Ondinnok and the Theatre of Healing

Lunch with Alanis Obamsawin. She’s a slight woman, with very piercing eyes, and a reputation formidable enough to have won her a retrospective at MOMA in New York last year. She’s been making films for 40 years, and has 35 to her credit. Most of these are documentaries about First Nations people – although she’s almost coyly pleased when I tell her how much I like Sigwan, which on the surface is a children’s film, though its mythic quality carries profound resonance for adults. She’s intending it to be the first in a series. Great to see somebody who has been working so long at the top of her profession trying a completely new direction, and doing it with such freshness.

She tells me that Kanehsatake had its first screenings in London (courtesy of Channel 4, back when it had a reason for existing), and was met with standing ovations, before anybody dared to screen it in Canada. It was finally shown on CBC on the condition that it was followed by a discussion, to overcome accusations of bias. Shades of Lord Hutton. Alanis refused to participate in the discussion – saying the film itself made her point. She’s also adamant that there is no place for “objectivity” and “balance” in documentary film-making: it’s about making a point with passion. Other people can disagree afterwards. What is amazing is that she works out of the National Film Board, which is a government body and yet acts as Producer for all her films, most of which are deeply critical of the government. I tell her that I find that a ringing endorsement of Canadian democracy. She agrees – but tells me such freedoms are very much under threat. We compare notes on censorship and the war on terror.

Alanis is thrilled that we want to show her work in Origins, and would like to come to London for the Festival. So – the programme grows. All we have to do is find the money to back it up….

The rest of the day is spent with Yves Sioui Durand and Catherine Joncas, the directors of Ondinnok. This company, the only First Nations theatre group in Québec, is the crux of this trip to Montréal, and I’m not disappointed in them. Ondinnok’s work is mythological and shamanic in its inspiration. They deal with “issues” and the contemporary reality of Native life – but they do it through a return to the spiritual power of the culture. For Yves, he tells me in his halting but eloquent Francophone English, the theatre is “a big work of re-opening the soul of the people and all the wounds they have”.

The company has been going for more than 20 years, and they show me a DVD which commemorates the 20^th anniversary. In the centre of this time-frame sits the moment in 1995 when Yves and Catherine were approached by a community in rural Québec, the Atikamekw of Manawan. This approach was the result of the community’s severe social and spiritual malaise: the high levels of alcoholism, suicide, domestic violence and sexual abuse which sadly characterise so many contemporary First Nations groups, not only in Canada but across the world. Why the community felt that theatre could be the way out of this downward spiral I do not know – but Yves and Catherine felt they had to do something in response, and they ended up staying for three years. During this crucial period they evolved their Theatre of Healing techniques, which they now apply to their own creative processes. For Ondinnok (which means “a theatrical ritual healing that reveals the secret longings of the soul”), theatre and ritual are linked to divination. They ask who we are, and what is going on. They enable us to re-contact our forebears through cultural practice, and so to link with memory, roots and ancestors. And the results are real – the Atikamekw underwent real change.

During the evening, I get the chance to watch some of this in practice. Ondinnok is just beginning a new piece, which will pre-Columbian in its inspiration. The workshop begins with limbering up, which crosses very naturally into a smudging ritual, as the actors wash themselves in smoke. The lights are dim, and there is shamanic music playing. Yves projects a video of Mayan images, and the participants watch it, as the music throbs, and they dance, adopting some of the physical imagery from the projections. Then, in darkness, Yves places masks at the west end of the room, the sunset space where the ancestors lie. The actors take the masks and respond to them, summoning forces and presences older than themselves. In many ways, the mask work is like my own – what is different is its framing within the specific cultural ritual, which has brought the actors to a place of trance, in which they contact their own, and perhaps also their culture’s subconscious.

Yves and Catherine are hugely excited by the idea of a Theatre of Healing workshop at the centre of Origins. If I can, I would like them to run a five-day workshop in the middle of the Festival, which will be free to the other First Nations performers involved. The encounters could be truly extraordinary.

Toronto

I popped down to Toronto on the train last night (a mere five hours), and now I’m popping back to Montréal, after really rather a great day in a city I got to know well four years ago, when I was doing The Handmaid’s Tale for Canadian Opera. It was even the same time of year, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by Toronto’s Indian summer. Yvette Nolan, AD of Native Earth, bought me a coffee, and we sat outside at a pavement café in the Distillery district, and talked about Origins.

I’m very keen on Daniel David Moses’ play Almighty Voice and His Wife, which Native Earth are reviving in the spring, and we plot to bring the production to London. Yvette seems confident about money from her end, and we print out and sign an official invitation letter there and then. She tells me the biggest challenge of running even this most established of First Nations companies is casting. As soon as a First Nations actor gets any notice, they are instantly devoured by the TV and film industries. You can hardly blame them – the money’s so much better, and so is the kudos. But you can’t help feeling that it’s only in spaces like Native Earth that these actors can be sure they are representing their nations accurately and with an appropriate political energy – at least in the current cultural climate.

I squeeze in a lunchtime visit to a theatre bookshop to get some more of Moses’ scripts to read, before a relaxing and stimulating afternoon with Wayne Strongman and Tom Diamond from Tapestry Opera. Wayne and I got on well when I was here before – I gave a talk to their conductors and directors lab – and we’ve been in fleeting contact ever since. Today we talk very speculatively about possible projects we could collaborate on. Great to range around like this, and to talk with no specific agenda. It allows us to explore the real reasons why we’re doing the sort of work we are.

And now I’m back on the train. It has wireless – of a sort… It keeps coming and going.

Orchestra meets Inuit

Wednesday dawns beautifully sunny in Montréal, and I make my way to the Chapelle Historique du Bon-Pasteur, where I’ve been invited to what is described as an open rehearsal, and is really the only chance in the comparative mainstream to hear a very important, pioneering piece of work. It’s an initiative by the Montréal Symphony Orchestra, seven of whose members are on stage this morning, conducted by none other than their music director Kent Nagano. (He also conducted Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand last night, and will do it again tonight – the stamina of leading conductors never ceases to amaze me!)

What makes today’s pieces so significant is that the composers have combined orchestral sounds with the language of the Inuit people, Inuktitut, and (most strikingly) with two Inuit throat singers, Evie Mark and Taqralik Partridge. It’s Taqralik, with whom I’ve been emailing, who invited me today. Check out her My Space page, and you’ll see she combines her Inuit identity with a very contemporary urban aesthetic – very exciting and inspiring. I’d not heard throat singing live before – it’s extraordinarily visceral, physical and elemental. The singers hold one another by the elbows, staring into each other’s eyes, and alternate their tones, which are sucked rhythmically from very deep in the body. It’s intensely powerful, highly charged, and with the music evoking tundra, it gives an incredible sense of a way of living anchored in a particular and extraordinary relationship to nature.

Tomorrow, this project flies to Nunavik: the area in the north of Québec which, although it’s about the size of France, has a population of only about 10,000. Taqralik explains to me, over smoked salmon and grilled prawns, that they will have to fly between the different communities where they are performing, because there are no roads. The Inuit of Nunavik remain very isolated, and perhaps that is no bad thing. You have to make a very special effort to contact them, as the MSO has done here. Nor is this just a case of “Let’s play music to the Inuit” – Taqralik and Evie make this a full collaboration, and the MSO has worked with the Inuit Cultural Institute Avataq, which is run by Inuit Elders. It’s a very inspiring piece of inter-cultural dialogue; and I feel very privileged to be there.

Montréal

As a suitable follow-up to the Lepage piece, I'm now in Montreal, researching First Nations work for the Origins Festival - thanks to a grant from the Québec government office in London, and its amazing Cultural Director Colin Hicks.

Montréal is lovely - at least now that it's not raining. Its ambiance combines the café culture and intellectual buzz of Paris with the energy of America. Hard to imagine, I know - but that's what it feels like. I'm painfully aware of how long it is since I've really had to speak French - whenever I ask for something the bi-lingual Québécois reply in perfect (if strangely accented) English, which is simultaneously helpful and embarrassing.

I spent much of rainy Tuesday in the HQ of the National Film Board, which has a wonderful facility for viewing just about every Canadian film ever made at the click of a mouse. For somebody researching the film element of a Festival (like me, say), this is a god-send. I watch a film about an Algonquin elder, which reminds me of Allan Collins' Sunset to Sunrise (screened at the launch last year); Drew Hayden Taylor's film on Native humour; and a whole string of shorter pieces. One of these is Sigwan, a beautifully photographed 13 minute fable by the legendary Abenaki film-maker Alanis Obomsawin. Watching this amazing little parable, which in so short a time manages to brig together theatricality, the environment and ideas of reconciliation, I feel all the sadder that I wasn't able to find a contact for the director before I came: she is somebody I'd really wanted to meet, but none of my "feelers" had paid off. Walk back to the hotel (everything seems to be in walking distance, even though it's a big city), and there, with Jungian synchronicity, is an email from Alanis Obomsawin. She's heard I was here and wanting to meet her, and has emailed her mobile number. I ring it, and we arrange to meet on Friday morning. Given the timetable I'm on before then, I decide to dash back to the NFB, and, to the amazement of the girl at reception, spend a few more hours watching her films. In particular, I take in her famous documentary Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance: which deals with the 1990 Mohawk resistance over land rights. It's stunningly done - full of wider resonance beyond the basic issue of the golf course, which started the war-like events it covers. How we relate to land, to colonialism, to history, to nature.... all the big questions, staring at us and demanding to be answered.

The Massively Long Production

I’m a bit of a fan of massively long productions. This may be partly because I’ve directed Wagner’s Ring (and they don’t come much longer than that). I remember the sense, with the mantra-like music at the start of The Rhinegold, of an audience moving collectively into a slightly different state of consciousness – a trance-like suspension of everyday life - having abandoned the hectic schedule of contemporary living to invest a substantial amount of time in something other.

It’s not just Wagner. Lots of my most memorable theatrical experiences have been with massively long productions. I remember the marathons of Angels in America (both parts in one day), Le Dernier Caravasérail at Le Théâtre du Soleil, Cloudstreet from Australia, and Robert Lepage’s The Dragon’s Trilogy and The Seven Streams of the River Ota. In each case, as a member of a privileged audience, you had a sense of moving beyond the comparatively commonplace experience of watching a play. You felt that this was an event of particular significance: that it was, in some sense, historic.

If I’m honest, then I must confess that this is what I am attempting to achieve with The Orientations Trilogy. It is, of course, an incredibly tall order – and a very “tough sell”. With a Wagner opera or a Lepage epic, the audience comes already expecting greatness, and that expectation does much of the work for you. With a lesser-known company, the marathon element is more likely to put people off than to tempt them. Penny and I are spending much of our time at the moment working on strategies to make the Trilogy work in the UK theatre market. Maybe it should play as three individual productions on Wednesday to Friday, with the marathons restricted to weekends (and the day off on Monday). Maybe this means we can’t actually go into most of the venues we’ve used in the past. On the other hand, with the kudos of the Asian partners and the EU behind us, why shouldn’t we be able to re-position ourselves, and give our audience the sense that they are coming not to “a play” but to “an event”?

All these thoughts were focused for me yesterday, as I arrived at the Barbican at lunchtime, ready to spend nine hours watching Lepage’s latest epic, Lipsynch. There had certainly been no problem getting an audience for this: the theatre was packed, and packed with theatrical luminaries at that. I chatted to Tony Guilfoyle (who was Julian in Dis-Orientations, and has worked with Robert several times), with Nick Williams, our Arts Council officer, with Angie and Louise from the Barbican management…. This felt less like an audience, and more like a congregation. So perhaps it is heresy to say this – but I didn’t think this production had the qualities which made Robert’s earlier epics so powerful and luminous, and which have inspired me to search for something analogous in our own work. There were moments of emotional power, and a great deal of humour – but the bulk of the production remained on the level of the mundane, almost deliberately avoiding the transformations between different layers of reality which characterised the earlier shows. And with that, there came a clumsiness in the actual handling of theatrical space, which is the last thing I would expect from this most technically adroit of directors. There were numerous long set changes, in silence, when the performance seemed deliberately to lose its own momentum, and with it any sense of the magical, the hypnotic, the spiritual.

I remember that the first version of Ota was also very disappointing, and yet emerged as a wonderful production two years later. Perhaps the same will happen with Lipsynch. But the first version of Ota was only three hours long, and the later one was eight…..

The tyranny of schedules

Why does everything depend on dates?

We've been thinking for some time that the development workshop for the third part of the Trilogy would be in late September / early October. Slowly, that slipped away from us. We suggested that it should move to January, when everybody is available. That was fine, except that China shuts down for the last couple of weeks of January because of the spring holiday. It's like trying to work in England at Christmas. So now we're looking at February.... Luckily we can change the start date for EU eligibility - although it means that things like my trip to Sweden are not eligible, and the money has to come from our general pot.

The other side-effect is that this opens up the autumn in a rather distressing way.....

When the workshop was for the autumn, I'd planned to combine it with Roshni's conference at Ningbo. She was keen for me to do a workshop on intercultural Shakespeare. When the workshop fell through, I let her know, then plugged that particular gap with the trip to Canada for Origins which the Quebec government office offered to fund. Only when the flights were booked did I get an email from Roshni saying the British Council would fund me for Ningbo, and provide a fee.

I spend most of my time juggling dates. If only it was all simple.....

Sweden

I´m in Göteborg, and have been since Sunday night. This (at last) is the first hint of the Trilogy project coming together artistically, as I lead a workshop with our Swedish partner company, Teater Eksem. They are a young group, formed from drama school by several actors and a very dynamic producer, Filip Aiello. I found them through colleagues of colleagues when I was putting together the European proposal, and have got to know Filip quite well since (he and his partner Malin even came to Sidcup to see Attempts on her Life in the early part of the year) - but this is the first time I´ve encountered Malin and her colleagues as performers.

It was a calculated risk, I suppose. We needed European partners to secure the grant, and I was intrigued by the idea of introducing a Scandinavian element into this dialogue between Europe and Asia. Luckily, they turn out to be very talented, very open, and full of creative ideas. I feel a bit bad that only two of them will be chosen to work on the show.

The workshop has been far more than an audition process, though of course it fulfils that function. It´s also been the first chance to look at the material through Swedish eyes, and see what they may be able to add to the cocktail. We work on Strindberg (if ever there was a dramatist who had things to say about gender, it´s Strindberg), and on contemporary Swedish attitudes to Asia, to gender, to sexuality. We touch on the notorious porn industry. And, most fruitfully of all, we look at Swedish folklore. Until this week, I had never heard of the Näck. This mythic figure, much painted during the Romantic period, is an androgynous young man who plays the violin while sitting naked in water, and lures women to their doom. Given the Trilogy´s use of music, androgyny, Romanticism and drowning, this is a pretty resonant image for me! We work around the idea of Näck, and it begins to suggest many interactions with other areas of the work. Näck is pronounced "neck", and means "naked". He is a Water Sprite, a Trickster, and the ideal androgyne.

At the flat they've found for me, I spot on the bookshelves a study by Robert Lyons of a production of the Dream by the Götenborg director Eva Bergman. Having recently done the play (it finally closes tonight!), I´m curious to read what she did with it, and discover that she made use of a musician, whose image appears on the cover, based on Näck. Lyons discusses the folklore at some length, and the paintings of Näck by Ernst Josephson in the 1880s. He hints that there´s a further story here, when he says that Josephson "imbued the motive with an extraordinary vitality by channeling his own personal sufferings and conflicts through the figure".

As is this wasn´t synchronicity enough, I was sitting with Filip and Mia (one of the performers), waiting for a meeting, when who should walk into the coffee bar but Robert Lyons, who heads the drama department at the univesity here? So now we have a link to a researcher who has studied this figure in some depth, and is fascinated by the use we'll be making of him.

The meeting was with Birgitta Winnberg-Rydh, who is Artistic Director of the Göteborg Festival, and seems very excited by the idea of bringing the Trilogy here in 2010. It´s necessarily a brief chat, since this is Festival week, but the foundation is laid. It's a good week to be in Göteborg. I've seen Tim Etchells´piece with Belgian children (called That Night Follows Day), and heard him discuss his work at some length in the Open Lab curated by Ong Keng Sen (this being Sweden, the Open Lab can be held in English and nobody has any problem). I´ve also seen Akram Khan´s work with the National Ballet of China, bahok. Like our own work, this is concerned with the nomad, the migrant, with global diasporas and zones of transition. I loved his use of an airport departures board.

Tonight, I shall be staring at one myself, as I head back to London.

Holiday reading

I spent a week in Wales with the family, getting well and truly rained on. Luckily, the house we were in was beautiful, and I had Volume 3 of John Richardson's incredible Picasso biography to keep me happy. I love the way this writer combines the narrative of Picasso's life with his own critical insights, and somehow avoids the trap which so many artistic biographies fall into - namely, implying that every aspect of the subject's work can be related to their life in a specific and direct way. Psychoanalytical theory run mad. When Richardson does relate the paintings to biographical specifics, it's with a sense of the way in which the art transforms those specifics, making them resonant way beyond the moment of and impulse to creation. So his knowledge of the background to the paintings informs the viewer, without diminishing our response to the work.

It also serves very nicely to blow away the romantic myth of the solitary genius which surrounds so many visual artists. We theatre-makers are often perceived as rather second-rate in the creative stakes because we collaborate (in fact I once knew a painter who actually defined art as "something you do on your own"). Picasso was himself a theatre-maker, of course - but what this book demonstrates over and above that is the way in which the artistic milieu in which he moved served to develop him. Well, of course - it's called a culture. And what a milieu it was: Diaghilev, Nijinsky and sister, Massine, Cocteau, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Braque, Apollinaire, Brassai, Eluard.... even James Joyce puts in an appearance.

Having convinced myself how important collaboration is, I go on a round of Embassies related to the Origins Festival, and meet up with Nick Yu from Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre (in London for a seminar at the Royal Court). We do lots of juggling of dates and funds. The most frustrating part of any project is this long gestation period, and at the moment we're in two of them!

My new book on Chinese theatre is out. It's co-authored with Doug Holton, and published by University of Stranmillis Press, Belfast.

Dream Reviews

Some very nice reviews of the Tahoe Dream production. There were also some not very nice ones, which suggest that racism is far from dead in West Coast America. It's quite astonishing how dismissive they were of Native American culture - which apparently is no match for the great Shakespeare... It just shows how important it is to do this sort of work - the barriers are still very present indeed.

But, from the positive reviews:

" Director Michael Walling’s outdoor production of this evergreen comedy begins conventionally enough, with the humans in modern dress (and soon the young lovers strip to undergarments), while the nature-spirits wear American Indian feathers and hides. (Titania carries a papoose.) But what begins as a cute costume conceit deepens into an elegant reimagining of this oft-produced play. Puck becomes a coyote-like trickster from tribal legend. And Shakespearean lines like the “the wolf behowls the moon” take on fresh resonance when chanted under the starry Western sky, with moonlight on Lake Tahoe’s waters. The haunting music performed onstage by American Indian flutist K. Mockingbird is an inspired addition. Walling’s spiritual finale (part Shakespeare, part tribal rite) is serene and visionary—and also well-grounded in the text. You may have seen other productions before, but you haven’t seen a Dream quite like this one. "

(Sacremento News and Review *****)

"What makes this Dream stand out is the use of Native American themes in a gorgeous outdoor setting.... This production moves from comedy into a spiritual dimension, presenting Shakespeare's nature poetry in a new light... It's lovely, almost cosmic... A fresh, satisfying take on this familiar play."

(National Public Radio)

So - as ever - the same things which makes some people rave about a show are exactly the things that other people hate. And that's just the way it should be.

Black Watch / Dark Knight

I saw Black Watch at the Barbican on Thursday. After all the hype, it was either going to be brilliant or unbelievably disappointing: and I'm happy to say it was brilliant! Theatrically, it was very exciting, with a wonderful blend of movement work into stylised fights, song, flying, video.... but what was truly invigorating about the piece was the way in which all this theatricality was employed in the service of a deeply humane politics. I've seen plenty of "the Iraq war is a bad thing" plays, most of which seemed to me to be stating the obvious. What was terrific here was that this was already taken to be the obvious - the consensus "back home" that this was "the worst western foreign policy disaster ever" was simply taken as read - and that freed up the production to talk about the human truth of the war. And so the play is less about Iraq than Fife: it's about male identity, about community and bonding, about belonging and about loss. I was reminded of Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme - in both plays, it becomes very clear that for the soldiers at least war is less about your enemies than your friends.

By way of contrast, the movie of the moment was my cultural fare for Friday night. The Dark Knight has much going for it - it's exciting, it's visually amazing and it's got Heath Ledger in it - and Nancy Crane, who was in Dis-Orientations crops up as a Nurse, no doubt earning far more for a few lines than she did in her entire time with us! But, as usual with Hollywood, the politics are very disturbing. Christopher Nolan's Gotham is far more recognisably New York than was Tim Burton's - and it's a very contemporary New York at that, with much imagery of burnt-out sky-scrapers and crowds running for cover: this is America post 9/11. The Joker is several times described quite explicitly as "a terrorist" - so it's particularly disturbing that, for all of Ledger's whizz-kid performing, he is given no motive. Indeed, Michael Caine as the butler and the "voice of reason" deliberately tells Batman that this enemy has no motive, but simply wishes to destroy, that he is evil. This has been the constant attitude of the right to the perceived Islamist threat, and it is a deeply dangerous attitude because, like the Joker's make-up, it de-humanises the "enemy". Add to this the fact that Batman invades the mobile phones of everybody in the city - and that when Morgan Freeman puts the civil rights case the plot proves that such freedoms are only taken from us for our own good by our wonderful leaders... and the whole thing starts to look suspiciously like an apology for the Bush regime.

First Nations writing

On the plane coming home, I finish reading Carpentaria by the Aboriginal Australian writer Alexis Wright. It's an extraordinary book - incredibly dense in its prose, crazy in its plotting, laden in symbolism, and somehow incredibly compelling. What fascinates me about this book is the way it shifts between what a western writer would construct as different realities, without so much as nodding at any notion that they may be different. Periods of time, dream and waking, politics and prophecy, the mythic and the scientific blend into one another with total disarming ease.

While in America, I've been hunting for pieces to show at the Origins Festival. One new play, by a Cherokee writer called Diane Glancy, has a similar way of blurring what to a western mind would seem to be distinctions or layers of reality. It's called Salvage, and it's being developed with an LA-based organisation called Native Voices at the Autry. In much of my own work, including this recent Dream, and the Orientations plays, I've tried to use theatre as a way of shifting between the everyday world and something more spiritual, more dream-like, more poetic and resonant. But what this writing from First Nations people shows me is a facility in this which makes the very idea of the distinction absurd.

Back to work this morning. New copies of Toufann have been printed, and our new office intern, Ro Lane, reports for duty. We do a VAT return, and post a large cheque. Billy Hiscoke turns up with some DVDs, and Penny is on her way in to discuss the Trilogy. Back to reality, then....

Opposites

At the cast party for the Dream, one of the actors (Lori Prince, who plays Hermia), says she thinks that I deliberately look for "the opposite" of the text. At the time, I say that I might be looking for the opposite of what most people think the text is - but having been mulling it over for the past day or so, I suspect there's a lot in what she says - though I'd never thought of it in quite that way before. After all, theatre is interesting because it's ambiguous, because of the suggestions it can make to the imaginations of the audience. So there's no point in just presenting one thing - a "straight" surface. We need to find the contradictions inherent in human behaviour.

After all, everything contains its opposite. Love contains hatred, and vice-versa. Laughter contains tears: which is why people often laugh at funerals and cry at weddings. "Action is suffering and suffering is action" (Eliot). Sexual attraction includes a powerful element of disgust. And comedy and tragedy are at their most exciting when they turn momentarily one into another. I guess that's really what I'm trying to achieve.

Thanks to Lori for pointing that one out!

American Dream

My production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened on Lake Tahoe last night. Although it's not a Border Crossings production, it (perhaps inevitably) reflects a lot of the concerns in our work, particularly in the way we engage with Native American culture and spirituality. Watching the ending, as the cast go out into the auditorium with their smudge sticks, Kelvin plays his flute and Art speaks his Washo prayer, as the moon shines above them and reflects in the lake, is extremely moving.

I spent the last day or so of rehearsals wondering about the strangeness of the audience in this open-air space. Never having directed outdoors, I wasn't really prepared for the way in which the daylight in which the first half of the play is performed makes the audience far less passive, far more likely to move around, to chat (admittedly about the play), to eat and drink. To begin with, I found it irritating, until we got to Act 5, the play within a play, and I realised that Shakespeare himself portrays an audience which does exactly that. The Dream was probably written for a wedding, so the party element at Tahoe is very much in keeping with the play. Realising that, I began to realise how the early part of the play, which is full of conflicts, actually serves to subvert the conventions within which it was placed. Realising this, we were able to rehearse a much more jolting, intense approach to the early scenes, which really energised the play, and set up an inspiring dynamic between the stage and the auditorium. Space educates again....

4th of July

I've never been in America on Independence Day before. The fireworks over Lake Tahoe, complete with orchestral accompaniment from the Reno Philharmonic, were certainly spectacular! But our afternoon's rehearsal was more so.... I had at last managed to bring a member of the Washo nation, Art George, into the rehearsal room. Art is quite a prominent activist among his people, and we've had a number of conversations about how this production can help heal rifts between them and the other communities here. We showed him our closing scene, the smudging ceremony; and then he told us why it mattered so much to him. For 150 years, Art said, the Washo have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands. Now, they believe that the time has come for their return - not removing the other people who live there today, but as custodians and guardians who care for the beauty and eco-system of this environment. He spoke of spiritual signs that this time was coming. And he thanked us that our work was welcoming and open to the Washo. I looked around the room, and could see that the actors' eyes were filling up. It's not often that our work receives this sort of validation.

The Dream is going to end with another Epilogue, beyond that of Puck and Shakespeare. Art comes onto the stage, bringing his shell and his sage. As the cast move out into the auditorium, he lights the sage from the fire. And then, as Kelvin's flute resonates through the space, he says a prayer in the Washo language, blessing the place, the land, the lake, and the people. He tells me that this will be the first time that these words have been spoken on this sacred land for 150 years.

The great outdoors

For the last couple of days, we've been rehearsing the Dream on the stage at Sand Harbour, Lake Tahoe. It's the first time I have ever directed in the open air, and I am truly loving it. I think the experience of visiting Athens and (especially) Epidauros last year has made a big difference to my understanding of outdoor theatre. I've become much more aware of the power that performance can acquire when it sits in relation to landscape.

Of course, there couldn't be a more perfect play to display this than the Dream. Titania's great speech about climate change acquires a whole new force when there are real mountains, forests, beaches and lakes for her to refer to. And the fact that she is wearing a Native American costume makes it doubly powerful. You become aware of a ritual connection between the performer, the text, the land and the indigenous culture. It's very multi-layered, and at the same time astonishingly simple - because it simply requires the stating of what is actually happening in the moment of performance.

I'm also really enjoying the experience of directing American actors in Shakespeare. The discipline of verse seems to me to be better understood here than it is in contemporary Britain. UK drama schools have just about given up teaching verse in the interests of the fast-track to TV. Maybe that's true of some places here too - but America is a big place and there are enough people with specialist knowledge and detailed training for some masterly iambics to be spun by the lake.

Smoke

The forest fires are raging in the San Francisco Bay area, and Lake Tahoe is swathed in smoke. The mountains, when you can see them, are hazy and clouded. The lake disappears into mist. Several of my actors are getting serious asthma attacks - they tell me the air quality feels worse than New York City, and I can well believe them.

Meanwhile, our American Dream is taking shape. It's usual when talking about rehearsal processes to say "slowly taking shape", but this process is astonishingly fast. It's barely two weeks since we sat down to read the play, and today we were running long sections of it. Given that the same cast are also rehearsing Richard III, this is lightning progress. We've also been joined by our Native American flute player, Kelvin Mockingbird. Kelvin's work is transforming the play, giving a magical echo-chamber to Shakespeare's verse, and filtering it through the indigenous culture into the consciousness of modern America. He's also a wonderful consultant for the First Nations elements we're including in the production.

Last night Kelvin, Catherine Atack and I were invited to the house of one of the board members, Vicki, where we met Danny and Rose, two First Nations people who are working to keep cultural traditions alive in this area. Danny had been part of the AIM (American Indian Movement) in the 1970s - supporting Wounded Knee and going on the Longest Walk. Rose had brought her daughter with her: a beautiful child whose traditional name is Evening Star, and whose English name is Hope. As we talked and laughed around the fire in Vicki's garden, and Kelvin played his flute, there was a real sense that this little girl had been given the right name. We are working together to create real cultural dialogue - and that is an action filled with hope.

Pow-wow

I took my Dream cast to a pow-wow which the Washo nation was hosting for Father's Day. Although I'm the foreigner, it seemed to be a new experience for them as well - very few Americans seem to have much contact with or knowledge of indigenous cultures.

To begin with, it seemed a bit like a village fete - although the stalls were selling sage sticks for smudging ceremonies and dream-catchers rather than home-made cakes and gigantic marrows. Once the dancing started, however, it was an extraordinary experience. The music came from a group of men around a huge drum, beating it together and singing in a very high voice, which seems somehow to be produced by tightening the throat - it's not falsetto. The sound is very mesmerising, and deliberately unvaried. Dancing to this sound, in their incredible bright costumes, people can easily move into a trance-like state: and of course that is the purpose of many First Nations dances - they help us to contact some other state. We were invited to have a go at the round dance ourselves - it's not exactly difficult.... you just face into the big circle and move sideways in time with the drum.... but the repetitiveness, even of this simple step, does take you into a slightly altered consciousness.

Under a clear night sky, with a nearly full moon, the landscape came alive.

Dinner with the Washo

I'm back at Lake Tahoe, in the US, directing A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Festival (and my old friend Jan Powell, the new Artistic Director here). One project often influences another, and I'm making use of all the ORIGINS work with First Nations people to explore the play's magic, its relationship to the environment, and its preoccupation with healing.

If there's one thing I learnt from Bullie's House, it's the importance of following the traditional protocols in dealing with First Nations people. It's not just that it's right and proper, it also enriches the process massively. Here, the traditional custodians of the land are the Washo people, and we need to be sure that they are not mis-represented in what we do. More than that, I want them to be represented in person - the Indian boy should surely be Washo, and perhaps there should be an adult present to give the whole thing weight and dignity.

Last night, I had dinner with some senior members of the tribe, and realised just how much dignity this might be. Steven, one of the Elders, said a Washo prayer before we ate. It was extraordinary to hear the language, which is very ancient (at least 10,000 years) and very musical. Totally unlike Indo-European sounds and rhythms. I asked them about ceremony and blessing, about music and dance, about clothing and face-painting. As with so many of the people from older cultures I've been lucky enough to meet, they were thrilled that somebody actually wanted to know.

The Washo are quite a small tribe today - about 2,000. There were more before a massacre in the 19th century, from which the nation has never really recovered. The community centre where we met to share our meal was in a small settlement next to the old boarding school, where Washo children were sent to teach them Western ways. The Elders reminisced about the time when their customs and language were illegal; how they had learnt from their own Elders in secret. Listening to Steven speak his Washo prayer, I wondered how long the language could survive at all.

It's official

The project has been announced on the EU website, so I think we can tell everybody now!

I should be back in Tahoe by now, but the visa has only just arrived. It always takes so long to get a US work visa... I am told, however, that there is hope - and it's not just to do with Obama! Check this article. It finally cam this morning, and I fly tomorrow. So - lots to do today!

Welcome Penny!

Thursday morning was spent interviewing people who'd applied for the Creative Producer's position on the Trilogy. The appointment coincided with signing the contract for the EU grant, and Collage Arts signing the guarantee - and I had Preeti from Collage with me as we did the interviews. The people who came through the room were one of the first bits of proof I'd had that this bigger project really will be a leap forward for the company on every level.

The person we ended up appointing is Penny Mayes - who used to run Trestle, raised the money for Arts Depot, has previously toured in China, and who for a time chaired the Arts Council's projects panel. If anybody can make this work, she can! And on Friday we got a little blessing for her arrival, in the form of a Connections Through Culture grant which will allow her to come to Shanghai with us later in the year.

The Audience is Different

I had coffee at the National Gallery with Yvette Vaughan-Jones from Visiting Arts. Before this organisation was re-structured, they had funded us a couple of times in the past; but now the Arts Council has clawed back the grants they used to offer into its own remit. Yvette, as a result, is changing what Visiting Arts is all about, and making its remit more specific. Some of this is to do with training and the facilitation of exchange on a managerial level (a bit like the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme), and some of it is much closer to a form of commissioning. I was very intrigued by her ideas for a web-based project around mapping, which would deal with small localities and yet be global.

We talked a lot about the specificity of performance: the fact that it exists only in the particular time and place. To Yvette’s mind, this is how performance can and should justify its existence in the 21^st century (because it’s doing something at a community level which film and TV can never do), but also suggests that some of the old structures won’t work any more – indeed, that they are “colonial”. And she challenges me about the idea of touring The Orientations Trilogy.

This has been much on my mind recently: partly because it looks as if it will happen in Shanghai this autumn, and partly because I’m also marking lots of essays about different audience responses to various pieces of work, including Bravely Fought the Queen and Robert’s Seven Streams of the River Ota. In each case, the students quite rightly point out how the same show can mean totally different things to different audiences: how a play about westernised Indians is a different play when presented in Leicester, London or Mumbai; how a Quebecois response to Japan is very different in Japan, and London, and Montreal.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the Trilogy has to remain fluid, and shift according to where we are. Thinking about Dis-Orientations, the most obvious point is Song’s narration in the second half. In China, it would seem right to let Song speak for herself, in Chinese, as the main narrative voice. She does not require the translation / mediation which we used in London. And maybe the comic scene about language learning should not be about a Chinese person learning English, but an English person learning Chinese. Maybe it should be Alex, not Song, who is the victim of the oldest joke in the book……

I phone Radhakrishna to check whether he’s up for the workshop this autumn. “I am in my village” he says. In the background, I can hear the bells and the tabla of a Yakshagana performance, in its traditional context. Now, how on earth will that read in Shanghai?

Back to China?

For quite a while, since February 27th in fact, I've been sitting on what could be the most exciting bit of news Border Crossings has had in a very long time. The reason I've been keeping quiet is that it's an EU grant for the Orientations Trilogy, and it's bureaucratically complex. I've kept feeling that if I put it out there, something is bound to go wrong. But I've just heard that the contact is on its way to us, and so it seems it will all happen.

Because we're quite a small organisation, the EU isn't really geared up to dealing with us. But they liked our list of partners, they liked the project.... and so they went for it. The only difficulty was that somebody has to guarantee to pay the pre-funding back if we don't deliver the project! We couldn't - we don't have sufficient resources to guarantee it. I have been searching a lot - finally Collage Arts agreed to be guarantors, and will be coming in to supervise the admin as a result - which is probably just what we need. They've done EU projects before, so they know what they're talking about. They'll be helping me interview potential Producers at the end of the month.

We open up the lines of communication to China. Nick Yu, from SDAC, is excited about the chance to host the devising workshop - but needs to check out just how many people they can actually look after (he's only had directors on their own before). The Shanghai Festival is keen to show Dis-Orientations this autumn, but needs a co-producing venue (possibly SDAC..). So the negotiations begin, and the frustration of nothing being tied down continues and grows. But we're getting somewhere, that's for sure.

Aotearoa

The Origins festival bubbles on - and I'm now pretty close to getting a programme together. Funding the programme is another matter, of course.... but it's looking promising. The last few days have been about the First Nations work coming out of Aotearoa (or New Zealand, as it's commonly known!). I spent much of Wednesday with Ian Conrich at the Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck. Ian knows a terrifying amount about New Zealand film, and has suggestions for our film programme. I need to find a time to sit down and watch them. It's made easier by the fact that his Centre has every NZ film ever made but two in its archive.

It was also Ian who introduced me to Ariana Tikao; a Maori musician who was in London for a few days. We had lunch together. Ariana showed me the visuals for her new album Tuia, created by Louise Potiki Bryant. Louise also happens to be one of the key figures in the Atamira Dance Collective, a pile of whose DVDs had just landed on my desk. It's fascinating work - not so much dance as a meld of movement theatre, text, projected visuals and Maori ritual. The overall effect is the creation of a new form - a contemporary spiritual theatre which allows the indigenous traditions to speak in our time.

It reminds me of Lemi Ponifasio's wonderful Requiem, which Peter commissioned for New Crowned Hope. It's also like the work of The Conch, which I saw last night at the Barbican. This piece, called Vula, placed Pacific Island women (and one Maori) in a huge pool of water, which became a space for the celebration of the feminine in those cultures. It was, again, a very beautiful piece of ritual theatre. There's clearly a movement coming out of Aotearoa: a movement which is partly about recognising indigenous cultures, but which is also about that key thing - the way indigenous cultures can give us a route back to the spiritual theatre.

From Dzifa's report

Dzifa sent through a very comprehensive, and fascinating, report on her time with us. With her permission, I'm going to quote a chunk here on the blog, because it raises some really interesting issues about intercultural theatre practice:

"In my mid-term report I mentioned that I would investigate British actors’ seeming concentration on head and voice as against involvement and control of the whole body when performing on stage, (which is what I have been trained to do). I asked about this at the drama department of the University of Plymouth, at the Barbican Theatre and also at the Drum Theatre, all in Plymouth, and indeed, in other places that the programme had taken me to. The most probable of the reasons I had been given came from the movement director/teacher, Anna Morrissey of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her view is that ‘it could be a class thing’. She believes that those in theatre are middle class, and those who go to theatre are also middle class; the middle class and perhaps the upper class tend to favour ‘stillness’, even if this is unconscious. ‘It’s like two middle class people talking to each other, they look each other in the eye, and that’s it’. She added that they train actors to control the use of the hands.

The cultural/class thing made a lot of sense to me. I agree with Anna Morrissey on the issue of actors being trained to control the use of their hands on stage, because even with Africans who are usually very expressive and therefore tend to gesticulate a lot when they communicate, our performers are taught to recognize that once they get on stage they need to get out of the ‘natural’ and consider artistic beauty, aesthetic, and so control and employ only meaningful gestures. It makes sense also that people of different social classes would gesticulate differently even if they are speaking the same line; that is where actor’s put on characterization.

My cultural background and training make me see some British actors as a bit ‘stiff’ on stage. On the other hand the stiffness I see may be non-existent to people of British culture and social class. In this sense my expectations in actor training techniques have been a bit frustrated. Other exercises on correct breathing, voice projection and other general practices in actor training are similar, and so reassuring. On the whole, I consider it a great privilege to have been in rehearsal with the famed Royal Shakespeare Company; it has been a wonderful two weeks."

Back to Africa

We were asked by a new African Arts organisation, called Aduna, to run a three-day workshop called "Artist Training" at the Africa Centre. I really had very little idea of what this would be like: all I could do was offer my theatre skills and practice, and see where it went. And it was a joy. Unlike Western artists, African performers don't categorise themselves over-much. So, although the room was filled with people calling themselves musicians, or actors, or dancers, or poets, the reality was that they were all creators and performers, and able to encompass a multiplicity of roles within that. So I was able to put a cora in dialogue with poetry, to set naturalistic theatre against dance, to make images with the body. Nobody seemed fazed by anything. And so, very naturally, a ritualised performance form emerged from the workshop, without my having to impose it in any way. As so often recently, I found myself thinking that Africa holds the key to a theatrical future - a form which is not confined by eonomically dictated specialisms, but which arises out of social and spiritual need.

Thinking like this, I went to see the amazing Molora at the good old Barbican. "Molora" is a Xhosa word for "ashes", and the play, which is based on the Oresteia, especially Libation Bearers, is dominated by death and mourning. But, by placing the myth in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation commission, it manages to avoid the inexorable cycle of retribution which Aeschylus postulates, without his dodgy solution of a male-dominated institutional justice. The chorus is fantastic - a group of traditional performers from the Transkei, all but one of them women. With their blankets and their songs, they remind me of the Chorus we created for Dilemma. In fact, I find myself thinking that this production in many ways echoes what we did in that play. The Chorus can still be real in Africa, in a way which is very difficult to find in the fragmented West. The voice of a community is so vital to theatre - and so tricky to articulate.

China controversies

The unrest in Tibet is making our work with China more controversial. With Spielberg pulling out of his Olympic role, the French talking boycotts, and nightly coverage of human rights violations, it's not really surprising that one actor has already voiced doubts about working in China for political reasons. And yet.... I tend to doubt the value of boycotts, particularly cultural boycotts. If artists simply shut up and abandon people because they disapprove of their government's policies in certain areas, then where is the hope for a way forward? Where is the possibility of dialogue?

I re-read the open letter which Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil sent to the people of Israel when they went there with L'Indiade in 1988. It states in great detail the very specific beliefs held by the company members on the Palestinian question, and on the way Israel had dealt with that question to date (and sadly it remains deeply relevant). Then it says: "We have hesitated about coming; we have talked, we have consulted a fair number of you, and we have decided not to add a facile refusal to so many criminal refusals. Nothing will persuade us to despair of the strength of words, to renounce our faith in humanity and also in art. We shall never renounce them."

Of course, this letter was published in five Israeli newspapers, in Hebrew, Arabic and English. I doubt whether such a letter would be published anywhere at all in China, even online. But that does not invalidate the truth and the inspirational quality of what it says. Or of what theatre can, with hope and passion, perhaps achieve.

Minghella's last movie

Last night, I was invited to the BFI for the premiere of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I'm not quite sure how the BBC put together its guest list - the talent on display ranged from Sanjeev Bhasker and Meera Syal via Jacqueline Wilson, Joan Bakewell, Alan Rickman and Andrew Marr to Tessa Jowell and Edwina Currey. I mean... Edwina Currey?? Still, somehow I was on the list, probably because of the involvement with African theatre and BBC Africa Beyond.

Mid-afternoon, glancing at the Guardian website, I realised that this was going to be a rather unusual film premiere. The director, Anthony Minghella, had died that morning at the age of 54.

I met him a couple of years ago when he came to see Nixon in China at the Coliseum. He was very much in evidence around ENO at that time, directing a version of Madame Butterfly, which was not his best work. He was incredibly generous about Nixon, though - and managed, while clearly being aware of his superstar status, to avoid any hint of arrogance or condescension. In fact, he seemed rather humble to me. This impression of him as a man, formed on the basis of one brief interval chat, chimed in with what lots of people were saying about him last night - Richard Curtis and Mark Thompson made speeches before the screening, as did Anthony's brother Dominic and his producer. Knowing the work, it doesn't surprise me very much - and I would emphasise that I mean all the work, including the stage plays which will probably get ignored in the obituary hype, but which I think are most expressive of his artistry. Made in Bangkok, one of the biggest commercial flops of all time, is a brilliant play - and I'm happy to acknowledge its influence on aspects of the Orientations Trilogy. It's very acid, very brutal - and at the same time very humane and compassionate. What theatre ought to be.

The same qualities are there in this last film. I read the novel last year - basically a series of comic anecdotes around some engaging characters. But Minghella makes use of the Botswana setting to flesh the whole thing out, and to place the characters in a spectacularly photographed landscape, which makes real sense of them. He draws off his dramaturgical talent to make links between storylines where the book had none, and so crafts the film into what feels like a multi-stranded narrative. And it's great to see an artist go out with a piece of work that is so deeply life-affirming. So warmly comic, so gleeful.

Attempts on her Life

Attempts performed a week ago, for a mere four shows, but I'm only now able to think and write about it, not least because ever since I've been laid up with a very dicky stomach - which I don't think was a case of post-show depression.... I mean, it wasn't as if I didn't have stuff to do!
I feel very proud of what a group of students were able to achieve, and very empowered by what I've experienced with them. One of the joys of working in a drama school is that the "permission to fail" which we all go on about in theatre, but which in reality doesn't really exist, is actually present. Because the institutional priorities are educational rather than artistic or commercial, you don't have to make something that's a sure-fire hit. You can take risks. And so, for me, directing in drama schools allows for a space of experiment, where I can try things I wouldn't dare try professionally.
And what I learn, of course, is that I should do them professionally. In this case, the key has been the complete open-ness of the process - of allowing everybody in a very diverse group a real voice, and encouraging those voices to be different from one another. It's also been really interesting in terms of the way text can be part of what is actually a devising process. We touched this a bit with Dis-Orientations, but I feel I can find ways of going much further with it when we re-visit that play and make its sequel. Attempts on Her Life is an authored play, of course, but one completely open to many, many interpretations. Maybe I could ask a writer or two to "seed" a devising process with some massively open scenes like this.... maybe this would be a way towards giving our devised work some of the textual wealth and dramaturgical discipline of our scripted pieces. I often feel that the devised work is the core of the company in terms of its cultural and political-artistic agenda, but that the scripted work is often more critically successful, and that this is why.
On the other hand, maybe only Martin Crimp knows how to write these sort of scenes.....

Learning from Students

Attempts on her Life opens this week, and I'm making use of the lull before we start to plot lighting to catch up a bit on the blog. It's been an extraordinary process, and immensely valuable for me in developing my devised work. Because Martin Crimp's script is so open, so ambiguous, so freeing for the performers and the director, the process has been very similar to that of devising. Except that the language is rich and disciplined, in ways which text derived from improvisation tends not to be. It's set me thinking about ways of integrating pre-exisiting text into the devising process, or of using a writer in a devising process, without that person acquiring the dreaded authorial authority.

The students have also taught me a huge amount about what it means to be alive right now. It's great to do a play about the present moment with young people - they've grown up with the internet, with media dominance, with the war on terror. The other day we talked about 9/11 - it turned out that one of them celebrated his 15th birthday that day. So what to me seems strange and new, is to them familiar and ordinary.

Seeing the world through such eyes, I went to Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler at the Barbican last week. Fantastic to see an Ibsen production which wasn't bogged down in period detail and Norwegian depression. Ostermeier drags the story into a cold and sharp contemporary reality, with the result that the play becomes extremely funny, like one of Calixto's blood and sperm productions. The reviews have been complaining that it isn't "moving". I'd have thought that was exactly the point.

Another blog

I'm aware I've been a bit negligent of you, dear reader, for a few weeks. It's because I'm deeply mired in rehearsals for Attempts on Her Life by Martin Crimp at Rose Bruford. But don't despair! This being a very contemporary show, it has its own blog, which operates a bit differently from this one but gives some food for thought. Everybody involved in the show is posting to it - which, given that the play is in many ways about viewpoint, seems only fair and appropriate.

Check out: http://attempts-bruford.blogspot.com

Theatre for Development

Dzifa's mid-term report to the Arts Council on her Fellowship begins in a characteristic Ghanaian way, with a proverb: ‘It is a child who has never travelled who boasts that his mother is the world’s best cook’. So, she's obviously finding her exposure to the UK theatre a valuable experience!

On Tuesday, I took her down to Winchester, to visit the University's MA in Theatre for Development, run by Tim Prentki. A fascinating day for both of us. Dzifa and the National Drama Company are often asked to help out with development projects in Ghana - she talks with justifiable pride about some work they did to help women in remote areas understand issues around pregnancy, childbirth and modern medicine, overcoming a taboo about knives being in contact with the body. One of her requests was to find out "how it's done here". I had expected the answer might be "not at all" - my image of TfD had been of NGOs heading out into Africa and Asia - but it turns out that most of Tim's students are about to begin major projects in the UK, and he confirms that this is the trend. Matters close to home, like disability, climate change, and child rights, are coming to be more and more significant in the TfD agenda. Tim points out that this is not unrelated to DCMS and Arts Council policy trends - there's quite a bit of money available for work with a clear social agenda.

In spite of our involvement with Third World countries and cultural diversity within the UK, and the importance of education /community work in all we do, I've tended to shy away from specific TfD work with Border Crossings. I suppose I tend to adhere to Sam Shepard's idea that "Ideas arise from plays, and not the other way round". Theatre which merely illustrates a social point tends to be bad theatre.

But, as Tim points out - this is also bad development. Much of the TfD work done around HIV in Africa was so preachy that it didn't have any effect at all. The more valuable forms of TfD, and the ones towards which these students are clearly being encouraged, are those which draw off the ideas, needs and creativity of the people involved. Like Natya Chetana does in Orissa. And actually, like we do when we have community workshops to explore the background to a new piece. Maybe we're closer to TfD than I thought.

Understanding America

I was wrong about Obama winning in Nevada. That shows how unreliable conversations with theatre people tend to be as a litmus paper for public opinion. On the back of the Nevada caucus, Hillary Clinton is now well and truly the front runner. Again. So the electorate, at least in the casino state, has responded to her spin about idealism and rhetoric being no substitute for experience in practical politics and getting things done. The irony of this is that Hillary’s biggest success was probably in the field of idealism and rhetoric (her Beijing speech on gender equality and human rights) and her biggest failure was in practical politics and getting things done (the aborted health care reforms). But America has a short memory.

Bernard Shaw said that we were two countries divided by a common language - and I often feel that the cultural gaps are pretty deep trenches. When I tell Jan about our production of Fool for Love in 1995, she muses as to whether English people could ever really get to grips with Sam Shepard. Isn’t it like Americans trying to do Oscar Wilde? I remember, years ago, sitting with her watching a truly appalling production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Portland, Oregon; and hope to hell that our production didn’t look like that to any American eyes.

In spite of all this, I tend to feel that the outsider’s eye can actually be very acute, and can often see aspects of a culture which those inside it don’t perceive. This trip has been less than a week long, but several people have commented on how the production plans for the Dream seem to suggest a very detailed insight into not just American society, but very specifically Lake Tahoe society. I’m not claiming any prophetic status - it’s simply that theatre itself is a powerful crucible in which social and cultural tensions work themselves out. And this place has plenty of those.

Oh yes - I’ve also discovered that the latest fad in American criticism is something called Green Theory. Eco-crit. Looking at literature through the haze of climate change. You can get a Theory for most things these days, if only you look hard enough.

A Tale of Two Lakes

I'm in Nevada, USA - on caucus day. On my way to a meeting yesterday, I passed through the University in Reno, and who should be there but Barack Obama. From the conversations I've had here, I suspect he will win in this state. It's rather inspiring that people here are talking a lot about the need for real vision in politics, and seem to be sick to death of pragmatism.

The reason I'm here is that my old friend Jan Powell, who I worked with at Tygres Heart Shakespeare in Oregon during the early 90s, is now Artistic Director of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, and has invited me to direct A Midsummer Night's Dream here in the summer. I could hardly say no.... Tahoe is an amazing beauty spot - an Alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada. At this time of year, it's surrounded by thick snow. I'm staying at the Cal-Neva hotel (on the border between Nevada and California), which was the haunt of Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys and Marilyn Munroe. And, like everything else in Nevada, it's a casino. There are slot machines everywhere - even in the airport and the supermarkets.

Partly because of the amazing landscape, and partly because of what we've been doing with Origins, I've been drawn to the idea of using the Native American spirituality which is so powerful here, and relates so well to the landscape, as a route in to the magic of the Dream. I'm also, of course, very aware of indigenous protocols, as a result of our work on Bullie's House and since. So Jan, Catherine Atack (the Festival's Executive Director) and I bundled ourselves into a car and set out to meet the Paiute nation.

This involved a trip into the desert. Nevada is astonishing: the distance from the Alpine Tahoe to the lunar landscape of Pyramid Lake is really very short. Yet the contrast couldn't be greater - look at these pictures! Pyramid Lake is fed from Tahoe via a river, and the Paiute people have been fighting against its damming and to protect their environment for a full century now. At their beautiful museum near the town of Nixon, two Paiute men, Ben and Ralph, talk to us for a long time, with that incredible generosity of spirit shown by so many First Nations people, when the listener shows a bit of open-nes and interest. Ralph, the elder of the two, tells us stories in his own language, and then translates them into English. He talks about the 10,000 year history of his people in this place, about their brief relationship with white America (the first contact was 1844), and about the prophecies of global warming and climate change (see Titania's great speech at the start of the Dream). It's them, not us, who suggest that there might be ways to collaborate on the production, to involve them in our process, and to bring the children of the tribe to see it.

It's one of those rare, privileged days, when you remember just why theatre matters, and how cultural dialogue rally does have so much to give.

My visit here is very brief, so Jan and Catherine will have to contact the Wahoe people, whose traditional land is Tahoe itself, after I've gone. If the response is similar, we'll really be on to something.

Dzifa's Fellowship

Dzifa Glikpoe stayed on after the end of Dilemma, with an Arts Council International Fellowship, hosted by ourselves and Africa Beyond. I've had the job of putting her in touch with people and organisations who can help her develop the skills and knowledge she needs to move the National Drama Company on when she gets back to Ghana. Nice to feel the whole thing will really leave a legacy.

So - she's been observing actor training at Rose Bruford, and giving workshops at the Royal Scottish. She's currently at the Barbican in Plymouth, seeing how a smaller theatre operates, and she's going to be watching Ramin Gray in rehearsal at the RSC. Plus, we're going together to find out about the Theatre for Development MA at Winchester, and we met with Femi and Thomas from Tiata Fahodzi last week. This is the company whose production of Joe Guy at the Soho I really enjoyed in the autumn. The remit is to work with British artists from the African diaspora, and the line-up for the 10th anniversary gala at the end of this month suggests they do very well! Dzifa turns out to know the woman who co-founded the company wth Femi. She's now back in Ghana, teaching at Legon, but before that she was acting here, and contributed half the name. "Fahodzi" is Twi for "freedom". It's part of Femi's emphasis on a West African, rather than a strictly Nigerian, identity for the work. Kwame Nkrumah would have approved!

The Culture Secretary

In Saturday's Guardian, there was an interview by John Harris with the Culture Secretary, James Purnell. The underlying suggestion seemed to be that there is a huge change going on in Cultural policy; and the interview is timed to coincide with Brian McMaster's review of public arts funding, which seems to shift the emphasis away from the last ten years of "art as social engineering" and towards something called "excellence". In theory, this should be no bad thing. The arts have been moithering around since 1997, trying to prove the social value of projects, instead of being honest about what they are actually doing. Purnell and McMaster have also rather adroitly wrong-footed the many organisations currently protesting against the Arts Council's recent Night of the Long Knives: the protests have all been couched in the language of social inclusion (e.g "we cater for children, pensioners, refugee communities and disabled people"), at exactly the moment the DCMS has moved away from this towards a language of artistic quality. My concern is that this may just be a smoke-screen. Reading between the lines of the interview, the emphasis on quality looks very like an excuse to cut organisations which would just have to be funded if social inclusion were the key criterion. When Purnell says that he won't "tolerate average work because it happens to be in a particular location", it's clearly the voice of the man who cuts funds, rather than the man who provides them.

I like the way he defines "excellence", however. "To have [people's] meanings shaken up and think about the world in a different way". That sounds like what we do. How far it will be possible for public policy to mould an arts sector which does this is something only time will tell. I just hope we don't see a return to the definition of "excellence" we saw in the Glory of the Garden days, when the great monoliths of the cultural sector gobbled up every penny going. Excellence is not the same as centralisation, nor is it the same as scale. I hope Purnell stands by his own definition.

2007

A really great year for the company - almost up there with our annus mirabilis of 2004. Dilemma was, of course, the highlight, and I shall long treasure the memory of a packed house rising to its feet in one spontaneous movement on the last night. But there was also much exciting work in the ever-growing Laboratory, with the work around First Nations theatre, and the launch of the Origins Festival with the symposium at Australia House being especially exciting. And we also published our first Theatre and.... book, Theatre and Slavery, with a very glitzy list of contributors. And we laid the foundations for some really important developments in the future. As I write this, Dzifa Glikpoe is in the UK as our Arts Council International Fellow; we're talking to organisations in China and India about the next stage of the Orientations Trilogy, and Origins is moving on. Yes, it's been a great year.....

A few cultural highlights for me personally (this being New Year's Eve).

The best book I read this year was the first: English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. An amazing (and very funny) voyage into the colonial process in Australia. I also loved reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I devoured in one hungry sitting (admittedly sitting on a plane for a long time). It's incredibly disturbing and deeply compelling. I finally got round to reading Life of Pi, of which I had great expectations, none of which were fulfilled. It's all the same... Best factual book (though that's not an adequate description for this wonderful poetic journey) - Wild by Jay Griffiths.

In the theatre, I much enjoyed Complicite's A Disappearing Number, and Peter Brook's production of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, both at the Barbican, and Lemi Ponifasio's beautiful Polynesian ritual Requiem at the QEH. It was also wonderful to see Ngapartji Ngapartji at the Dreaming in Australia, and this Festival is my overall cultural experience of the year. I also saw some great films there: Rhoda Roberts' A Sister's Love, and Alan Collins' Sunset to Sunrise (the latter we later screened at the Origins symposium). In mainstream film, I guess my film of the year is The Last King of Scotland.

Music: John Adams (of course) - The Flowering Tree and Dharma at Big Sur.

Roll on 2008....

Books for Ghana

The year ends on a high note for us, with a grant from the Morel Trust, which will enable us to distribute 100 copies of the Theatre and Slavery book around Ghanaian libraries. That's very good news! Too often books like this don't get read where they can really make a difference. I've still not given up hope of getting the production out there - though that's a challenge! - this is at least a start.

Dilemma and the trip to China have left me feeling optimistic about the future - though there are many signs that I shouldn't be! The Arts Council ended the year by sending letters to a great many clients informing them that their revenue funding is being cut. The list is very long - with the Drill Hall probably the most shocking of them all. If there were any sign of new clients stepping in as RFOs, that would be a compensation, but there doesn't seem to be any. And here are we clinging on as a project-funded company.... What's more, the British Council is apparently closing all (yes all) its arts departments. I don't yet know much about this - I can't imagine it means that there won't be any more arts activity within the organisation, but it does sound very like the arts will again be pressed into the service of other masters, like "development" and "governance", and the inevitable propaganda for the British education system.

Mme. Mao's suicide

On my last evening in China, I finished reading The White-Boned Demon. I was amazed to discover that Jiang Ching actually wasn't in prison when she hanged herself, but in a "treatment apartment". Ross Terrill writes: "Toward 3.00 a.m. a weak and depressed Jiang crept from her bedroom to the bathroom and with several handkerchiefs fashioned a noose and tied it to an iron frame above the bathtub... At 3.30 a.m. a nurse came in and found her suspended above the bathtub." This is amazing, given that when we created Dis-Orientations we had no idea that there was a bathtub anywhere near when Mme. Mao died. And yet the image we found was of her hanging herself at the same time as Alex prepared her own fatal bath. Spooky or what?

Tianjin and back to Shanghai

Tianjin, an hour or so from Beijing by train, is "Not a very big city", or so I am told by Zhao Hui from the International Cultural Exchange Agency of Tianjin, China, who meets me at the station. Its population is only 11 million people. Fair enough: you would have to add London's measly 6 million to that in order to match Shanghai.

I knew very little about the place before this trip, but I've been reading about its particular importance for Jiang Ching during the Cultural Revolution. She was very popular here: a bit of an irony considering that Zhou Enlai was also educated in this city. As Hui and her boss, Qiao Zhi, drive me through the urban sprawl, I can imagine her raving away amidst its Stalinist architecture. It's not a very pretty place.

Qiao Zhi has been interested in Dis-Orientations since it first appeared on the CTC website, and we've exchanged emails from time to time ever since. I scared him a while ago with a suggested fee for performances, but now things look more possible, if the Yue Opera Company and the Festival do what they said they would / might. I'm very aware that we've not talked about money at all - I hope that the Chinese partners will handle finance in China as we did in the UK, but that's by no means a given. At least Qiao Zhi is direct about this from the start: they will pay a fee for one performance in Tianjin, provided they can afford that fee. Fair enough!

Qiao Zhi and Zhao Hui turn out to be incredibly kind, hospitable hosts. Our meeting only takes an hour or so, but they then take my for lunch, followed by looking at videos of other work they've presented (virtually all of it Chinese, in spit of the International label), and then a shopping trip in the "tourist area", during which they help me haggle over clothes for the children, and insist on buying me a traditional hand-painted bust of a Peking Opera performer. As if that wasn't enough, we then go for dinner (although it's only three hours since a big lunch). This time it's traditional Tianjin food, which is like no cuisine I've ever tasted. We have a sweet purple mash which they tell me is made from "something like a big tomato"; three different porridges in incandescent colours, one of which tastes like liquid marzipan; various fungi and the comparatively familiar pork in honey sauce. They're very sweet-toothed in Tianjin. The restaurant, called 1928 after the year it opened, is vast, and the waiters are all mounted on roller skates to deal with the distances they have to travel. As well as food, there's a Peking opera cabaret, a little bazaar, and a photographic exhibition, which includes images from the Cultural Revolution period. There's one of a performance taking place in a village, as a form of political education. In another photo, a family is sitting on the floor of their tiny home. Qiao Zhi says that his family was just like that twenty years ago. It's not all that long, really. He's a young man, and yet he has seen enormous changes in his lifetime. At the next table is an old lady with her family. What she must have seen....

Another overnight train brings me back to Shanghai, and a meeting with Nick Yu from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. I enjoyed meeting Nick when I was last here, and felt we had a lot of similar ideas. I'd intended this to be a courtesy call really; and was interested to hear about his recent projects. He's done an intriguing piece called Drift, set in different times, and a re-working of the first Chinese play to adopt the Western spoken form (huaju), exactly 100 years ago. This play was itself adapted from Uncle Tom's Cabin. In Nick's version, the master-slave relationship reflects on the position of the artist in relation to powerful people.... potent stuff or what? I tell him about our own work on slavery - it's an interesting coincidence. Then Nick asks if we would like to develop another project in collaboration with SDAC. Well, yes.... how about Re-Orientations? He jumps at the idea. This is intriguing. Maybe we can present Dis-Orientations here, and develop the third part with a different partner but around the same time... I begin the usual conversation about possible funding sources, and Nick cuts in to say that he knows that's a problem in the UK, but that he already has the money for the Chinese actors and for our accommodation and per diems. So that means I only have to find funding for flights and UK fees. This is starting to get very interesting indeed! Of course, there's many a slip, and I promise myself that I won't get too excited. Yet.

De-briefing session with Ophelia Huang at the British Council. She sounds all the cautionary notes I've been sounding to myself - only louder. In particular, she thinks it's important to find somebody who can be a bi-lingual contact between ourselves and the Yue Opera, as much as anything so that the British Council doesn't appear to get involved in direct negotiations of contracts etc. She's going to check with Director You if there's an English-speaker among their admin staff, and I promise to take some soundings in London. I have a few ideas. SDAC is less of a problem: Nick's English is fluent.

I walk back along Fuzhou Lu, the street of bookshops and the Yu Fu Theatre. I'm fired up enough to think I should invest in some research materials for the next stage of the project. Mao's poetry. A VCD of Mei Lanfang. The Journey to the West. A CD and DVD of the androgynous Super-Girl Li Yuchun, who is now being marketed under the gender-and-culture ambiguous title "Chris Lee". Where might all this lead us?