with other people in the department there. Chris Megson, sporting a new beard, sat next to me during Joseph Loach's lecture which launched the whole thing. We were both a bit blown away by the range of scholarship on display. To discuss a native American museum and casino in terms of Orphic myths and Miltonic theology is pretty complex stuff.
The whole idea of a research centre in this area is very exciting for us, of course - but especially important at the moment, since its first project is around the performance of indigenous identities. Helen's already contributed some of her funds towards the writers who came to Origins in May. Now that we're looking towards further festivals, the dialogue with the centre could be really productive. On Friday, they had a wonderful indigenous Australian performance poet and film-maker giving a short presentation. I talked to her afterwards - we knew all the same people, of course!
Simon Anderson emails from Canada House. They're running a series of films in partnership with the National Maritime Museum coinciding with their current exhibition, The Northwest Passage: An Arctic Obsession, and have asked me to introduce the one on October 13th. Here's the full programme:
Arctic Film Programme
Canada House, Cockspur Street entrance, Trafalgar Square, London SW1Y 5BJ
Doors open 18.30 for 19.00 start
Advance booking only through the National Maritime Museum on 020 8312 8560.
Sept 22
Film double bill:
Henry Larsen's Northwest Passages (1962, 27mins)
Norwegian-born Superintendent Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was the first man to navigate the Northwest Passage
in both directions. In this film he relates anecdotes of his voyages in the tiny schooner, the St. Roch.
Northwest Passage (1970, 26 mins) Dir. Bernard Gosselin
It took a supertanker like the U.S.S. Manhattan, assisted by a nimble icebreaker, the Canadian John A. Macdonald, to realise the dream of centuries: the navigation of a commercial sea lane through the Arctic channels. This is a record of that historic expedition, filmed in colour from both ships and from a reconnaissance helicopter. Commentary by ships' navigators and observers, and shipside sounds of formidable sea ice groaning, straining and cracking make this an adventure rarely seen on film.
Sept 29
The Necessities of Life (2009, 102 mins) Dir. Benoit Pilon
Set in the 1950s when a tuberculosis epidemic in the Far North forced many Inuit to go to various Canadian cities for treatment. Tivil (Natar Ungalaaq) is taken to a sanatorium in Quebec City. Uprooted, far from his loved ones and faced with a completely alien world, he finds himself unable to communicate with anyone.
Oct 6
Atanajurat: The Fast Runner (2001, 161mins) Dir. Zacharias KunukCannes Camera d’Or winning Atanajurat is Canada's first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. An exciting action thriller set in ancient Igloolik, the film unfolds as a life-threatening struggle between powerful natural and supernatural characters.
Oct 13
Before Tomorrow (2009, 93mins) Dir. Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu
Circa. 1840, some Inuit tribes still have never met any white people, although rumours circulate about what they might be, where they come from, and why. Before Tomorrow tells of a woman who demonstrates that human dignity is at the core of life from beginning to end, as she faces with her grandson the ultimate challenge of survival.
Oct 20
Passage (2008, 108 mins) Dir. John Walker
It was news that shook the English-speaking world. Celebrated British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men had perished in the Arctic ice during an ill-fated attempt to discover the Northwest Passage. More shocking, they had descended into madness and cannibalism. Passage is a story of incredible sacrifice, stunning distortion of the truth and single-minded obsession. It challenges the way we look at history.
The whole idea of a research centre in this area is very exciting for us, of course - but especially important at the moment, since its first project is around the performance of indigenous identities. Helen's already contributed some of her funds towards the writers who came to Origins in May. Now that we're looking towards further festivals, the dialogue with the centre could be really productive. On Friday, they had a wonderful indigenous Australian performance poet and film-maker giving a short presentation. I talked to her afterwards - we knew all the same people, of course!
Simon Anderson emails from Canada House. They're running a series of films in partnership with the National Maritime Museum coinciding with their current exhibition, The Northwest Passage: An Arctic Obsession, and have asked me to introduce the one on October 13th. Here's the full programme:
Arctic Film Programme
Canada House, Cockspur Street entrance, Trafalgar Square, London SW1Y 5BJ
Doors open 18.30 for 19.00 start
Advance booking only through the National Maritime Museum on 020 8312 8560.
Sept 22
Film double bill:
Henry Larsen's Northwest Passages (1962, 27mins)
Norwegian-born Superintendent Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was the first man to navigate the Northwest Passage
in both directions. In this film he relates anecdotes of his voyages in the tiny schooner, the St. Roch.
Northwest Passage (1970, 26 mins) Dir. Bernard Gosselin
It took a supertanker like the U.S.S. Manhattan, assisted by a nimble icebreaker, the Canadian John A. Macdonald, to realise the dream of centuries: the navigation of a commercial sea lane through the Arctic channels. This is a record of that historic expedition, filmed in colour from both ships and from a reconnaissance helicopter. Commentary by ships' navigators and observers, and shipside sounds of formidable sea ice groaning, straining and cracking make this an adventure rarely seen on film.
Sept 29
The Necessities of Life (2009, 102 mins) Dir. Benoit Pilon
Set in the 1950s when a tuberculosis epidemic in the Far North forced many Inuit to go to various Canadian cities for treatment. Tivil (Natar Ungalaaq) is taken to a sanatorium in Quebec City. Uprooted, far from his loved ones and faced with a completely alien world, he finds himself unable to communicate with anyone.
Oct 6
Atanajurat: The Fast Runner (2001, 161mins) Dir. Zacharias KunukCannes Camera d’Or winning Atanajurat is Canada's first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. An exciting action thriller set in ancient Igloolik, the film unfolds as a life-threatening struggle between powerful natural and supernatural characters.
Oct 13
Before Tomorrow (2009, 93mins) Dir. Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu
Circa. 1840, some Inuit tribes still have never met any white people, although rumours circulate about what they might be, where they come from, and why. Before Tomorrow tells of a woman who demonstrates that human dignity is at the core of life from beginning to end, as she faces with her grandson the ultimate challenge of survival.
Oct 20
Passage (2008, 108 mins) Dir. John Walker
It was news that shook the English-speaking world. Celebrated British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men had perished in the Arctic ice during an ill-fated attempt to discover the Northwest Passage. More shocking, they had descended into madness and cannibalism. Passage is a story of incredible sacrifice, stunning distortion of the truth and single-minded obsession. It challenges the way we look at history.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Rehearsing with the Roma
O Patrin, the Participation and Learning project for the Origins Festival, is in rehearsal, and starts touring schools next week. I went in to see them yesterday. Dan, from the Roma Company, has written and is directing the piece, and he's working with two Roma performers and one non-Roma who seems very knowledgeable! Gabrielle from Polygon is also in the room, and a movement director. One of the Roma performers, Sarah, is a very accomplished musician, so the piece is full of song and dance. Lovely to see that this work, like the pieces we create directly ourselves, follows our aesthetic of combining non-naturalistic theatre forms with the more "real" scenes.
The production is a response to the workshops which Dan and the company did with the visiting First Nations companies during the Festival. What's great is that the piece doesn't become didactic about this - the contributions are there in poetry, movement and music, making the Roma experience resonate with others, but they are not overtly stated. When Roma performers speak a piece of text by a Maori ("A spiritual thread binds us together"), then the resonance is so powerful that there is no need to explain it. In any case, the show will be followed by a workshop, so the schools' audience will be able to get directly involved in the debates, which makes it all the more exciting to work by stealth rather than statement.
On the Travellers' Times Blog, there is an article which points up the parallels between the indigenous Australian experience and that of Roma people in the UK. It's by the Roma journalist Jake Bowers, who has often pointed up these similarities of experience.
The production is a response to the workshops which Dan and the company did with the visiting First Nations companies during the Festival. What's great is that the piece doesn't become didactic about this - the contributions are there in poetry, movement and music, making the Roma experience resonate with others, but they are not overtly stated. When Roma performers speak a piece of text by a Maori ("A spiritual thread binds us together"), then the resonance is so powerful that there is no need to explain it. In any case, the show will be followed by a workshop, so the schools' audience will be able to get directly involved in the debates, which makes it all the more exciting to work by stealth rather than statement.
On the Travellers' Times Blog, there is an article which points up the parallels between the indigenous Australian experience and that of Roma people in the UK. It's by the Roma journalist Jake Bowers, who has often pointed up these similarities of experience.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Rustom Bharucha
After several years of email friendship, I finally met Rustom on Friday evening. He's in London for a huge Shakespeare conference at King's, and clearly enjoying it enormously. Conversation with him is a stream of highly sophisticated consciousness: "These guys really know their stuff. We had Stanley Wells talking this morning. Amazing. About the Sonnets. And there was a woman from Canada who really challenged the canonical thing - asking whether we should abandon the numbering of the Sonnets. It's always numbering and ordering. Like the system which forces you to do lighting cues in a particular way. It's all being exploded though. When I was young in India we were taught John Galsworthy. Galsworthy! Then in 1978 Edward Said came along and everything changed. Everything. And now, they're approaching Shakespeare through post-colonial theory, through feminism, through queer theory.... I saw As You Like It at the Globe. Apparently it's one of their better productions. But I couldn't get the radicalism of the text I was hearing to fit with the safety of what I was seeing. I mean, in the end, the production becomes an affirmation of heterosexual marriage..."
I'm parodying, of course - it's exciting to be in the presence of somebody whose mind is so incisive and so eclectic. And great to feel that he's so supportive of all we are doing. He's really delighted about the notice Theatre and Slavery got in The Drama Review.
As part of the conference, we see an extract from a version of The Merchant of Venice performed by the Taiwanese BangZi Opera. This is a new form on me, though it has a great deal in common with Peking Opera (percussive puntuation) and with Yueju (sheng boots and a largely female cast). Shylock (a Saracen merchant in this version) is played by a tough little woman in a false beard, and is presented as a comic figure. Portia is romantic, Bassanio heroic, Antonio tragic. The naivety of the whole thing is actually rather refreshing, and we're reminded that, for centuries, this was how the play was done in the West. I never thought I'd actually see it like this!
I'm parodying, of course - it's exciting to be in the presence of somebody whose mind is so incisive and so eclectic. And great to feel that he's so supportive of all we are doing. He's really delighted about the notice Theatre and Slavery got in The Drama Review.
As part of the conference, we see an extract from a version of The Merchant of Venice performed by the Taiwanese BangZi Opera. This is a new form on me, though it has a great deal in common with Peking Opera (percussive puntuation) and with Yueju (sheng boots and a largely female cast). Shylock (a Saracen merchant in this version) is played by a tough little woman in a false beard, and is presented as a comic figure. Portia is romantic, Bassanio heroic, Antonio tragic. The naivety of the whole thing is actually rather refreshing, and we're reminded that, for centuries, this was how the play was done in the West. I never thought I'd actually see it like this!
Monday, September 07, 2009
Showings
Last week was crazy and wonderful. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday teching the show - long days which lasted into the late evening, as we struggled our way through the whole thing. I'm usually fairly efficient in techs - but the first go at any devised piece is always more complex than scripted work, because the reality is that the play isn't even fully scripted at that stage (it still isn't!), never mind rehearsed. We'd managed to work our way through the first half while Denise and Micha were with us, but the second half was still no more than a series of scenes, and I had to stage the transitions at the same time as lighting them, sorting out the sound cues and integrating video more fully. In work of this kind, the tech is not an add-on, but an integrated part of the production's creation: that's why it was so important that we did it in this period, rather than waiting for Manchester.
On Thursday and Friday mornings, we had dress runs, with extensive notes afterwards. The first time through, the main preoccupation for everybody seemed to be with costume changes. The Chinese actors are used to large companies of dressers and make-up artists - and hardly anybody is used to appearing as so many different characters, all of whom have to look different, in a comparatively short play. By Friday morning, we had just about got to a stage where it was possible for a showing to happen - which was just as well, since they were on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.
Our invited audiences were wonderful. On Friday, there was a younger group - very diverse - with Swedes, Chinese and Indian people much in evidence. The different laughs rising out of different areas of the audience were very exciting, and instructive. On the Saturday, we made some key changes before the second showing - clarifying bits of the "back-story" which hadn't been apparent to the first audience, adjusting a couple of scenes to overcome language barriers, and speeding up the bits that had dragged. The second showing was a huge leap forward from the first. This time the audience included lots of very knowledgeable and articulate people - Paul Sirrett from Soho, Alaknanda Samarth, Juwon Ogunde, Di Robson, Sarah Nunn... and so on. Haili and Peter were there from earlier casts as well. So the post-show conversation lasted well over an hour, and was incredibly helpful. Not everybody in the audience agreed on everything - there were some people who wanted a stronger sense of "closure", or at least to "know what happened to the characters", while others were excited by the open-ness. It's interesting that the people who wanted narrative closure tended to be white Europeans: Asian people were much more open to the open! There was also a very useful conversation about Song and Alex's lesbian relationship, which continued over our "au revoir" dinner afterwards. This will be hugely helpful for re-working the second play.
On Sunday, I delivered the Chinese performers to the airport, and got the (now much bigger) set back into storage. Once again, we're at a beginning point.
On Thursday and Friday mornings, we had dress runs, with extensive notes afterwards. The first time through, the main preoccupation for everybody seemed to be with costume changes. The Chinese actors are used to large companies of dressers and make-up artists - and hardly anybody is used to appearing as so many different characters, all of whom have to look different, in a comparatively short play. By Friday morning, we had just about got to a stage where it was possible for a showing to happen - which was just as well, since they were on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.
Our invited audiences were wonderful. On Friday, there was a younger group - very diverse - with Swedes, Chinese and Indian people much in evidence. The different laughs rising out of different areas of the audience were very exciting, and instructive. On the Saturday, we made some key changes before the second showing - clarifying bits of the "back-story" which hadn't been apparent to the first audience, adjusting a couple of scenes to overcome language barriers, and speeding up the bits that had dragged. The second showing was a huge leap forward from the first. This time the audience included lots of very knowledgeable and articulate people - Paul Sirrett from Soho, Alaknanda Samarth, Juwon Ogunde, Di Robson, Sarah Nunn... and so on. Haili and Peter were there from earlier casts as well. So the post-show conversation lasted well over an hour, and was incredibly helpful. Not everybody in the audience agreed on everything - there were some people who wanted a stronger sense of "closure", or at least to "know what happened to the characters", while others were excited by the open-ness. It's interesting that the people who wanted narrative closure tended to be white Europeans: Asian people were much more open to the open! There was also a very useful conversation about Song and Alex's lesbian relationship, which continued over our "au revoir" dinner afterwards. This will be hugely helpful for re-working the second play.
On Sunday, I delivered the Chinese performers to the airport, and got the (now much bigger) set back into storage. Once again, we're at a beginning point.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The Games at Goldsmiths
It's a huge bonus to be able to do this development period in the theatre at Goldsmiths. For one thing, we're able to accommodate all our overseas visitors on campus at an affordable cost... More crucially, we have the luxury of rehearsing in a real theatre space for the entire period. Usually, you only get the theatre for the last few days before the show opens, which means that anything technical has to be worked out in advance, and done just the once. This inevitably tends to mean that you play safe - there's no time for things to go wrong. But, this time, we can afford the luxury of being playful in our technical work, just as we are being with the rest of the production. We've got our new video projector rigged up, and are playing with live feeds from an onstage camera. With Nancy as camera-person, we ended up re-staging a scene around what these live feeds offered us. What's more, we already have much of the lighting in place, so Nick and David have also been part of this experimental process. It's very liberating.
We've had Denise and Micha with us all week, so the emphasis has been very much on the larger scenes with movement sequences. I feel most of these are working well now, and I've been able to develop aspects of the storyline alongside their physical work. Where the holes are now is in the more intimate scenes - the two and three-handed bits of the play where the emotional depths need to be found. In previous devising processes I've found these the easiest part - but this time it feels harder, perhaps because I've shifted the emphasis. Maybe I'm lucky that Monday is the day we've allocated to the final rigging and focusing of light, and so it's the one day that I won't be working on the stage. Being in a smaller space will force me to concentrate on the more internal aspects of the play.
We've had Denise and Micha with us all week, so the emphasis has been very much on the larger scenes with movement sequences. I feel most of these are working well now, and I've been able to develop aspects of the storyline alongside their physical work. Where the holes are now is in the more intimate scenes - the two and three-handed bits of the play where the emotional depths need to be found. In previous devising processes I've found these the easiest part - but this time it feels harder, perhaps because I've shifted the emphasis. Maybe I'm lucky that Monday is the day we've allocated to the final rigging and focusing of light, and so it's the one day that I won't be working on the stage. Being in a smaller space will force me to concentrate on the more internal aspects of the play.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
More devising
The process is moving forward in very exciting ways. I wish I could blog this on a daily basis, as I did in Shanghai, but the journey to work is about an hour and a half each way, and I can't get internet access in the lunch break. It's not like living over the job as we did in China!
Denise and Micha have joined us this week, and are working their usual magic, drawing beautiful and emotive movement out of us all. Their tsunami piece is extraordinary. At the same time, lots of strands which hadn't seemed to mesh before appear to be coming together. I'd been really worried about one scene, and kept putting it off - but today a very simple idea, born out of a previous scene, gave us the key. That key, oddly enough, was to use Yueju. I'd thought it had disappeared from this show - lovely to see it return as the solution here.
Denise and Micha have joined us this week, and are working their usual magic, drawing beautiful and emotive movement out of us all. Their tsunami piece is extraordinary. At the same time, lots of strands which hadn't seemed to mesh before appear to be coming together. I'd been really worried about one scene, and kept putting it off - but today a very simple idea, born out of a previous scene, gave us the key. That key, oddly enough, was to use Yueju. I'd thought it had disappeared from this show - lovely to see it return as the solution here.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Publishing and devising
Nice news for the publishing side of the company: there's a brilliant review of Theatre and Slavery in the new issue of The Drama Review. It's by Jane Plastow, the Professor of African Theatre at Leeds, so it should carry lots of weight in academic circles. It's also very nice that she points out it isn't a solely academic publication.
Devising processes continue. It's a big, complex business, but starting to shape very well. I'm enjoying the combination of Method-ish psychological character exploration with wild theatricality. By playing with form, naturalism becomes only one of the theatrical modes employed. There was a hiccough on Monday, with Nancy pointing out that there didn't seem to be much point her character being in the play as things stood. She was absolutely right. As so often in this sort of process, the blip led to a very creative new idea, which solves at least two plot-lines much more satisfactorily than before. Process, process....
Devising processes continue. It's a big, complex business, but starting to shape very well. I'm enjoying the combination of Method-ish psychological character exploration with wild theatricality. By playing with form, naturalism becomes only one of the theatrical modes employed. There was a hiccough on Monday, with Nancy pointing out that there didn't seem to be much point her character being in the play as things stood. She was absolutely right. As so often in this sort of process, the blip led to a very creative new idea, which solves at least two plot-lines much more satisfactorily than before. Process, process....
Sunday, August 16, 2009
A week in workshops
We're back in workshop for the Trilogy, this time in London. I spent last weekend dashing backwards and forwards to Heathrow, picking up Chinese and Swedish actors, while Penny picked up Radhakrishna. They are all being accommodated in student rooms at Goldsmiths, which, while not exactly five-star, has the distinct advantage of being on-campus for our venue: we're working in the University theatre while the students are on holiday. This is a huge advantage, since we can have the set from the beginning (complete with a new, perfectly reflective and decidedly durable floor), and can experiment with light and projection, rather than simply imagining these additions to the rehearsals and hoping they will work at a last-minute tech. What's more, this period isn't about final preparation for a paying audience (that doesn't happen till February), so we also have the chance to take mad risks in the knowledge that we can revert to safer practice later on. I'm planning to try something particularly mad tomorrow...
Many of the foundations for this third play were laid in Shanghai, but the work Brian and I have been doing since then has re-moulded much of it. As a result, we're creating lots of new scenes, and re-working much of what we had before, with totally different sub-texts and meanings. In many cases, the scenes have different characters in them, while retaining the same theatrical structure. It's all very extraordinary. Brian came in on Tuesday, and worked with us on some of the scenes which require a more textual approach, and he's now sent those through. I've not worked in a way which combines devising and a writer before - but I think it's the way forward for us: it's certainly working at the moment.
The new additions to the company, Lianne and Spatica, are both very creative and very exciting. I'm trying to bear in mind that they don't have the history with the project that everybody else has - but at times they make it hard to think that! The Chinese actors are wonderful - Qi with his piercing intelligence, Hui with her earnest grace, and Jue with the best comic timing since Chaplin.
Many of the foundations for this third play were laid in Shanghai, but the work Brian and I have been doing since then has re-moulded much of it. As a result, we're creating lots of new scenes, and re-working much of what we had before, with totally different sub-texts and meanings. In many cases, the scenes have different characters in them, while retaining the same theatrical structure. It's all very extraordinary. Brian came in on Tuesday, and worked with us on some of the scenes which require a more textual approach, and he's now sent those through. I've not worked in a way which combines devising and a writer before - but I think it's the way forward for us: it's certainly working at the moment.
The new additions to the company, Lianne and Spatica, are both very creative and very exciting. I'm trying to bear in mind that they don't have the history with the project that everybody else has - but at times they make it hard to think that! The Chinese actors are wonderful - Qi with his piercing intelligence, Hui with her earnest grace, and Jue with the best comic timing since Chaplin.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Back in workshop
We've gathered the Trilogy cast together again for the next round of workshopping on Re-Orientations. Many reunions of old friends from Shanghai, plus one or two new faces. Mahesh's friend Spatica has joined us from India, and Lianne Tucker has taken over as Alex and Linda. There's also the new stage management team, and even an American intern called Mica. Lots of people in the room.
I always find it difficult to start something. Maybe a re-start is even harder. I spent the morning playing devising games with the cast - as much as anything to get people in touch with their creativity, and with one another, after six months' gap. In the afternoon I talked them through the new ideas for the structure. It took quite a bit of time, so that at one point Jue asked how long I thought the play would be (!), but there seemed to be a general sense that things were moving forward very positively.
Jet-lag hit the Chinese actors from about mid-afternoon, so I sent them home and worked in some detail with Lianne, Spatica, Sarah and Radhakrishna on the tsunami and the background to the Indian story. Some very interesting possibilities starting to show. Brian's coming in tomorrow - we'll check out some possible approaches to key scenes which I'm hoping he may script. Really exciting to be mixing the written with the improvised like this.
I always find it difficult to start something. Maybe a re-start is even harder. I spent the morning playing devising games with the cast - as much as anything to get people in touch with their creativity, and with one another, after six months' gap. In the afternoon I talked them through the new ideas for the structure. It took quite a bit of time, so that at one point Jue asked how long I thought the play would be (!), but there seemed to be a general sense that things were moving forward very positively.
Jet-lag hit the Chinese actors from about mid-afternoon, so I sent them home and worked in some detail with Lianne, Spatica, Sarah and Radhakrishna on the tsunami and the background to the Indian story. Some very interesting possibilities starting to show. Brian's coming in tomorrow - we'll check out some possible approaches to key scenes which I'm hoping he may script. Really exciting to be mixing the written with the improvised like this.
Friday, August 07, 2009
The Observer
I saw The Observer at the National the other night. Two reasons for going: firstly that it's a new play about Africa, which is always of interest; and second that Joy Richardson (who played Olivia when our Twelfth Night went to Zimbabwe) is in it. Joy plays the mother of a young man who's been beaten up during a supposedly "free" election, for ferrying people to the polling station on his motorbike. The underlying point is that the people in the rural areas of this fictional African country (coyly un-named, but reminiscent of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nigeria and even hinting at Ghana) are more likely to vote for "the leader of the opposition", and so become targets for the bullying tactics of "the President". What's interesting in the play is that the "democratic" opposition is the preferred candidate of the western powers in terms of trade, getting their hands on resources etc., and the altruistic heroine finds herself becoming their unconscious agent as she endeavours to get voters to register. The fact that her encouragement is concentrated in the rural areas also compromises the apparent objectivity of the international observer. It's intelligent, and at times very powerful - but I found it a bit Shavian, with the characters existing primarily to voice particular viewpoints, and the African voice being denied. Joy's big scene is wonderfully acted (of course), but it's almost entirely in Igbo, and so relies for its effect on her emotional performance, rather than on the articulation of viewpoint. The figure of the translator is, symbolically enough, the only African character who is explored in any depth, and his role as translator seems so specific that he only really exists to explain. It's difficult territory, of course. But it did make me feel that we're right to be looking to create our work through many different voices, rather than looking at ourselves looking at "the Other". There's a reason this play is called The Observer.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Who is that bloodied man?
Nisha and I went to see the Polish open-air Macbeth, which is being performed beside the Thames at the National's new Square 2. It's presented by Teatr Biuno Podrozy, who specialise in very visual, physical, outdoor work. I remember seeing them years ago, doing Carmen Funebre at the City of London Festival - and being totally thrilled by it. The Macbeth is not quite the stunning experience that was, but it's still very exciting. You have, as far as possible, to forget about Shakespeare's play - except in terms of a synopsis which tells you the story (because the performance doesn't). There are very few lines at all (and some of them aren't from the play anyway), but there is a powerful visual poetry and a language of ritual and brutality which works wonderfully on its own level, and which communicates in a large open-air space in ways which text-based theatre finds very challenging. I kept comparing it to the difficulties I faced last year at Lake Tahoe, trying to get the text of the Dream to resonate out of doors. I remember it all got much easier once it was dark: this performance of Macbeth has the advantage of only being an hour long, and so starts at 9.30, after the sun's gone down. And because it's about roughness rather than beauty, it copes very well with the unpredictability of the open-air show: at one point a passing hooligan threw a beer can into the space - and it seemed like part of the show. There's lots of fire - thrillingly used - motorbikes and gunshots, and blaring music. I remember years ago, when I tackled the play at university, and was pitching it to the college societies for financial backing, explaining the "leather jackets and jackboots" approach, the beer kegs and the cigarettes. "Macbeth on motorbikes?" somebody sneered. Well - here you can see it literally! And very exciting it is too.
Friday, July 24, 2009
The Wall in the Sahara
Last night there was a showing of work-in-progress by our old friend and colleague Giles Foreman, who played James in the first run of Double Tongue. Giles now runs Caravanserai Productions, which is an acting studio and production company; and includes Candis Nergaard, who is also a member of the Romany Company, and will be in O Patrin in the autumn. Caravanserai has teamed up with Sandblast to work on the refugee crisis in the Western Sahara - a story which is hardly ever covered in the press and is all the more important for that.
When Spain de-colonised the Western Sahara, Morocco illegally occupied the territory, which is (surprise) very rich in mineral deposits. That was as long ago as 1975. The occupation has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council - but still it goes on. And the Saharawi people, who are denied the right to self-determination, are largely banished behind a huge wall, living in refugee camps in Algeria. Danielle Smith, who runs Sandblast, has been lobbying for them for 18 years: so she has a battle on her hands. She and Giles are trying to raise awareness through performance.
The show is still developing, but has potential to be very powerful. It's based around interviews with Saharawi refugees, but manages to avoid the traps of the "verbatim", and has a theatricality about it. Given that I'd just come from a dramaturgy session with Brian, I was thinking about structures and conflicts - and felt this was where the play needed to grow. The problem with directly political work is that it can be a bit short on moral complexity. If we see and hear a lot about brutality, we will all agree that it's wrong - so where is the drama? Maybe the play should not be "There is a refugee crisis", not even "We're not helping to solve the refugee crisis" but "Why are we not doing anything about this refugee crisis?" That's something we can and should usefully be asking a British audience.
When Spain de-colonised the Western Sahara, Morocco illegally occupied the territory, which is (surprise) very rich in mineral deposits. That was as long ago as 1975. The occupation has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council - but still it goes on. And the Saharawi people, who are denied the right to self-determination, are largely banished behind a huge wall, living in refugee camps in Algeria. Danielle Smith, who runs Sandblast, has been lobbying for them for 18 years: so she has a battle on her hands. She and Giles are trying to raise awareness through performance.
The show is still developing, but has potential to be very powerful. It's based around interviews with Saharawi refugees, but manages to avoid the traps of the "verbatim", and has a theatricality about it. Given that I'd just come from a dramaturgy session with Brian, I was thinking about structures and conflicts - and felt this was where the play needed to grow. The problem with directly political work is that it can be a bit short on moral complexity. If we see and hear a lot about brutality, we will all agree that it's wrong - so where is the drama? Maybe the play should not be "There is a refugee crisis", not even "We're not helping to solve the refugee crisis" but "Why are we not doing anything about this refugee crisis?" That's something we can and should usefully be asking a British audience.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
