San Francisco

I flew out to San Francisco yesterday. Nothing to do with Border Crossings - though as so often with freelance work there are lots of possibilities in the trip - but to re-work Xerxes again. It's essentially the same show I did in Houston last year, with very few cast changes, so in theory it should be quite an easy job. In theory. I spent the morning watching the video of the Houston production and having a rush of "Oh - is that what we did? How are we going to get something that complex back in a very short time?" The system here is very odd: we don't actually rehearse till October, but we're doing much of the technical work now, a long way ahead of rehearsal proper. I just hope it doesn't mean we can't change any staging because of where the lights are.... luckily this is quite a bright show, so we ought to be OK!

The city is very different from other parts of America. I had a lousy introduction to it last night when I stumbled jet-lagged into the Tenderloin district, and found myself surrounded by homeless people pushing shopping trolleys containing all their worldly goods, and drug addicts in incoherent rages. It was deeply depressing. Today I discovered that this is not typical, and that San Francisco is rather an attractive place! I picked a museum at random, and went to the Museum of the African Diaspora. I'm not sure it's a museum in the conventional sense - there are no artifacts to speak of - it's more of an historical centre, with displays exploring slavery, the Haitian revolt, Mandela, African music and food, plus an archive where people can type in their own family histories. There's also a wonderful temporary exhibition of Siddi quilt-making. The Siddi are people of African ancestry living in India as a result of the Indian Ocean slave trade and similar - I knew a bit about them already because Rustom talks about his work with the Siddi of Karnathaka in our Theatre and Slavery book. I'd not seen pictures before, though, and I'd certainly not seen the lovely vibrant quilts which the women make. The exhibition is linked to an initiative to help them make some money for the community out of this craft. Here's the link:
http://www.henrydrewal.com/sales.html

The Tree of Life

I went to see The Tree of Life last night. It was, I admit, with a degree of trepidation. For one thing, some aspects of the film (which I'm sure must be at least partly autobiographical by Terrence Malick) seemed a little close to my own life (actually, as things turned out, that wasn't disturbing at all). For another thing, the film had been met with derision, laughter and catcalls at Cannes, and with silent awe in other less jaded spaces. Neither boded too well, but - the film just sounded interesting.... and that matters. Arouse and hold intelligent interest. That's our business.

Much of the controversy concerns the film's Christian content. And it is Christian, no doubt about it. Christianity has had a bit of a bad press recently, thanks to the lunatics on the American Evangelical right and the bigots who've been elected at the last two Papal elections - but there is actually still a profound and important theologically capable and intellectually credible element in Christianity, of which the current Archbishop of Canterbury is a part. It's the faith in which I grew up, and to which I remain attracted, even loyal. So to see it explored in a film which doesn't reduce morality to simple binaries is a great pleasure.

What's more, Malick's film brings a spiritual awareness to contemporary living in surprising, unsettling ways. The central character, looking back from a middle-aged perspective on his childhood, does not overcome the past through time and contemplation, but rather becomes all the more acutely aware of its immediacy, the weight it places upon him, as he contrasts his own insignificance with the scale of the cosmos and the workings of history. Context on the grandest scale meets psychological realism. It's very easy for us to avoid the spiritual in our contemporary lives, but if we do so in art then we are actually denying what validates it. That's why I like to work with non-western traditions, where the spiritual is still explicit in performance, and with music, which simply wouldn't exist without the spiritual dimension. And bravo to Terrence Malick for attempting such a challenge in the most westernised and realism-bound medium of them all.

Two days in Germany

Last Friday and Saturday saw me in Saarbrücken. I was last there in 2004 (I think) at a conference organised by Prof. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, about the Indian diaspora. I spoke then about Toufann - and she'd asked me back to talk some more about this play, its relationship to The Tempest, and its political and cultural context in Mauritius.

It was quite an intense time - talking for nearly three hours on Friday afternoon, then screening a video interview I did with Dev Virahsawmy in the evening (with Q&A), and a long seminar on the Saturday. Still - it was a lot of fun and great to be surrounded by people who really want to know all about this work. There was an unexpected bonus in that I turned out to be a double-act with Farrukh Dhondy - a very interesting writer. Farrukh had been working with the MA students on possible creative, post-colonial responses to The Tempest - and he also talked very entertainingly about CLR James (who lived in his house for four years) and VS Naipaul. What they said about one another is not printable....

I get home to discover Farrukh has emailed me a play. Oddly, it's about the myth of Karna - a subject we had wondered about before. It's already been very well received in India....

Back to Toufann

I've been re-visiting Toufann - the Mauritian play we did as long ago as 1999 - because I've been asked to talk about it and lead a workshop in Saarbrücken on Friday. It's been strange but refreshing to go back all that time and look at the way we were working then - and at the politics we were engaged in. It's still about interculturalism and post-colonialism: but the ground has definitely shifted.

Very interesting to stumble across some work by Francoise Lionnet, the Mauritian scholar now working at UCLA, to whom Toufann is dedicated (along with Shakespeare). In her book Minor Transnationalism, she looks at the play, and indeed at our production. I find it a bit odd that she analyses the effects of that production, and the meaning generated by presenting the play in a London context, seeing as she wasn't actually there..... I also think it's a bit disingenuous of her to say that I'm wrong to regard the use of the Hindi word "toufann" to convey "storm" as harking back to an Indian past, on the grounds that Dev is from the Tamil community, not the Hindu, and that he's interested in present and future, not past. It wasn't Dev I was talking about - it was his central character Prospero, who quite clearly names his tempest "toufann", even though it's not a common Creole word (or wasn't in 1991 when the play was written), and who obviously IS interested in the past. The play critiques Prospero and his standpoint, and that's where Dev's radicalism comes out.

Where she does say something very interesting, however, is in relation to the Creole phrase "tou fann", which I had not heard being linked to the title before, but clearly is. "Tou" means "all", and "fann" means "wilts" or "decays". So the title might mean not only "tempest" but also "Things Fall Apart" - evoking Yeats and Achebe to engage in a post-colonial battle alongside Shakespeare. And (though this is not in Lionnet) the Labour Party of Iran, which is also known as "toufan".

Things fall apart. There is a storm.

Talking Circle

Origins closed on Saturday. It was a beautiful event, led by Bruce Sinclair, from Canada - who has been present throughout the Festival and clearly enjoying himself! We began with a smudging ceremony - burning sage and bathing in its smoke - which we had to do out in the car park because of the smoke alarms. Probably the first ever smudging ceremony to happen in a car park in Bethnal Green, I would think. As Bruce took the smoke around the circle, Robert Greygrass sang a song - and there were responses in Maori and Aboriginal prayers too.

Then there was the talking circle. It's an incredibly simple idea, which is followed in the tribal councils of North America, and which has a lot to teach us about real democracy. You all sit in a circle, and pass around the talking stick - or eagle feather. Whoever is holding the stick speaks. You can say as much or as little as you want - or just pass it on - and whoever is speaking is not interrupted but is listened to with respect. It's definitely the best approach to "Evaluation" I've ever experienced. It's totally equal, it's very open, and it lets the emotional into the public space.

I won't tell you what was said. Just that it was very moving, and that this Festival has clearly touched people far more deeply than I ever dared to imagine.

Responses to Robert

I thought I should post some of the audience responses to Walking on Turtle Island, because they have been so positive, and it really is a very important piece of work. So - here we go:

"Turtle Island was wonderful. Simple, deft, finely-tuned storytelling, told by a storyteller with a twinkle in one eye and a tear in the other. Please extend my congratulations and gratitude to Robert Greygrass and thanks to the Border Crossings team for making it happen."

"Easily the best one-man show I have ever seen. The subtlety and deftness of the performance is mesmerising and moving."

"Thought it was really fantastic -really thoughtful, interesting and made me think about things not much discussed here. Also brilliantly performed."

"Excellent - amazing - enjoyable and I learned a lot."

One more performance tonight.

Origins Special Offers

Origins Special Offers

The Great Robert Greygrass

Last night, Robert Greygrass's production Walking on Turtle Island opened as part of our Origins Festival at the Rich Mix. It's an incredible piece of work: Variety wasn't wrong to call it "a tour de force" of acting. In less than two hours, Robert embodies no fewer than 21 characters, suggesting the distinctions in subtle ways, but absolutely making you believe in an aging Native woman, a little girl, a drunk mixed-race man in a cell, a young boy whose dog dies, his grandfather... and binding them all together a spirit figure, who seems in many ways to be remarkably similar to Robert himself. Why? Well, both are shape-changers. The spirit, like Robert, passes into the bodies of all these people through several centuries. It's a beautiful metaphor to link the acting to its meaning, and to suggest the cultural resonance which underlies the entire performance.

This is theatre which gives an alternative history - the native view of what has happened on Turtle Island (North America) from the European invasion to the present day. There are scenes which deal with the first contact, scenes around transplantation, scenes about the reservations, scenes set around contemporary alcohol abuse and custody. So yes, it's a human rights show. But it's so far from being "worthy" - because the whole performance is suffused with Robert's characteristic native wit and humour. In spite of the subject matter, his energy and sheer talent makes it feel light and buoyant - the audience is constantly surprised, excited and thrilled by the virtuosity and human generosity of the whole thing.

Two more performances tonight and tomorrow. Don't miss it.

Festival and Politics

An amazing thing happened at Music in the Yard on Monday. The Lani Singers, our West Papuan performers, were playing on the open air stage at the Guildhall Yard in the City of London. On the other side of the Yard, separated from us by crash barriers, a man was putting out a red carpet. Then the limos swept in, and out got hoards of black-tied bankers and women in cocktail dresses. It was clearly a very posh banquet indeed. Meanwhile, Benny Wenda was speaking and singing about the illegal occupation of his country, and the way in which the Indonesian colonisation is upheld by US foreign policy, as a result of their commercial interests. And then the guest of honour showed up - Condoleeza Rice herself, fresh from unveiling a statue of Reagan.

You couldn't have scripted it better.

The First Week

I'd meant to blog daily through the Origins Festival. Fat chance. It's been the craziest, most exciting week for a very long time. Perhaps the craziest week in the company's entire history. No - that was Mexico in 2001... but we're close.

Noel Tovey's Little Black Bastard was the first week's theatre show, and it's got great reviews and responses across the web. Noel flies back to Australia this evening - hopefully with a sense of the job being really well done! He's shared his extraordinary life story with people hanging on every word.

The film festival kicked off on Saturday with a great screening of Our Generation, followed by discussions with Julian Burger and John Packer from the Human Rights Centre at Essex University. Tonight we move on to Inuit films, having taken in the Sahara along the way!

The main theme of the weekend has been music, with the Origins Concert on Saturday night and the Family Day on Hampstead Heath yesterday. The Heath event began with a Maori powhiri, or welcoming ceremony, led by Ngati Ranana, to welcome the First Nations people to London in an appropriate way. It was wonderful to do this in the very week that Sydney acknowledged the colonisation of Australia to have been an invasion. Somehow it felt as if we were a part of a real spirit of truth and reconciliation - and the amazing atmosphere at both events seemed to confirm that.

We've also been able to bring young people into the festival spirit in other ways - our education project had a really big moment on Friday when we had hundreds of schoolchildren parading through the City with model wakas, and dancing the haka on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. Wild.

Origins begins

The Festival opened on Tuesday with an incredible night at Rich Mix. Traditional blessings from Gloria Alcozer and Toi Maori (even though the latter had only just got off their 22 hour flight!), amazing Polynesian food from Joylene Fenikowski, a great series of talks and films - all punctuated with the haunting music of Kelvin Mockingbird.

A few responses: "a superb evening. I thought it was really beautifully put together, the format was really successful, delicious food, a lovely warm atmosphere and inspiring stuff to get everyone raring to go for the next two weeks!"

"I just wanted to drop a line this morning to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the evening last night at the opening of your festival and it made me realise to what extent this festival is beautiful. I am really impressed at all the First Nations that you have been able to gather and their professionalism. Their conversations were really interesting!"

"Great spirit last night."

And it was all filmed for BBC2!

Wednesday saw the start of Marie Clements' workshop, which is by all accounts totally amazing, and the Origins Lecture at Gresham College, which was packed out, and really got the debate going.

Tonight we open Noel Tovey's Little Black Bastard at Rich Mix. Can't wait!!

One more day to Origins!

The Festival starts tomorrow, and there's a lot of frantic activity around the company. In fact, I'm the only person left in the office, putting the final touches to the Lecture for Wednesday night, and thinking through how to introduce everybody tomorrow. Our opening event is intended to be a sort of taster menu for the Festival as a whole, so there will be bits of music, short films and a series of conversations - plus the traditional blessings. It's also the private view of Rosanna's exhibition, and it's going to be televised by Wall-to-Wall - so it's quite a night.

Noel Tovey arrived a week ago: when you're in your 70s it takes a bit longer to get through the jet-lag. Otherwise people have been pouring in over the last couple of days, from the States, Canada, New Zealand, the Pacific. I'm especially excited to see Kelvin Mockingbird (pictured) again - after the incredible experience of working with him at Tahoe in 2008, and finally to meet one of the heroines of the indigenous stage, Marie Clements (pictured).

The publicity is really building too - New Internationalist have posted a piece I wrote, and the Twittersphere is buzzing.... there was a plug in the Guardian Guide, and Chuquai and I did Inspirit on Radio London on Sunday! (If you want to listen, we're 2 hours 40 into the programme)!

See you at Rich Mix during the next couple of weeks.....

Origins is coming next week!

Lance, Shelagh and I were at a reception at New Zealand House last night. It brought home the fact that Origins is coming along rather soon!

Rosanna Raymond, who will be our commissioned visual artist for Rich Mix, was there, as was Jo Walsh from October Gallery, where the Current exhibition opens tomorrow. There were people from our partners at City of London Festival, and a performance by the London Maori, Ngati Ranana.

The Maori performance sat strangely in the penthouse of the High Commission. I was chatting to some of the artists afterwards, and they said that the energy of kapa-haka depends very much on a connection with the earth. And there we were on the 17th floor, staring out over serious London greyness. Hopefully by July 3rd the weather will be glorious and we can all enjoy Maori ceremony and performance in the open air on Hampstead Heath!

I met Noel Tovey at the airport on Sunday morning. What a remarkable man. He lived in London for 30 years, not really acknowledging his Aboriginality, but slowly came to a realisation of the importance of his identity, which took him back to Australia, back to his own people, and into a new life of arts for social good, including scholarships for young Aboriginal performers and work with Aboriginal young offenders. His production of Midsummer Night's Dream for the Dreaming Festival is legendary. It's a great privilege to collaborate with him as he returns to London to tell his life-story. He tells me that it was something he had to do. Part of a homecoming process that works in both directions.

Amnesty at 50

It was my birthday on Saturday - thanks to everybody who left messages on Facebook! It was also an important birthday for Amnesty International - and I've been reading the special issue of their magazine.

It's very striking just how much of this magazine deals with theatre. There's a discussion of a play which was made from an exchange of letters between activists and a political prisoner. There's an interview with Daves Guzha, who I met in Zimbabwe as long ago as 1998, and who is still using performance to work against Mugabe. There's a piece on the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. And there's a very strong piece on Henning Mankel and his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique.

Mankel talks about the importance of theatre in illiterate communities - he's very clear that literacy is a way to improve health conditions in a very direct way. And he says something else which could almost be a description of our work at Border Crossings:

"Living theatre is one of the few meeting points in the world where all the false borders, like language and race, come down. Actors, white or brown or yellow, even if they don't speak the same language, can start working together and create art immediately."

Brussels day 2

Today we moved from the threadbare-friendly surroundings of La Maison des Cultures and into the European Commission's Albert Borschette conference centre, complete with numerous translators in booths relaying our every word. In this more formal space, we have the chance to dialogue with people from the Commission itself - Vladimir Sucha, who is the Director of Culture and Media, and Giulia Amaducci, who works in immigration and integration. She's Italian, and speaks English at Italian speed and in Italian tunes, which made me wish she could be translated into English.

Vladimir had some very heartening things to say. In particular, he talked about some theatre he had seen in his native Slovakia, which engaged with the Roma community, and with the huge local prejudice against them. "Twenty minutes of theatre", he said, "has a life-long impact. This is the way to change perceptions profoundly and to involve people actively in intercultural dialogue." I wrote it down so that I can quote it everywhere!

I was also very impressed by a man called Ahmed Ahkim, who runs an organisation for Roma and traveller people in Belgium. Ahmed talked about the importance of imagination in overcoming prejudice: when people look at a traveller, they imagine them to be something. We need engineers of the imagination to suggest other possibilities. "In order to establish cultural dialogue you have to dream - and artists are the professional dreamers." I wrote this one down because it's true.

In Brussels

I'm in the default EU capital for the annual gathering of the Platform for Intercultural Europe (which really does abbreviate to pie...). It's a two day event this year, so one overnight stay is unavoidable, though I still managed to make yesterday a very long one, getting up at 4 to catch the Eurostar and be here for 9.30 (and don't forget Belgium is an hour ahead!).

I sang for my supper in the morning, reporting back to the Platform on the Practice Exchange we hosted late last year. The report on the website is so exhaustive that I didn't have to go through everything that happened, but was able instead to talk about some of the key issues which emerged. The crucial one, which led to lots of discussion yesterday, was whether we could find a common language between people working in cross-cultural dialogue (be that in the arts, education or advocacy) and the politicians who increasingly conceived of "value" not in moral or cultural terms, but solely as something quantifiable and monetary.

The afternoon session was brilliantly done, with a series of discussions at tables around projects which members were developing in their own countries. I talked to an Italian trade unionist about his work to help Somali refugees into the labour market, a Jewish woman from Belgium about work with religious groups on gender and sexual orientation, and a woman from Cyprus who was doing cross-cultural theatre work in primary schools. There's clearly huge potential for future collaborations in this network.

The footprints of creation

The workshop over, I had a weekend in Botswana with David and Adala, before a "planning for the future" meeting on Monday morning, and the long flight home. Currently blogging in Johannesburg airport, which is not such a terrible place as airports go, but hardly the most inspiring place to be for five hours. They charge colossal sums for internet access, so I'm determined to use every minute I paid for!

On Saturday night, we were back at Maitisong, where the workshop took place. This time we were in the audience for a Punjabi community event. I had no idea there could be so many Sikhs in Gabarone. All ages too - from babies to grandmothers. They had brought over a performance group from India (via South Africa), who were very good. The first half of the show involved martial arts - the highlight being the smashing of a coconut on a man's head by a blindfolded performer armed with a club. "Don't try this at home", they told us. The second half was bangra, with lots of noise and bling - and this was the part of the show which led to the spontaneous audience participation. Young men whooped and leapt on one side of the stage, and little girls on the other. As the local women started to dance, the little girls, who seemed to have learnt the moves while their mummies practiced, invaded the stage, only to be shooed away by an irate professional. It was all totally anarchic and wonderfully affirmative of community. We even got curry included in the ticket price.

Sunday morning saw a tour of the touristy sites in the area of Gabarone. Most exciting of these was probably the ancient rock art at Matsieng - where there are footprints which the Tswana say are those of the first man. Given that humanity did indeed originate not far from here, and that this is a very beautiful place, I was happy to credit it as the Garden of Eden.

I've really valued David's friendship during my time in Botswana. It's rare to find somebody you "click" with quite so instantly, and who has such a wealth of life experience and theatre knowledge that he is so willing to share. His stories of life in Malawi during the last days of the dictatorship are at once thrilling and terrifying.

Before the airport this morning, we sit down with Jane and talk about what we can do to develop links further. I'd be very excited to work in Botswana again, of course - and I think we can be of use to them in terms of developing the infrastructure for a company that Jane is so keen to create. There are certainly lots of possibilities in these new links!

Praise Singing

We had our sharing session for the workshop this morning. David, and Jane from the Botswana Society for the Arts, pulled in a reasonable crowd of interested people, with the actors' friends and families (including one rather embarassed mother) making up the rest of the audience. I had been feeling a bit nervous about this event - it's always a bit strange to show work which isn't made with the purpose of performance - but in fact the audience was incredibly responsive. We showed a number of the movement-based exercises we'd been working on, including a lovely performance of posed tableaux, and some of the mini-plays that had been made in response to various creative stimuli. As when they were first formed, I was surprised and delighted by the specifically Botswanan feel of these - the sense that we'd managed to tap into the psyche of the place. The cumulative effect reminded me a bit of Third World Bunfight - the rapid shifts between the spiritual, the farcical, the political and the personal is very exciting in this environment. As so often at the end of a workshop, I was left wanting to carry on, and to see whether this work might become a piece of theatre. David, Jane and I are having a meeting on Monday morning to see what we can plan... who knows? The British Council people, who paid for my flight here, came in during the week, and the director of the Alliance Francaise was here this morning, and seemed to enjoy herself.

At the end of the showing, Jane got me to present certificates in a slightly headmaster-ish way - they looked nice with lots of logos on them and everybody seemed happy. One of the actors, Emmanuel, made a speech about how they could go on to develop what they had learnt. And then came the moving moment. Kagosi, who seems to be one of the shyer members of the group, began to show his real talent as a Praise Singer, improvising in Setwana as the others ululated and danced around him. In spite of not understanding a word of it, I realised that this was a very rare and special honour - that I was being praised by a Praise Singer. They certainly know how to make you feel wanted here. Later, David told me the poem included jokes about Kagosi's limited English, and his desire to be cast in a production in London (there was lots of laughter from the other actors and the audience).

Beautiful and humbling. Thank you fabulous artists.

More from Gabarone

Another fantastic day in the workshop. The morning was spent on Lecoq's Seven Levels of Tension, which is always a great way to energise inexperienced actors and move them towards spontaneous and original work. That led on to an exercise called "walking into the wrong room", which is self-explanatory and very funny.

In the afternoon, we made use of pieces of clothing that I'd asked the actors to bring in - each had an item with a particular emotional meaning for them. The exercise was deceptively simple - they just had to find a way of presenting that piece of clothing to the whole group. It was truly extraordinary. One young man beat the drum while wearing feathers on his head and a leopard-patterned vest. Another put on shorts, took off his shirt and became a Praise Singer. A mixed-race woman acted her journeys between Africa and Europe, and her decision to buy a traditional German dress so as to embrace that part of her identity. It was all intensely moving, deeply honest, almost shocking in the complexity of its identity politics.

Long talk with David about theatre for development. He's been involved in the form since the 70s, and knows everybody. He's also full of amazing stories about work with Zapu PF during the guerilla war, workshops in Bangladesh which landlords tried to sabotage, theatre workers being imprisoned in or deported from Malawi. We discuss the fact that theatre for development seems to have lost its radical edge these days, has become a little "worthy", and very westernised. In part, he blames the shifting agendas of funders, and in part the more rigorous accounting procedures they are following. In the old days, you used to be able to sneak in revolution under the counter.

Wonderful Batswana

The third day of the workshop has been the strongest so far - there's a real sense of growth in the room, as the artists come to trust one another and me. It's a very interesting bunch - three of David's students from the Performing Arts course at University of Botswana, and ten young actors (not students) from Botswana Society for the Arts. The latter include a fascinating young woman called Mora, whose father was German and whose Matswana mother teaches at the university. She is also a painter, musician and most other things.... as so often, the polymath abilities of people from non-Western cultures stagger me. There's also a young man called Tommy with a real flair for comedy, people who can sing and dance.... and act.

But the really fascinating thing is the way in which the work is starting to reflect more and more on the internal drama of being young Batswana today. Scene after scene deals with real conflicts between the sense of standing in an ancient culture, and the power of modernity. Nor is this a simple old v new battle - sometimes the older generation stands accused of selling out or cashing in. It's fascinating that these profound dramas are emerging with very little language - most of the work is happening through movement and song. There's a great deal of fluidity between the spirit world and the "real" - something which I love, and which seems very current here.

And the sun is shining too.

Botswana workshop

Typing this in a very slow internet cafe in Gabarone, so there won't be a full report on the last two days! I've been in a workshop, hosted jointly by University of Botswana and Botswana Society for the Arts. I'm working with a group of young performers, most of whom have very limited experience (there is no professional theatre in the country), but all of whom have energy and enthusiasm in buckets. As often in Africa, the plus side of the process is music and dance. Rhythm games which would take ages anywhere else in the world simply materialise here. You don't have to ask for songs or dances - the moment they are on stage, that is what they do.

On the other hand, there's not much awareness of theatre language, and so anything spoken requires a lot of work. It's interesting to see how colloquial and poetic registers don't seem different to them. This may be a language issue - but I'm deliberately working as much as possible with African texts. They are certainly open to direction, and don't have any inhibitions whatsoever. We saw some sexually explicit material within minutes of starting, and with no prompting in that direction.

I don't know if we'll have any great art to show at the end of the week, but I do know that both they and I will have learnt a huge amount.

More to follow when the typing is easier!

Arrival in Botswana

I'm typing this in Prof. David Kerr's office at the University of Botswana. I arrived here yesterday, via Jo'berg, to run a workshop for a mixed group of David's students and the Botswana Society for the Arts. It's an initial dipping of toes in Botswanan waters - and I'm feeling very excited about it!

David is an extraordinary man: an academic, a director and an activist, who has devoted his life to working in Southern Africa. He's spent two long periods in Malawi, where he met Kate Stafford, and she introduced us when he visited London a while ago. Since then he's been on our mailing list, and when he saw the level of intercultural engagement we were making with Re-Orientations, along came an invitation to come here and see what could be done. Thanks to the British Council for the funding!

David and his Zambian wife Adela met me at the airport, and took me straight to an arts and crafts centre called Batswanacrafts, where there was a schools competition going on in traditional dance. There's less drumming here than in many other parts of Africa - the rhythms come from clapping and rattles on the feet. It's very mesmerising, all the same. David tells me about a time he was working on a scene about traditional healing with a student group, and one student really did go into the trance state that the rhythms are designed to induce. It reminds me of Brett's work with Third World Bunfight - the emphasis on altered states of consciousness.

Much of the theatre which is done here is issue-based, particularly TfD work and HIV /AIDS awareness (with a 25% infection rate, that's no big surprise). I read a couple of the devised pieces David has made with his students - one of which is in the African Theatre volume on Youth, and the other is a recent piece about homophobia, called Straight and Narrow. It's not illegal to be gay here, but homosexual acts are... which must be pretty tricky. David says that even five years ago, it would have been impossible to do this play, but that now it seemed easy: even the straight actors were willing to play gay characters. On the other hand, there are negative aspects to this new distance which younger Batswana are acquiring from tradition - they don't, for example, know the traditional songs, there's a cultural limbo. All of which could make for a fascinating workshop. And I start tomorrow....

The Search for the Throat Singers

We've known for some time that we wanted the Inuit presence to be a strong one in this year's Origins Festival. We've programmed two films from Nunavik, and Simon Lynge, from Greenland, will be playing at the concert - but we also wanted a real sense of the traditional culture. Which really meant drum dance and throat singing.

When I was in Montreal in 2008, I was lucky enough to meet Taqralik Partridge and Evie Mark (pictured), both of whom seemed keen to come to London. But neither was available this time. Evie, however, had a friend called Beatrice Deer.... who also turned out not to be available.... but Beatrice had a friend called Leah May - and she and her partner (throat singers work in pairs) could come. The only problem was that Leah doesn't live in Montreal. She lives in Kuujjuaq, which is a very long way from Montreal. In fact, it's a very long way from anywhere. And so the transport costs are astronomical. Luckily, the wonderful Inuit airline First Air (run by the amazing Pita Atami and his Makivik Corporation - www.makivik.org) stepped in with a pair of tickets to Montreal, and we're off! They will be performing at the Origins Concert at Rich Mix on July 2nd, as well as in Trafalgar Square for Canada Day.

Last night, I went to Soho to see Chekhov in Hell by Dan Rebellato, who spoke at our event with the Platform for Intercultural Europe last year. The play was very characteristic of Dan - a series of snapshots from contemporary urban life, full of sharp comic observation. It was also very well performed - especially by Ruth Everett, whose string of grotesques were all horribly credible.

Drum

We saw Oily Cart's show Drum over the Easter weekend. It's very remarkable to watch, or perhaps I should say, experience a piece of theatre which is as inter-cultural as this. I use the term with reservations, of course, but also as a deliberate choice, because this was theatre that was able to do what very little of our work can - to reach beyond the bounds of language and to communicate with people we think we can't talk to - in this case children with autism.

The show didn't have a story, or at least not in the conventional sense. It did, however, have a very powerful emotional journey, from the comparative calm of finding a cushion with a particular design to the mayhem of wildly beating drums, on which the children sat or lay. The emphasis was on the sensory experience - whether that was bright colour, the touch of bubbles and foam, or the sensation of rolling in a drum. There were games with light and music.

It's very beautiful, very thought-through, and very theatrical theatre. And it reaches out in the fullest sense of that much overused term.

Love but no money

The Arts Council came to see us on Friday. Yes - they actually came to our Wood Green office, which is less shabby than once it was since Lance took the broom to it, but remains a world away from the hallowed halls of high policy. Very nice to see.

Pete Staves, who is now our ACE contact, was at pains to say that we very nearly got National Portfolio funding, and that he was very sorry we didn't! So the agenda of the meeting was largely about how we can best survive, with their help in whatever way it comes, until the next round of NP bids in about three years' time (which is also, rather frighteningly, when our Esmee funds run out). One of the key new areas which may help us build on the old round of GFA applications is the new "Strategic Funds". These replace the old managed funds, which used to sit in various ACE pockets and got allocated at will - now they will be open to application, which seems to me a positive step. Less positive is what some of them are for... there's one to match philanthropic donations / business sponsorship, on the old A&B model. On the other hand, there are some around Audience Development and Touring which could be very useful. We'll have to see. It's very early days for this.... but we felt encouraged.

Meeting the Maori

The last Origins had some very interesting links with London's Maori community - including the powhiri pictured here - and this year we're really developing these in a big way - thanks to our collaborations with the City of London Festival and Heritage Lottery Fund. Over the weekend, Gabrielle and I went to New Zealand House to meet the Maori youth group, Te Kohanga Reo, and today I was back to chat with Ngati Ranana. As well as holding another powhiri - this time on Hampstead Heath and with real hangi food - they will also be involved in plans to bring a Maori war canoe, or waka, up the Thames.

Even more exciting is the Participation and Learning project, which Gabrielle is heading up with Carissa. This will link the younger London Maori to elders, as well as giving kids in lots of London schools the chance to learn a lot more about Maori culture, learn haka, waiata and poi (various forms of music and dance, since you ask!), and to build their own model wakas. The intergenerational oral histories are going to lead to a new website and an archive of Maori presence in the UK, which actually goes back to 1800, no less.

The National Portfolio

After all the tension, the phone calls and emails started to fly around at 7.30 this morning. The Arts Council hasn't exactly had an easy task on its hands; and probably did quite a good job of cutting down the number of RFOs without simply slashing everybody in sight. The National Portfolio is published online, but of course this only says who got money (including all the usual suspects, with their varying levels of cuts). The headline figures are that 849 RFOs have been reduced to 695 - but 110 of these are new, which means that 264 organisations must have been axed completely. Well done the 110 new clients. We weren't one of them.

I've yet to talk to ACE about this, but I can predict from the written report what they will say. They reported that we were "Good" in every area - but "the budget is limited". Well, of course that's true - but it wasn't too limited to fund some other people, so we do need to know a bit more.... I'll let you know what they say!

On a nicer topic, I saw Peter Brook's A Magic Flute at the Barbican last week. It's had quite a mixed press - and you can see why, especially with regard to the singing. But it's an incredibly winning performance, especially if you happen to be sitting in the front row, which I was. All the bombast and vast scale of most opera has gone - this is a chamber show with a piano, and so becomes very subtle, human, and delicate. Brook doesn't look for "readings" or "interpretations" (which is something I probably would do). Instead, you get the sense of an elder of the theatre returning to a childlike delight in the simplicity of fable and fairytale. It is, in every sense, enchanting.

Brook has long been famous for his work on magical pieces, of course (A Midsummer Night's Dream is the stuff of legend). As in that production and his Tempest, the theatrical magic is in the hands of anonymous spirits, who employ circus tricks and the rough magic of theatrical honesty to make the performance happen and the story move forward. It's all about the audience investing totally in the show.

It's also one in a series of productions Brook has done of late, great works: The Tempest, The Cherry Orchard. As he's now 86 himself, you can't help feeling that this is in some way about signing off. So the fact that what may well be his last project is a late piece by somebody who dies aged 35 is very touching. As I said, it's childlike. Direct and simple magic.

Changing the World

Tuesday night saw the first Routledge / Stanislavski Centre Lecture at Rose Bruford. It was given by Anatoly Smeliansky, who is Dean of the Moscow Art Theatre School, and Associate Director of the MAT itself. So he has a bit of a direct line to Stanislavski - though he was at pains to point out that Stalin and Co. represent quite a gulf between modern Russia and the great man.

Anatoly is a dramaturg - that central figure of European theatre who you hardly ever encounter in Britain - and so he has been on the scene for many of the great events of Russian theatrical history, without taking part in them directly. It gives him the critical distance and ironic voice of the great raconteur. He seems genuinely to believe that all the main events in Russian history somehow happen in the MAT before they happen outside. The obvious case is Chekhov's prophecy of the Revolution in The Cherry Orchard - but his more recent anecdote is better. When Gorbachev came to power, he came to see Uncle Vanya. This in itself was odd, since most Soviet leaders only watched propaganda pieces. Gorbachev phoned the director the next day, and Anatoly was in the office. The discussion was about the actors, using their first names, about the play and how moving it was.... and at the end, the director put down the phone and said to Anatoly "Russia is about to change". And, as we know, it did.

Sometimes the world changes from below. I went yesterday to a workshop on Ethics in Participatory Theatre, run by Frances Rifkin for the Arts Council. Joel and Gabrielle from Polygon came too, and there were some very interesting and experienced people from other companies like Theatre Is... Spare Tyre and London Bubble. There seemed to be a bit of a movement towards establishing some sort of ethical code for practitioners - rather like nurses or therapists have. I'm not sure I'm convinced about that. The conversations through the day seemed to me to suggest that we live in an ethical minefield, and that every case has to be taken on its merits, with a huge awareness of political, social and cultural context.

Frankenstein

The National Theatre's production of Frankenstein has been given some of the best reviews I've seen in years, and is a massive sell-out hit. So I was a bit surprised to find that it's not really all it's cracked up to be.

Benedict Cumberbatch was the Creature on Saturday, and he was undoubtedly brilliant. The opening scene, in which he emerges from a womb-like drum into life, was a tour de force. But the world into which he emerged was basically a series of effects from the National's massive budget, with nods at Les Mis in the form of snarling 19th century prostitutes. There was even a train. Not that I'm one to object to visual flamboyance in the theatre - but it needs to be done with a sense of meaning, and not just for show.

The crux of Mary Shelley's novel is the character of Frankenstein himself, the Modern Prometheus, and the question as to why he should create life, only to abandon it. In this production, for all the gimmick of the leading actors swapping roles, the character became a cipher, only of interest to the director and playwright in so far as he encounters the Creature. But without Frankenstein's urge to create, there is no Creature - so why should we care?

Heresy, I know.....

Barking

I've been on a semi-sabbatical from Border Crossings over the last few weeks (although I've still been having to do the financial reports for the EU through the evenings and weekends....), with Lance looking after the office and fundraising. I've been in rehearsals for Howard Barker's play The Europeans, which opened last night at the Unicorn. It's a final year student production for Rose Bruford - so it only plays four performances - two more today and one tomorrow afternoon. Which is a shame after five weeks of very intense rehearsals!

I've enjoyed working on the play very much - partly because the students are terrific, and partly because the text is fascinating. It's the second Barker I've done - the previous one was Victory, also at Bruford. In each case I've found that it feels horribly obscure when you first read it, but yields more and more depth, humour and energy as you go on. The Europeans is set against the background of the Siege of Vienna - so it's about a war between the Western powers and Islam... which is pretty relevant to us at the moment.... So we've found ways of setting the piece simultaneously in the 17th century and right now. Somehow it doesn't seem to jar at all.

The Unicorn is a wonderful space. The auditorium curves around a quite intimate downstage area, and then there is a huge open space behind. This means we can make some scenes very intense and others incredibly epic. It's as if the space breathes, moving between the public and the private. Like the Greek theatres.

Tony came last night, as did Carissa, and they both seemed to enjoy themselves! I also got to meet Gerrard McArthur, who is Associate Director of The Wrestling School. he said we had really found the style which Barker's work demands. So that was nice....

Blue Dragon

It was a pretty weird experience to watch Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon at the Barbican on Monday. It begins with a short Prologue, which is followed by a dance sequence in front of projected titles. Then there is a multi-lingual scene set in Shanghai's Pudong Airport.... Sound familiar?

This is, of course, not plagiarism in either direction but synchronicity - there are certain subjects in the air which artists of particular outlooks feel drawn to. All the same, it was a bit of a surprise! After Pudong, the play moves onto a different route, although the centrality of foreign visitors in contemporary Shanghai kept Dis-Orientations and Re-Orientations very much in my mind. The Blue Dragon is an intimate, lyrical, surprisingly linear and naturalistic three-hander about mid-life crisis, the failure of art and love, parenthood, and China. All themes very close to our own. But the final result is very different as a theatrical experience.

On the way home, I found myself jotting down notes for our next co-production with SDAC. But, I'm happy to say, they were inspired more by the differences from Robert's work than by the similarities.

Rehearsal as refuge

I have spent the entire weekend doing accounts. And I mean the entire weekend. From 9am to 9pm Saturday and from 9am to 7pm today, with brief meal breaks and a quick trip to Tescos. This was not what attracted me to the theatre as a career. Last weekend was very similar, and next weekend promises to be even worse.

In my spare time, I am directing Howard Barker's The Europeans for Rose Bruford. It's a final-year production, so the actors and team are trained and ready for the profession, which means the quality of their work is very high. It feels like a holiday to go into the rehearsal room with them - though this is meant to be the real work. Bizarre.

On the train down to Sidcup on Friday, I had a long chat about this with Iain Reekie, the Head of Acting. He said he felt much the same, rehearsing another of the shows. For him, the tension is around the fact that the future of higher education generally, and drama schools in particular, is so uncertain right now. He, and the other Bruford staff, are all caught up in a web of politics and finance like the one that's dogging me. And, like me, he finds the rehearsal room to be a refuge. A safe haven in a storm.

The Antonioni Project

To the Barbican for a production by Ivo van Hove and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam. I had very high hopes for this work, after their extraordinary production of The Roman Tragedies, which I saw in 2009. Like that show, there's a lot of multi-media in The Antonioni Project - not totally surprising, given that the production is based on three films by Michelangelo Antonioni. In The Roman Tragedies, the film was to do with the constant exposure of political lives, both public and private, to the scrutiny of the media. Here, the film-making itself almost became the subject: the production's probably best described as a live film - every scene is shot and projected as it is being performed. At times this can be stunning - for example, when bluescreen is used to place actors who you can see on stage into a pre-recorded and totally "real" environment - but very often it feels as if the technology has been allowed to become the point. The narrative and the characters just aren't interesting enough to hold their own against all this, and so the production seems rather "New Labour" - all style and no substance.

At the same time, it's very fascinating and suggests lots of possibilities for a future project I'm currently mulling over. The characters are living in a world where everything is conceived in mediated terms, perhaps especially human relationships. So they can only operate through layers of media-tion: and the apparent distancing achieved by the technology is a powerful metaphor for the way they see their own lives.

All this made sense to me intellectually as I watched the piece - but it didn't work in terms of emotional engagement. There was no compelling narrative to pull you along, no character to draw you in. I want to treat these subjects in the new play I'm planning with Hui and Tony - but we've got to make sure we don't lose the humanity.

Susannah York

A funny new year. It's only mid-January, and the two most celebrated actors I know personally have both died: Pete Postlethwaite, and now Susannah York.

I knew Susannah very well in the 90s: she used to come to all our productions, even the solo piece Departures / Arrivals. When I directed The Great God Brown, she recorded a voice-over for the show, so she was kind of in it... and I also helped her out with her performance as Ranyevskaya when she didn't feel it was working. That was a lot of fun.

What Pete and Susannah had in common was that they didn't just act. They believed in theatre as a way of making the world better. They had celebrity, and so they made use of it. For charity, for campaigning, and just to generate a positive energy.

Miss them both.

Lance's baptism with fire

Our new General Manager, Lance Bourne, started work this week. Lance's appointment is one of two we're able to make thanks to a core costs grant from the wonderful Esmee Fairbairn Foundation - and he's a huge boost to us as an organisation. We'll post some details about him on the website soon - but suffice to say for now that he's got a wealth of experience in both the public and voluntary sectors, and he understands business. And funding.

It's just as well, because this is the month in which the Arts Council has opened its doors to every arts organisation in the country to apply for National Portfolio funding. The good side of this is that it was always an exclusive club before - you had to be invited to apply for the status of a Regularly Funded Organisation. The bad sides are: 1) the open application process comes at the same time as a 30% cut, so at a rough guess it's going to be more about some RFOs not succeeding than loads of new organisations coming on board, and 2) it may never happen again.

So - Lance and I are using his first days to write a business plan, make budgets, think through strategies and artistic plans... all before he's really hung his coat up. At least it's going to mean we have a plan! Happy New Year everybody....

2010

Well, it's been quite a year for us at Border Crossings! The production of Re-Orientations was a highlight, of course - especially the excitement of bringing the play to Shanghai, and the sell-out run there. It was the climax of two years' work - more, if you think in terms of the lead-in with the other Trilogy plays - and it truly lived up to the incredible work everybody had done to develop it.

We also ended the year on a high, with the Practice Exchange we organised with the Platform for Intercultural Europe. Very exciting for us to move into areas where we are dealing directly with policy. This has been a trend in our work for some time, not least in the Origins Festival. With another Origins planned for 2011, and the expansion of the Laboratory, we should be able to do a lot more to bring the arts into dialogue with policy-makers in the future.

One of the things enabling this is that, for the first time ever, we will have some revenue funding in place during 2011 to support a core staff. Thanks to the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation for this, and to the board, who have been so pro-active in developing the company to this point. We appointed our General Manager and Associate Director before Christmas, and I'll announce who they are in this blog and on the website once they are in post in January.

Elsewhere, the year has offered some exciting cultural experiences for me - though not that many of them in theatre, strangely enough. In the theatrical mainstream, I enjoyed the Cheek by Jowl Macbeth at the Barbican, and David Greig's not unrelated new play Dunsinaine at Hampstead. But my favourite theatre piece of the year, part of a very exciting LIFT season, was Life Streaming - which was hardly conventional theatre at all, but an online conversation with a survivor of the tsunami, sitting on a beach in Sri Lanka. Otherwise, my theatre highlights were actually operas, both directed by Richard Jones: Meistersinger in Cardiff, with Bryn Terfel, and Queen of Spades, which I saw in Houston.

The freelance job in Houston was also a big event for me this year - as much as anything just to get the chance to work with such an astonishing cast (Susan Graham and David Daniels to name but two). It also gave me one of the most profound experiences of the year - the Rothko Chapel. It was matched, in a very different way, by the powhiri given to Womad guests by the Maori of Taranaki in March.

In film, I'll confidently predict that Patagonia will be a big hit in 2011, and I loved the chance to watch The Baader-Meinhoff Connection on a plane!

In books, I particularly enjoyed Han Suyin's biography of Premier Zhou Enlai, Eldest Son, which I read in Shanghai. While I'm not totally convinced by her theory that China's embrace of capitalism represents the triumph of a policy Zhou was pursuing covertly throughout the Maoist era, she certainly demonstrates a surprising current of continuity running beneath the radical change. In the year a comic novel finally bagged the Booker, Ian McEwan's Solar failed to attract the expected attention, but I found it his strongest work since Atonement. Through farce and fury, it turns an acid gaze on our environmental myopia and emotional constipation. Dan Rebellato spoke at our Practice Exchange. His book Theatre & Globalization is an incisive, perceptive and witty polemic, which proves, among other things, that a loathing of near-slavery in Asia is not incompatible with eating sushi. He also provided another cyber-theatre event which lit up 2010, with his performance on Twitter during the Raoul Moat siege. So - how do we start to make intercultural theatre which relates to these new media?

The Cuts

So, Vince Cable thinks that the Tory agenda is Maoist. He does have a point (except, to be fair to David Cameron, he wouldn't still be sitting at Mao's Cabinet table after what he's been saying). But, like the Mao of the Hundred Flowers policy and the Cultural Revolution, Cameron really does seem to believe that the role of government is to unleash anarchy. In which he has been remarkably successful so far.

In yesterday's Guardian, my signature was on a letter from artists resisting the cuts - though I'm not sure that direct resistance will have much effect on so determined an ideological agenda. What is probably needed is for Cable to exercise his "nuclear option" and resign, bringing down the government. After all, it is diametrically opposed to everything he ever stood for. If he left, then he could get the bulk of the Lib-Dem MPs behind him, topple the morally bankrupt Clegg and actually stand to do better in the election which Cameron would have to call. It feels like the only way to stop the rush into chaos. And this from somebody who doesn't normally think history is about the individual.

Still, while Vince remains Business Secretary, we carry on letter-writing. Karl Rouse from Central School asked me to sign one to Dave Willets et al, which has been sent to Ministers but not the press. Since I wrote some of it, I'm going to publish that section here, with Karl's agreement. It feels a bit like a credo for the current moment...

"One of the positive things which the new Prime Minister has done is the attempt to establish a measure of the nation's happiness, or well-being. Sadly, it is also something for which he has been much ridiculed. Happiness and well-being, it seems, are not matters for the serious business of politics, which should concern itself solely with economic growth and wealth creation. This is the prevailing view in civil society, and across the political spectrum - it was the Labour government which removed the Universities from the competence of the Department of Education, and turned them into an adjunct of the Business Department, so paving the way for the current decimation of any course not deemed to be of immediate use in training our young people to meet the demands of the private sector.

But wealth creation in and of itself cannot be the aim of any civilisation worth the name. We know that wealth does not bring happiness - indeed, that it often brings unhappiness. We know that the current economic system is directly responsible for an ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions. We know that the wealth of the West only exists because of the near slavery existing in other parts of the world. We also know that the economic system is imploding - why else is there this "deficit" which is being used to justify an attack on the future?

If our institutions for higher education are turned into a combination of training grounds for middle-management in computer companies and playgrounds for the children of the rich - and that is what the policy now before Parliament would surely render them - then our society will be forced to continue its subscription to this flawed, immoral and unsustainable global system. What we need - and need urgently - is a politics of the imagination which allows us to see outside the current paradigm and into a future where we will not systematically destroy our planet, where we will not pander to our own luxury at the cost of others' basic needs, and where we might just score a little higher on Mr Cameron's scale of well-being.

And that is why we need artists. Because art enables us to see the world from a different perspective. It enables us to empathise with the other. It compels us to look outside the narrow spaces of the everyday. Art is not a luxury to be tacked on to the edge of a society once it has dealt with other needs apparently more basic. Art itself is basic. Without it we lose our humanity and become mere machines.

Above all, we must not lose the capacity of our young people to be educated in art. They are the people whose vision can shape the future: but only if they can learn to see."

The Practice Exchange

An exciting couple of days, hosting a Practice Exchange event which we produced jointly with the Platform for Intercultural Europe at Rose Bruford. Under the title Interculturalism: Art and Policy we were able to bring together some of the most exciting artists from diverse cultural traditions who are currently working in Britain, and to get them interacting with people from academia, policy-making, social and political activism etc. It's an important step for us as company - it gives us a voice in Brussels, and it brings our artistic work into dialogue with political processes. Right now, that seems a pretty urgent need.

There will be a full report by Brendan Jackson, which I'll post when it comes out, but in the meantime here are a few highlights!

Jatinder Verma gave an opening Keynote Speech about Intercultural theatre as it relates to European policy - you can listen to it online here. David Tse Ka Shing spoke about working with British East Asian communities, and also joined a panel on dialogues between diverse communities and the cultural sector, with Gabrielle Lobb from Polygon and Femi Elufowoju Jr.. In a particularly inspiring session, John Martin from Pan talked about his work with Refugee communities - with some really concrete examples of transformative events occurring for traumatised people, including former child soldiers.

All of this was very useful when it came to the discussions of policy on the second day. The people we'd expected from the Commission and the DCMS didn't turn up (of course), but their absence probably made it easier for us to talk freely about how intercultural arts can make their case - both the case for culture and the case for cultural diversity - at a moment when both are under threat. There was a brilliant talk by Graham Jeffery about the language gap between artistic idealism and political pragmatism, the use of evidence to bridge that gap, the quantifying of cultural value. Here's a link to Graham's blog - which is going to be worth watching as the current crisis deepens.

More to follow....

Mulholland Drive

Now - call me out of date - but I've only just seen this incredible film. I was prompted by my friend Dimitrios's response to Re-Orientations: "It's like David Lynch!" Well - I had to investigate... I'm happy to say that on closer inspection:

1. It really is a compliment and

2. I think it's probably true!

Where our work overlaps with Lynch is in the shifting nature of reality - the way in which a narrative refuses to explain everything, but allows itself to elude and mystify the audience with hints and surprises, just like life itself. The film, like our play, is set in a world of performers - and very often life seems to imitate art, rather than the other way round. Perhaps we make art - narrative - as a way of making sense of lives which are in fact largely arbitrary.

And Mulholland Drive (or - strictly - Mulholland Dr., for which read "dream") has an apparently realistic surface which is constantly shattered or disrupted by illusions, fantasies and imaginings. It dares to show, in the conventionally realistic form of cinema, what goes on invisibly in the subconscious. That's something else we're very keen to do in our work.

Where the film gets really radical is about three-quarters of the way through, when there is apparently a total reversal of realities, and the main characters seem to be re-created as different figures - still related to the main story but with different personalities, and different names. When it was first released, everybody complained that it was nonsense - but actually life can be very like that - and so can dream. I'd love to attempt an inversion so brave as that one!

Here's a link to a great blog about watching the film - a useful companion!

Gothenburg and home

Saturday night saw a great Swedish feast at Teater Eksem's Gothenburg HQ, which gave me the chance to thank everybody properly. It was quite emotional - the end of two years' work with a very inspiring and tightly knit group of people. Not that it will be an end really - the show may well come back, and even if it doesn't the potential legacy projects are legion.

Still, we went into the final show on Sunday with a combined sense of loss and determination to be brilliant - and as a result had an amazing night. Last shows are often faintly disappointing, because the cast strive for a definitive performance and there really is no such thing. But this show, which is in many ways about loss, benefited hugely from the circumstances, and was very moving and beautiful. At the reception afterwards, the Swedish managements, funders and artistic guests all kept using the same word: "poetic". I like that. The performance was in the space at Pustervik, where I saw Victoria perform in the Festival on my first Swedish trip in 2008. Exciting to end the project in this lovely space which I know from its beginnings.

Filip and I shared the driving of the van to Dusseldorf on Monday, and then I did the last slog through the fog of northern Europe on Tuesday. The air of melancholy was appropriate, I suppose. But I didn't linger in it for long - the emails and meetings have been constant since I got back, and of course we are recruiting staff!