Thomas Keneally shipwrecked

Tom was on Desert Island Discs this morning. I got used to his voice through a saga of phone-calls in the build-up to getting Bullie's House on: nice to hear him again. By a funny coincidence, today I also finished reading his novel A Family Madness, which is a journey into deeply disturbing material across two parallel narratives - one in contemporary Australia, the other around the Belorussian involvement in World War Two. This is characteristic of Tom, and one of the things which drew me to his work in the first place: he's very much aware of the interdependence of seemingly discreet spheres of operation - the way in which global history affects each and every life, however parochial it may seem to others, and indeed to itself. Bullie's House was set on a remote mission station - and was about the great spiritual and political questions of our time. At one point in the BBC interview, Tom says: "The best stories happen on the fault lines between races and cultures". That could be the motto of Border Crossings.

Full steam ahead

The last few weeks have been packed with admin - all of which is moving very much in the right direction. The really good news is that Dilemma has now been funded by the Arts Council, the Commonwealth Foundation, Passage of Music and the Gibbs Trust. Which means we're on. Kate (who runs Bilimankwe, and is going to be producer on this project) and I carve up the admin jobs - which are legion. The most immediate tasks are around bringing people from Ghana, where the news of the go-ahead has been greeted with much rejoicing! We need a work permit, which means getting passport details. I suspect at least one of the people we're inviting may not have a passport - and that there may also be no record of her date of birth, which will make everything a bit more complex than it really needs to be. Of course, I may be wrong, and I hope I am. By a fortunate coincidence, Steve Collins, a young director who we're intending to take on as an intern on this, is currently in Accra with Theatre for a Change, so he can help smooth the way and sort some of the cultural bridges. I doubt he'll still be there by the time the cast need to apply for visas, so we may have to get British Council help there.

Phone Ama Ata Aidoo. She's very excited, and sure that she will be able to come for at least a week, possibly more. This is a big boost to the marketing - which is probably the biggest job of the lot. Plus it will be wonderful to have such an eminent figure around our work.

Meanwhile, the Origins Festival is also moving on. We've got funds from the US Embassy and from Arts WA for the Advisory Board's meetings and the launch in September. I meet up with Ian Connich, the Director of the new Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, and he offers to show some Maori short films for the launch. This will be great - it's a way of involving some element of presentation even at this early stage. I phone Allan Collins (Aboriginal film maker) in Alice Springs, to see if we can also show his amazing film Sunset to Sunrise. He seems very open to the idea, and tells me amazing things about the background to the piece. In order to allow the elder Max to tell his story, they spent six weeks consulting other elders about protocols, and then went to the specific place in the bush where Max's father was born, and sat under a specific tree to tell the story. None of this is overt in the film, but it goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary resonance it has.

Ophelia Huang emails from Shanghai to say we've got a CTC grant for me to go to China and meet Director You again, with a view to moving the Trilogy forward. Hopefully I can get this to happen in December, once Dilemma is done - I'd like to be in the country till then if I can. But there are also pressures to try and get the work seen in the first half of 2008 - not least the China Now Festival. I met their Programme Manager, Fenella Barber, who would like the project to be part of the Festival. Worry that suddenly everything is happening at once..... which is great, of course......

Zero Culture

For the last few months, we've been sharing the Wood Green office with Bilimankwe Arts and Zero Culture. The idea is that the three companies collaborate in a Consortium, which is proving very fruitful as Kate from Bilimankwe takes on the producer's role for Dilemma. Last night we went to see Zero Culture's show Find Me Amongst the Black at the Purcell Room on the South Bank: and started to see some real points of contact there too.

Zero Culture is run by Hardial S. Rai, who I've known ever since we took Bravely Fought the Queen to Watermans in the very early days of the company. He was running the Asian programme there at the time, and was very helpful in my first ventures into Asian casting. One of his recommendations, Harmage Singh Kalarai, who played Jiten, is there for the show. So are Suman Bhuchar and Shobana Jeyasingh, plus Manoj from Collage Arts, who it turns out formed London's first Asian theatre company with Hardial and Harmage, way back in the 70s before even Tara. But the evening is no nostalgic reunion: it feels very contemporary. Hardial has brought together a text by Parv Bancil, based on the background to the 2005 Birmingham riots, with choreography by Darshan Singh Bhuller and some really fantastic video work by KMA. It's very edgy, very current, and manages to bring traditional forms into the present moment without being at all self-conscious about the fact. It feels right to be in a consortium with this company.

Back from the Dreaming

Back in England to hear the latest news from Australia: John Howard has decided to ban sales of alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory. By all means have some sort of prohibition if it's going to solve a problem - particularly if it's related to child pornography and child abuse - but don't racialise that prohibition! What makes him think Aboriginal people are more likely to be corrupted by malign influences than white people? Racism, that's what.

Interestingly, through my four days at the Dreaming Festival, I had precisely one half of lager. The atmosphere, although it was celebratory, and at times wild, just didn't seem to need alcoholic fuelling. The culture alone was enough.

I'm intending to write quite extensively about this Festival elsewhere, so here's just a few cultural highlights and recommendations:

Ngapartji Ngapartji: somewhere between a lesson in indigenous language, a sing-along and a tragic re-telling of Aboriginal history, this is an amazing project which has been developed between a Scott Rankin's activist company Big hArt, the actor Trevor Jamieson (another of Bev Webb's boys) and the Pitjantjatjara people from around Alice Springs. A rare example of community work of the most valuable kind which really does turn into the highest quality theatre. And there's a language website too.

Sunset to Sunrise: a beautiful and simple film by Allan Collins, in which an elder spends a night in the bush with his two sons, and talks about the changes he's seen during his lifetime, and the decline of the old culture.

Bigotbri Ladies: every prejudice caricatured. I saw a great set they did about the food at the Festival - which was intercultural and so not to their liking....

Indigie Femme: two women, one Navajo, one Polynesian, who have beautiful voices and sing about a better world.

A Sister's Love: a really amazing film by the festival's director Rhoda Roberts, which deals with the murder of her sister Lois. Aside of the personal tragedy, which is very intense, it's also an extraordinary indictment of the ongoing racism in Australian society - a society which assumes that when an Aboriginal person disappears, they have just "gone walkabout".

This year's Festival fell on the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum: the moment when the Aboriginal people were admitted as citizens of Australia. Prior to that, they were categorised as "flora and fauna". They may be acknowledged as human now - but there is still a very long way to go.

Broome and Perth

A tropical evening in Broome, and Uncle Baamba rolls up at the Mangrove Hotel to take me out. My one night here happens to coincide with the opening of an exhibition commemorating 100 years of the presence in the Kimberley of the Sisters of St. John of God. In 1907, a handful of Irish nuns, with no knowledge of Aboriginal people, appeared in the north of Western Australia, fuelled by nothing but missionary zeal and charity. Although they now wear simple modern clothes, and for some time wore white cotton habits, the first nuns were clad in heavy black wool from head to toe, with a train for good measure. Given that it’s 35C today, and this is the winter, they must have been stifled. “No wonder they were a bit grumpy”, says Baamba.

When we were doing Bullie’s House, it was very apparent that Baamba knew a lot about mission stations, priests and anthropologists. Now it’s clear why – he went to school on one. He shows me pictures of his mother as a novice nun (who never took her final vows!), himself as a boy in the dilapidated school-house; he introduces me to his numerous cousins, nephews and nieces, and his “favourite teacher”, who is an ageing nun. I’m always wary of evangelism in any form – but there is something very touching about this community and its place in this region. Not least the fact that, if indigenous people had not come here, they would have been massacred in the bush. Michelle tells me that Aboriginal people were being hunted for sport as recently as the 1970s; and that there was a conspiracy of silence to protect the perpetrators.

It takes us a while to find a restaurant which is still open at the late hour of 8.30pm, but finally get a Chow Mein in the local Chinese. It’s BYO (bring your own), so we drink water with it. There are lots of Chinese people here, as well as Malay and Japanese. Broome was exempt from the white Australia policy, as a step to encourage Asian people here to man the pearl luggers. Hence the incredible mix of races. Dalisa is part Aboriginal and part Malay. Jimmy Chi, the playwright and musician, is Aboriginal, Japanese, Chinese and Scottish – one quarter to each grandparent. Baamba had a Japanese step-father, and used to be allowed into the pubs when other Aboriginals were not, because the Japanese were regarded as closer to white. “Besides”, he chortles, “they had to let me in, ‘cos nobody else could play ‘em any music”.

We trundle across the road to the Roebuck Tavern, made famous by Jimmy Chi in Bran Nue Dae – the Aboriginal musical with its roots in Broome, in which Baamba played Uncle Tadpole; a character I suspect was modelled rather closely on himself. Sadly, the cliché of the alcoholic Aboriginal is much in evidence here. As we sit on the veranda, waiting for a taxi, they lurch and stagger around us. It doesn’t feel dangerous or threatening – just rather pathetic. And horribly understandable. There are people in this state whose first contact with the wider world was only a few decades ago. Now, even in this incredibly remote little town (two and a half hours’ flight from Perth, which is itself the world’s most remote big city), there are numerous cars, internet cafés, cinemas, tourists, and flashing corporate logos. And alcohol. It’s hardly surprising that people should have such a deep sense of displacement.

And yet, there is so much here that is positive in the community’s development and efforts towards sustainability. Baamba’s own work at Goolarri and in education (he’s one of the founders of Notre Dame University here) is extraordinary. Michelle takes me to Magabala Books – an independent Indigenous publisher. We browse through galleries of traditional art, wondering at the throbbing, shimmering vitality of these Dreaming-inspired paintings. And, of course, there was Bran Nue Dae. At the airport, I spot a CD of the music, which I have never heard – and snap it up.

Back in Perth for one evening, which I spend with Heath Bergersen, who played Bullie himself, and Bev Webb, his adopted mother, agent, and our Australian Associate Producer on the project. Both Heath and Baamba have the most incredible memories, and remind me of things which happened during that 2004 tour which I’d long since consigned to my internal recycle bin. There’s much laughter, and a little sadness over the death of Kevin Costello. It does us good to talk about him. I’d been a bit wary, because I know some indigenous Australians resist talking about the dead – but both Baamba and Heath initiate the subject with the generosity born from a shared loss.

Up early, and dash round to the Post Office, to collect a parcel of material from Bain Stewart, who is Leah Purcell’s partner and manager at Bungabura Productions. And now here I am on yet another plane, this time to Brisbane. I should be meeting Leah and Bain on Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m off to the Festival of the Dreaming.

Perth and Broome

Australia Day 1 begins with the most intense alarm clock experience I can ever remember, piercing through the jetlag. It’s 7.30 Perth time, which means that it’s just after midnight in London. Worth remembering that, according to my body clock, these days are nocturnal.
Michelle Broun from Art WA turns up at 8.50 with David Milroy. David is a writer, director and serious activist. It never ceases to amaze me how people from cultures other than our own are capable of such multi-faceted lives, while we specialise ourselves into oblivion. David tells me about his work with his ancestral community over Native Title issues, and the battles with the mining companies over land rights, sacred sites, ancient rock paintings and the like. The picture which emerges is very grim: people are bribed, conned, bullied and cajoled into giving up their traditional ownership. How are they supposed to resist the juggernaut of international capital? But David is remarkable in his approach: he talks about it as a performance, with himself as a comic trickster, doing all he can to outwit the lawyers and anthropologists who are drafted in to overcome the Aboriginal communities.

He has written a play called Windmill Baby, which has won just about every award going. He’s also, just in case I didn’t think he was enough of a polymath, written the music for it. And directed it. For Yirra-Yakkin, which – although Sam now runs it – was founded by David. It’s 10am on the first morning and already I feel totally humbled.

Over to the Yirra-Yaakin offices for a conference about repertoire and touring practicalities with Derek Nannup and Paul MacPhail. Then lunch with all three of them plus Bev from Jiriki, Michelle, and some of her Arts WA colleagues. Over the traditional Aboriginal curry (!) I tell them about some of the ideas behind the Festival, about the way audiences responded to Bullie’s House, and how that made me realise the intense need that Western countries are feeling for other ways of looking at and living in the world – for an ecologically appropriate culture, and a culture which allows many voices to be heard, while respecting tradition and wisdom. They especially like the point that the Festival needs to evolve out of a gathering of First Nations people later this year, in a creative environment. As Paul says: "We’d all been wondering why these wetjalas were doing this?" I think he got his answer.

Back to the hotel, where I talk to Duncan Ord, the Director of the Aboriginal Economic Development office. This is a man with a big budget – but it’s only big because it’s about commerce rather than art. Still, he’s very much in tune with our ideas, not least because he used to be a theatre administrator with Black Swan. There’s a serious case to make that an international festival will do a vast amount to develop the culture and the careers of the people and companies involved.

David re-appears, and drives me out to Edith Cowan University, where a young man called Maitland is showing a piece of performance art he’s created. It’s about the experience of being mixed race – and it’s incredibly experimental. Heiner Muller meets the didgeridoo.
A packed day…. Particularly since I also have to do a revised budget and schedule for Dilemma to email through to Nick at the Arts Council. During Maitland’s performance I have a sudden panic that I’ve got one of the figures wrong. Find out I haven’t. Decide I’d better do some serious sleeping.

Day 2 sees me on yet another plane, this time on an internal flight with Michelle to Broome. This little town in the Northern part of WA is a bit of a legend among Aboriginal people (and Australians generally). It’s also where my old chum Baamba lives – and as we pull in to Goolarri Media Enterprises, there he is to greet me. Baamba told me so much about Broome while we were doing Bullie’s House, and it’s great to meet him again on home territory. He’s had a leg amputated as a result of diabetes – but he’s walking well on the new one, and actually looks younger, leaner and healthier than he did in London. Over lunch we talk about some ideas for the Festival. Baamba is an elder, so it would be great to involve him, since he could also take a leading role in any ceremonial events we include. As I expected, he seems game for anything.

Dalisa Pigram turns up with a DVD of the new show she’s been working on with Stalker and its indigenous offshoot, Marrugeku. I saw Dalisa in a previous Stalker show, Incognita, at the Perth Festival in 2003, and was blown away. The director, Rachael Swain, uses dance, circus skills and wild music to create work which is distinctly Australian, and which also de-constructs being Australian. In the new piece, Burning Daylight, she’s collaborated more closely with Dalisa as an indigenous choreographer, with the Yarroo people and the rest of Broome’s extraordinary multicultural community, and with a choreographer from Burkina Faso for good measure. The work seems really incredible. I may have to move mountains to get it into the Festival (it’s a big, expensive piece) – but I guess that’s my job.

Dalisa says a lot of it comes from a sense that young people in Broome are losing touch with their background. I understand that. In spite of all the apparent political progress, there remains a deep sense of the prejudice against the traditional ways. This morning, as the plane was landing, Michelle was telling me about the many small indigenous communities in the area. The white man on the other side of me, who had said nothing through the whole flight, leaned in and hissed: "We call them mining sites".

Stepping towards the Indigenous

I'm writing this in a hotel room in Perth, WA. Another hotel room! This time I'm in Australia as the guest of the Australia Council, with a view to programming indigenous work into the Origins Festival. Great to know these ideas are being taken so seriously.

This sort of work has been an emerging theme over the last few weeks. First we has Sam Cook's workshop at the Laboratory, and then last Thursday I drove up to Cambridge to see Miria George's play and what remains.... as part of the Pasifika Styles Festival. Miria is a Maori, who runs a Wellington-based company called Tawata Productions with a writer and director called Hone Kouka. It's an incredibly provocative piece of work - based on the idea of the last Maori leaving New Zealand a few years into a dystopian future. If it sounds far-fetched, Miria points out that she wrote it in response to legislation in 2005 which forbade Maori ownership of seashore land. Which sounds very like ongoing colonialism in the 21st century.

What was really striking about the play was the way in which Hone had given "voice" to the almost silent Maori character of Mary through her use of traditional gestural language. There's a great moment when she opens her suitcase, and we see it's full of earth. She gets in, and dances in the earth: a dance of eloquent despair. Hone and Miria came to the Laboratory on Saturday, and did a workshop for us around this way of working. As often in the past, I'm struck by the pervasive nature of performative activity in First Nations cultures. We find ourselves strutting like birds, singing laments, performing hakkas, and all with a theatrical meaning and intention behind them. It's very much helped by the fact that half the people attending are themselves Maori - there's a clear and deep loyalty to the home culture among Maori people living in England.

On the plane coming here - it's a very long flight - I saw a new film called Ten Canoes, with an entirely Aboriginal cast. Again, there's an amazing sense of culture and performance as being the heart of everything. There's a wonderful sequence of a Makarrata ritual, with two members of a tribe that has given offence facing the spears of the offended, dancing magically as they dodge them. And, when one, Ridjimiraril, has been hit and mortally wounded, he performs a long and agonizing dance of death; like the one David Gulpilil (who narrates this film) does in Walkabout. It's a very beautiful film - and has filled me with excitement about the next few days.

Tessa Jowell - and the Dreaming

Now here's a clever way into the ears of the mighty. Roisin Rae, who played Linda in Orientations for its second outing, and who runs a company called Crescent Theatre, also lives in Tessa Jowell's constituency. Which means she can get an MP's surgery with her. I, of course, am a mentor and advisor to Crescent - so on Friday morning I found myself sitting opposite the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Roisin had written in, expressing concern about the recent cut to the GFA fund, so Tessa already knew why we were there. "I can quite see why you're so concerned about this...." she began, "... but I have to tell you it's been blown up out of all proportion". And then we got the usual party line about how much the arts budget had increased under Labour (it had to!), how this cut was really very small and how what really mattered was the Comprehensive Spending Review in October, and how somebody known as "Gordon" had given a "categorical undertaking" that no further Lottery funds would be re-directed towards the Olympics.

There seems to be a pretty serious conflict between the Arts Council and the DCMS / Secretary of State. I asked why it was that the cut had only hit the smaller-scale, experimental companies - those of us who are project-funded. Because that was where the Arts Council spent its Lottery funds. And whose decision was it that this sector should be Lottery-funded, while funding for national institutions and rep companies came from the taxpayer? The Arts Council. Not DCMS. Not Tessa Jowell. And, in any case - "The level of fuss is disproportionate." Not where we're sitting. Why do we sense a cultural shift in the Arts Council over the last couple of months, from an organisation wanting to say "Yes" to one looking for excuses to say "No"? That, she says, is "ridiculous". She seems to feel that the Arts Council was looking for a fight - and now has found one. But, if all this spin is true, then why would the Arts Council want the fight at all? "Look", says the Secretary of State: "if your project is something they want to fund, they will fund it." So - I suppose that means the Arts Council has been funding an extra 35% of projects they didn't want to fund. Just for the sheer hell of it.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. The language of the whole conversation felt so alien to what culture is really about - we could have been talking about any publicly funded sector of the economy. Transport, health, culture.... these things are not the same as one another, and they cannot all be treated the same. We need to find new ways of assessing value, which are not just about money, but which allow the nation to make sense of investing its money.

After this, plus a week of endless admin, it's a relief to go into the Laboratory at the weekend. Sam Cook from Yirra Yaakin does a workshop called Enter the Dreaming. In many ways, it's about clearing the creative space inside us, and shutting out the chaos which gets in the way of the dream. A journey away from modern living, which shows us what indigenous cultures can really offer by way of an alternative. Sam's technique is actually very simple: it's a bit like certain sorts of voice training, or yoga. By breathing, and concentrating on the breath in the abdomen, she puts us in touch with our Liyan – pronounced Lee-anne. For Aboriginal people the centre of our personal world is in our stomach. Certainly this works for us in practical terms: through this meditational process, everybody in the room starts to make contact with their creativity, and often in ways which they're not used to. I did a painting..... And of course, on the most basic level, Sam is expressing a very simple and profound truth: that our dreams do not happen in our heads, but in our bodies. So when we shut out the rational, we have a much more direct route to our personal Dreaming - to the place beyond the rational.

If only Tessa Jowell would come into our Laboratory, lie down on the floor and breath a bit. This is my public offer of a complimentary place on any workshop you choose, Tessa. And feel free to bring Gordon.

Africa looming large

Lots of African events in the last few days. We've been talking to the Africa Centre, where we did Toufann, as a possible central London venue for Dilemma. Graeme Jennings, who is running it on a temporary basis as it recovers from deficits, is rebuilt etc, invites me to its Arts and Culture Advisory Panel meeting, and I end up as part of the panel. There are some fascinating other people on it: Tessa from Africa Beyond, Netsayi Chigwendere, Zina Sar-Wiwa, and Adrian Berry, who programmed some of our work into the Bull at Barnet years ago. Adrian has done a draft programme for how the venue might function once it's re-built: in the meantime, we're talking about performing in its decaying shell. I like this idea for this play - it's a piece which demands the roughness and immediacy of traditional African performance, and where the sense of a decaying history, of ghosts, will be very helpful indeed.

Last night Kate Stafford and I drove up to Birmingham to see the Drum, where Dilemma will perform in Birmingham, and to attend the launch of UK Arts' Africa Consortium. It's a great idea - and displays the huge interest which the UK has in African work now. I find myself wondering what's at the root of this: post-colonial guilt, or a real sense that a continent which lives more closely with nature and at a saner pace might be able to teach us something? John Kani, who is the Consortium's Patron, suggests the latter in his speech. "When you come to Africa, come with an empty suitcase.... we are teachers as well".

The launch coincides with the press night of his play Nothing but the Truth at the Rep. In the programme, Zakes Mda (who knows a thing or two about this) says that the play is a milestone in South African theatre, and that it shows that Kani really is a fine writer - overturning the myth that it was really Fugard who wrote The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead. I'm quite sure that John Kani and Winston Ntshona fed a hige amount into those plays - they were genuine devised collaborations, like lots of what we do - but that doesn't make them great playwrights on their own, and to my mind this play showed it. I couldn't see how the family tiff was supposed to connect to the politics. I found the Ibsenite naturalism, unearthing past secrets, creaky and obvious. And so Western - box set and all. Kani is a wonderful actor and a great ambassador for African theatre, but this play shows him receiving Western models wholesale and then sending them back, long out of fashion and looking a bit bedraggled. I suppose it may be part of a malaise that I've been told has gripped many South African theatre-makers in the years since apartheid ended: the sense that there is no focus any more. One thing which did feel very resonant in the play was the way Kani's own character felt washed up and abandoined in the new South Africa - still, in his early 60s, unable to rise to the post of Chief Librarian. As if the generation that did all the suffering and all the campaigning has just been left behind.

It makes it poignant to compare this with the revival of Sizwe Banzi at the Barbican, with Peter Brook's company. Two young African actors perform this with virtuoso brilliance - particularly Habib Dembele in the John Kani role. The opening monologue (which is well known as Kani's own work - based on his experiences at Ford and developed through the stand-up like experience of performing the play in the townships) feels very alive, very current and incredibly funny. Because it is so concrete - because the politics and the human experience are the same thing - this play continues to resonate right now.

Favela education

The Barbican sent me an invitation to a seminar called "Can Culture be Our Weapon?". The title is surprisingly literal - this session was about cultural work with young people in the inner cities (notably Hackney), responding to gun crime and knife crime. There was a Commander from the Met on the panel, Jeremy Weller from Grassmarket project, and the remarkable Camila Batmanghelidjh, who runs something called Kids Company, which combines art and therapy for young people. She comes up with some fascinating ideas - for example that "brain research" (does she mean neurology or psychoanalytical theory?) is showing that violence is often the result of poor attachment or of trauma. Art / performance, she argues, allows the processing of unresolved emotional material, and so is therapeutic and a force against violence. If this is true then science proves Aristotle and catharsis theory....

I email Paul, my favourite neurologist. Here's what he says: "Attachment theory is a psychological theory (after Bowlby) and is about social relationships. Neuroscience is really at its limits with social relationships. The first journals in this area came out only last year. I was at Westminster today addressing (with Susan Greenfield no less) some all party group about neuromyths - and how Hilary Clinton helped start the myth that brain research tells us how people are going to turn out. This is baloney. Biology is not destiny."

So - catharsis is still theory.

The impetus for the seminar, however, is very real - a group called Afro-Reggae from Brazil, who grew up in response to the 1993 police-led massacre in the favela Vigario Geral, and have done an enormous amount to empower youth through music and performance, to turn people against the drug war, and to suggest a different way of living. It's almost evangelical - you "join" Afro-Reggae - but that is what it needs. Now, in the person of their distinctly street-cred lead percussionist and insightful thinker Altair Martins, they are in London, starting a project with Hackney youth, which the Barbican is backing for five years, no less. "The longest we've ever backed any project" Louise Jeffreys tells me. "God - they were some I backed for three and regretted it." This one is called Favela to the World, and I suspect she won't regret one second of it.

Answer to Phelim

Dear Phelim

You've written me a very interesting and helpful comment - I appreciate it. Your tone indicates that you know I'm coming at this from the position of somebody who shares the idealism behind what you have been (so bravely) attempting in Satyagraha. I grapple with the sort of challenges which are present in this work all the time: as much as anything because of the nature of Border Crossings as an intercultural company, and the fact that I sit in the comparatively privileged position of a white director who manages to make a living out of this. I chose to write as I did in the blog after thinking very hard about the production for some days - because I was genuinely discomforted and I wanted to discover why. This may be as much a discomfort about aspects of my own work, which I need to question constantly, as it is about yours. As I said in my last post, so much of your production reminded me of things I've done myself. Given that I was already pre-disposed towards the idea of the opera, I thought I would come out with feelings different from the ones I in fact experienced. Now, that is probably a good thing - what's theatre for if it doesn't disrupt an audience's expectations? - but it also requires some careful probing.

I realised that the gesture of the projected Chorus was an echo of the Satyagraha oath - but it does have the same feeling as a gesture of blessing, and in the context of the scene, where Gandhi and King are both being constructed as sacrificial figures, it seemed to me to have the effect of softening that sacrifice, and making it easier for the audience to deal with. I suspect this is partly because of the medium of projection, and the choice of white, which gave them the aura of a film-like heavenly chorus (and we do easily read Glass as filmic music) - which I can quite see was not what you intended. What you say about the relationship with Arjuna in the Gita suggests that you read sacrifice in a much more powerful and disturbing way. If we are to meditate on the assassinations of Gandhi and King - these iconic figures who perform the rare feat of bridging the gaping void between the spiritual and the political - then it is essential that we root this in a physical form which allows us to locate them politically - in the real world which requires social and economic, rather than merely ideological alteration. This is something which theatre is very well equipped to do, and music theatre (by virtue of the spiritual strength of the human voice, produced with such physical effort), supremely so. Gandhi's spirituality, like all Hinduism, is rooted in the physical and the elemental: that is what defines him, and makes the paradoxical concept of "maya" so powerful at the heart of his philosophy. Much of your production emphatically did this - but for me it pulled back into an easier, more Western numinosity in certain key moments. I felt a lot of the time that the physicality of the production was deliberately distanced from the singers, and that as a result we saw a Western spirit-body duality, and not the holistic ideas of Indian religion. Singer as spirit, actor as body - in the Indian theatre these specialisms do not exist.... So maybe it's the form, yes.

Your closing comments are acute, and I think they strike at the heart of my response. I used to love the Coliseum, in all its broken-down shabby functionality. I loved the fact that it embodied the destruction of empire within its decaying shell. I loved the sense of the secular cathedral with fraying seats. And now - it disturbs me. It feels imperial, fascistic and triumphalist. It glows like a Hygena kitchen. It has no theatrical roughness. Now - we live in an age of dislocation, and sometimes the placing of contemporary work in a relic of past theatrical glory can be incredibly telling. But for me, the dislocation on this particular night was beyond this, and was compounded by the fact that virtually everybody on the stage was white (you're right), and that I was sitting with a friend from Tagore's University in Bengal who had never been to an opera before.....

This is strange territory - because I had just come back from reviving Nixon in China in Athens, and I did the same piece in the Coliseum last year. Minimalist music again - white people playing Asians, modern political icons on stage, multi-layered realities, a sense of Asian spirituality...... So I really am talking about my own work as much as yours, and I do thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that. Your production has opened my mind and set me thinking. And I can absolutely see why it was the hottest ticket in town.

Thank you for engaging in the dialogue.

warmest regards
Michael

Some successes, some setbacks, Satyagraha

I plough on with arranging the tour for Dilemma. Lots of positive noises on the financial front, though nothing totally solid as yet. I'm hoping to get some hard cash behind it soon, so that we can wave it at the Arts Council and avoid the problem of the last application! Although the application is in, the discussions with venues are ongoing, and not always easy. One venue emails to say there have been internal confusions, and the key person didn't actually know our show had been booked - which is a nice way of saying it isn't booked any more. On the phone - trying to plug a gap in the tour.

We announce the next set of Laboratory workshops, with Sam Cook, Hone Kouka and Miria George, and Denise and Michael from A Fleur de Peau. The response is very encouraging - lots of bookings straight away. What's really nice about this programme is the way in which the first two workshops should lay some foundations for the Origins Festival. I've carried on touting this around the Embassies these last few days - meeting Cultural representatives at New Zealand House (the best view of London I've ever seen is from its penthouse) and Canada House. There's the usual litany of "We have no money", but at least these people are good at pointing us towards those who do. The Australia Council emails this morning with the offer of funds to take me to the Festival of the Dreaming next month. The perfect place to talent scout indigenous artists.

I went last week to see Satyagraha at ENO. A strange night for me. I really ought to have liked it, and I expected to. There was so much in it which felt very like my own work. Minimalist music - Philip Glass isn't John Adams, but his way of setting voices really reminds me of Paul Howard-Jones's scores for several of our productions, especially since Paul loves to work with made-up language, and this was in Sanskrit (which isn't made-up, but sounds it). A corrugated iron wall with flying panels - just like our Mauritian Macbeth. Projections of proverbial texts, and projection used to frame figures in little rooms - like the Magic Flute I did with Will Hargreaves and Mark Doubleday in Stowe years ago. And above all the sense that this was a piece which was taking the audience into a meditational space: that holy quality in the theatre which we strive for in our productions.

So - why did I find myself disliking this production? After a week, I'm beginning to feel it was because it was all too easy. The text comes from the Gita, and the opening is clearly intended to suggest a parallel between Gandhi and Arjuna - but that correspondence is not justified or pursued within the piece. The Gita works because Arjuna is in crisis, and his crisis is over (wait for it) the fact that he is going to use violence. Whereas Gandhi's campaigns are about non-violence. And there is no sense in the piece that he, or anybody else, is in any sort of crisis about anything. Be good, don't fight, peace, love.... Until at the end the Chorus is projected on a cloud raising hands in blessing. Yes really - a heavenly chorus. It's too easy - too sure of itself - too smug. And, as a piece about de-colonisation sitting in the newly renovated triumphalist auditorium of that Edwardian theatre, it really cannot afford to be smug. Sorry.

The First Cut

Talk about coming down with a bump. I got back to England, fired up from my travels, the excitement of Nixon, of all I learnt in Greece, of the seeds planted in Hong Kong - and there was a letter from the Arts Council saying that they'd turned down our application to fund the development workshop for Re-Orientations. I make the dutiful phone call to check why - and get the response I pretty much expected. There's nothing wrong with the project or the application (though if other people were putting money in, they would be more likely to!!) - it's just that they have far less money to go round.

So - the cut has already bitten. In some ways, I'm not very surprised that it should hit us here; and I remain hopeful that they will fund Dilemma later in the year. But the development workshop would have been a closed, private period of experiment and exploration. No visible "outcomes", no boxes they can easily tick. Not many "art experiences" to put on record. Given that the Arts Council is under attack from both government and artists at the moment, it needs to APPEAR to be as active as it can, which means that work of this kind, which is not immediately visible, and has long-term rather than immediate results, will be the first to feel the pinch. Sadly, this also means that the development of really exciting, cutting-edge work, which needs this sort of time and space, will be cut short. And we'll end up with yet more of that blanding out which characterises our times.

The Arts Council has very kindly linked its website to this blog, and clearly likes to encourage the sort of discussions which are going on here - as much as anything because I'm certainly saying they should not have taken the cut they did. However, the internal decisions they are making are as disastrous as the ones imposed by the DCMS. If Grants for the Arts is so important to them, why do they fund it solely from the Lottery, which is subject to fluctuation, and was (remember this?) only ever intended to be a "top-up"? Why not spread the Lottery money AND the core funding through the Council, so that all sectors of the Arts economy are hit by Lottery fluctuations equally? OR - why not just redistribute a few funds internally, like cutting one huge gas-guzzling company, which could offset the entire cut to the small to middle-scale sector? Well - we know why, of course. Because a ritual sacrifice like that would cause such a big outcry - and they don't have the courage to take that on. So, instead, the entire experimental side of the arts world is subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. It will not do. Without experiment and vision, there is no inheritance.

And we need to find another way to make Re-Orientations happen. Which we will.

Interview with Aphrodite

The Greek National Opera’s Publicist is called Aphrodite – isn’t that fabulous? In the last hours before I leave Athens, she sits me down in front of a video camera and subjects me to the sort of interview I’ve been doing with lots of other people over the last few years (book pending – watch this space). The interview is a substitute for the pre-show talk Stefanos Lazaridis wanted me to do, but which somehow never materialised. With this version, he says, we’ll have something in the bag when he brings out a book on the company.

As we talk, I realise just how very fulfilling this experience has been. Although the opera is a piece I know incredibly well, it yields new fruit each time, and the particular context always gives it added resonance and meaning. By linking another exploration of this piece to the discovery of this country I’d never visited before, I’ve been able to articulate so many of my hunches about what we’re trying to do with this thing called theatre: its relationship to the political space, to democracy, to feminism, to spirituality, to healing. At one point, I find myself in the surreal situation of quoting Tomson Highway’s comment that the 21st century may turn out to be the age of the returning goddess, and realise that I am talking to Aphrodite!

The first show was on Friday. It was committed, urgent and a bit tense. The audience, I thought, felt unsure – especially after the Cultural Revolution scene. They seemed to be asking whether this was really opera. The second show (I’m glad I stayed for it), was more secure, and the audience was very different. Younger, a bit less “distinguished”, and far more receptive. Around me I could feel the reality of communication. Something stirring in this home of theatre. And so, today, I can go home with a sense that it was worthwhile coming here for two months.

And what a two months. Here are a few sample stories against myself……

The lead dancer, Emilia, tells me that before I did my first session with the dancers, they were warned by the Chorus that “He will talk for hours”…..

Outside the theatre one day, one of the male dancers came running up to me. “I love the way you are so passionate about your work”, he said. “A lot of people make fun of it, but I think it is great”.

On the first night, the same young man took one look at my Chinese silk shirt from Hong Kong and remarked "If you go to the reception wearing that, the Grecian men will mock you".

Adrian Thompson gave me a very nice bottle of wine as a “Thank you”. I was stupid enough to put it in my hand luggage, and somehow forgot about it at the check in. Moron. At the scanner, they ceremoniously put it in the bin. Another little sacrifice to the lunacy of the “war on terror”.

Epidauros

One of the funny things about opera is that, as the performance approaches, you rehearse less, rather than more. It's because of resting voices, and orchestral timetables. So we had a rehearsal on Saturday night, and now we don't get one till Tuesday night. Adrian Thompson was away on Saturday - so I played Chairman Mao. I don't think it's gone to my head.

I took advantage of the break to get on the bus to the Peloponnese for a couple of days. I based myself in Nafplio, and took trips to Ancient Mycenae (you can see the very postern gate through which Orestes escaped, with the Furies in fast pursuit...) and to Epidauros. I'd been very aware of this incredible theatre for a long time - it's required study for anybody interested in theatre space. Peter Hall and Denis Lasdun maintain that the Olivier is based on this space - but the two are so different in spirit it isn't true. The Olivier is basically a very big end stage with a curve to its front and to the auditorium. Epidauros is a vast auditorium, enveloping a circular orkestra by 270 degrees. The skene gets even less of a look-in than at the Theatre of Dionysus: it's so obvious that the open space of the orkestra was the key to Greek performances. The scale is everything people say, and the acoustic is truly incredible. Sitting at the back, which feels about a mile from the stage, I could hear people dropping coins onto the orkestra floor.

But what I had not realised before was the social context in which this theatre was built. It is part of the Sanctuary of Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a god associated with medicine. In other words, this vast theatre, seating some 14,000, is a space of healing. The sanctuary, known as the "cradle of medicine", was a place where people came to be cured, through medicine, and also through mystic processes associated with dreaming. They would sleep in the sanctuary, where they would dream of the god and find their cure.

What more perfect ideal is there for what theatre ought to be? A dreaming space and a healing space. Right at the end of Nixon in China, Zhou En-lai begs "Come, heal this wound". On one level, this is a personal thing, to do with his cancer. But it is also about the profound wounds suffered by China in the 20th century, and the wounds which the world continues to suffer today. As the opera ends, he hears the birds sing, and a new dawn coming, and decides to carry on with his work. So we send the audience out with a sense of the darkest things in our world; but also with a hope of healing, and the balm of music.

At least, I hope so.

The Theatre of Dionysus

After several weeks in Athens, I finally get to make the great pilgrimage which every theatre-maker who comes here has to make. I climb the hill of the Acropolis, I walk through ancient Agora, and, carved into the southern slopes, I experience the space where this strange and obsessive art took birth: the Theatre of Dionysus.

Approaching the space from the southern entrance of the Acropolis site, you stumble on it almost unawares, entering through the stage right parados, like an ancient character coming from the city. Like so much else, this convention makes sense when you see the space in its reality. Stage right was the city because that was where the city was: stage left was the sea because, as you look over the theatre and the landscape, you can glimpse the shoreline in the stage left distance. This tells us something essential about this foundation of theatres: that it was absolutely engaged in the reality of its context. For all its mythological and apparently esoteric subject matter, the theatre of the Greeks was about the present moment, asserting and claiming its space at the heart of this mother of democracies. And that’s why it has to be an open space: because it is visibly in the heart of the city, and it is about open-ness in the public discourse. That’s why the dodgy events in Greek drama – the murders, the suicides, the self-mutilations – all happen offstage, in the closed private space of the skene, while in the open space of the orkestra, the chorus, and the audience they represent, debate these events and attempt to find a moral sense in them.

Everything about this form and its huge potential as a force for democracy makes sense in this space. Greek theatre was a compulsory attendance for the citizens of Athens, in preparation for legislation and jury service; and the auditorium is vast. But an auditorium, a listening place, is what it is. The acoustic is amazing – indeed, the space actually resembles nothing so much as a vast ear carved out of the hillside.

Terrible news

The Arts Council has announced that Grants for the Arts is to be cut by 35% with immediate effect. This is truly terrifying for us as a company. This is the programme from which we have received the bulk of our money over the 12 years of our existence.

I wrote an immediate letter to our MP - Joan Ryan (who is also a Minister of State at the Home Office). Here's the text of it:

"Dear Joan,

Many thanks for the letter you sent recently congratulating Border Crossings on our A4E funding. This funding has allowed us to move the Laboratory programme forward in very positive ways.

However, the Laboratory is of value in so far as it feeds the main work of the company, which is in the field of intercultural theatre production. Over the last few years, we have created major pieces of work in collaboration with artists from key regions across the world; notably China, India, Aboriginal Australia and Eastern Europe. We are now regarded as a leading force in intercultural theatre on a global basis. Only last week, I was in Hong Kong at the invitation of the British Council, developing new partnerships with Asian arts organisations.

The work we have done over the last twelve years has been funded from a number of sources, but a key funder has constantly been Arts Council England, through the Grants for the Arts Programme. I was therefore devastated to hear the announcement that this programme is to be cut by a massive 35% with immediate effect. This is a direct result of the DCMS re-allocating Lottery funds to the 2012 Olympics. It is somewhat ironic that one of the reasons London was awarded the Olympics was the significant cultural element in the bid.

This cut will have a catastrophic effect on the cultural industries, and will be particularly drastic for small to medium scale organisations like Border Crossings, which do not have core funding, but are dependent on project grants. Given that these are also the organisations which are generating the most dynamic and inspiring creative work, there is an urgent need to review this cut.

I would ask you to make an immediate overture to Tessa Jowell and to David Lammy, and to table a motion in the House censuring this decision.

I hope to hear from your shortly.

Yours sincerely,
Michael Walling
Artistic DirectorBorder Crossings
http://www.bordercrossings.org.uk/"

If you're reading this, please write something similar to your own MP. You can go to www.writetothem.com and follow the links.

There's also a dedicated blog at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2007/03/this_arts_council_cut_will_dev.html
though I doubt the power of the blogosphere to do much about this. The only real way forward is to make noise at the centre of political power. Let them know there are votes in this.

Days in Hong Kong

I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday afternoon, and left on Monday night. I’m writing this on the second plane, from Doha to Athens: I’ll finally be back at about half past one Tuesday afternoon. It sounds like a crazy schedule, and it is – but for Hong Kong craziness seems rather appropriate. The city is everything you expect and more. In the narrow strip that runs along the north side of Hong Kong Island are crowded soaring skyscrapers, packed between the waterfront and the rapidly rising Victoria Peak. This intensity of pinnacles gives the whole financial district the feel of a cathedral of capitalism. And I thought Shanghai was extreme. This place makes no excuses – its every pore breathes money. There are shops in every MTR station; every subway is also a shopping centre. When you leave the Peak Tram to walk out and gaze down at the harbour from the wooded hill, you have to ascend several escalators in a multi-storey shopping centre to get there. Hong Kong just makes money, and spends it. Or pops over to Macao and gambles it.

This is a peculiar place to be talking about culture, and the food of the spirit – but maybe this is our common dilemma in the 21st century and Hong Kong simply writes it large. The Festival Symposium, which I attend as a member of the British Council’s Connections through Culture delegation, is all about Festivals, and especially Festivals in Asia. With one significant exception (of which more anon) there’s a competitive subtext between Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul: all vying to be the biggest, the most impressive, the most prestigious. Values of this kind have very little to do with cultural needs, and everything to do with metropolitan marketing.

Not, of course, that this precludes these Festivals from programming significant and challenging work. I’m honest about the reason for coming: I want to get the Trilogy seen in Asia. So I’m selling as furiously as the next person. In this environment, I find it easier than in my own polite culture of circuits and networks. Here, it’s expected; and a certain pushiness is actually a contribution to a friendly discussion.

The UK’s circuits and networks turn out in force. One of the fringe benefits of this meeting, which I’d not really expected, was the large number of British people I got to talk to, many of whom I’d been phoning and emailing for years but never actually met. Laura Collier is here from the Traverse in Edinburgh, and seems excited to discuss Dilemma and Origins. I chat to people from Northern Broadsides, Natural Theatre, and a new Northern Irish cultural exchange company. Deborah Shaw is here from the RSC, and I’m thrilled that she starts our conversation by saying how interested she is in all that Border Crossings is doing. Nice to know we’re so present on the radar of significant figures. The very first person I see as I walk into the Novotel for our Friday night rendezvous is William Wong, who assisted me on Dis-Orientations, and is now networking his way around Asia (as a Hong Kong person, William is a very smooth networker). His presence gives the whole event the feel of a mini-reunion; especially since Meijing is here (my translator on that first trip to Shanghai, and now the Council’s CtC Manager in Beiing); as is Ophelia Huang (who is brokering discussions in Shanghai, and introduces me to the Director of the Shanghai Festival – he asks if the show is available this year…..); and Queenie Lau, the Council’s Arts Manager in Hong Kong, bears a marked resemblance to Zhang Ruihong (same hairstyle, same smile). When Ieng Un pops over from Macao to have lunch with me on Monday and discuss the next stages of the project, there’s a real sense that something is building up.

On Friday night we were bussed across Hong Kong to the Kwai Tsing Theatre (900 seats and a vast stage), to see My Life as a Dancer – the Evolution. This is a Festival Commission, involving 16 contemporary dancer-choreographers from Hong Kong collaborating to make a sort of variety programme. As usual with mixed bills it was …. well, mixed. I liked a crazy sequence with the whole cast in bright orange dresses, going very anarchic as light turned the skin blue but left the dresses orange and zingy. There was also a strange and fascinating sequence with a small platform used as a kind of imprisoning hovercraft, with a woman caught on it being moved by men who yelled into radios as they danced: something with a bit of edge here.

It’s very hard to tell just how edgy one’s allowed to be in contemporary Chinese theatre. Ophelia and I catch up on the discussions with Director You at the Yue Company. He’s very keen to continue the collaboration, she says, but is still concerned to read the full script in Chinese before moving towards any performances in China. Fair enough, I suppose. As Benny Chia, the Director of the Fringe Club, remarks at the Symposium – collaboration doesn’t just mean “working together”; it can also imply “assisting the enemy”. Certainly the Symposium doesn’t give much sense of any radical new theatre emerging in China. Lu Kaiwang, the Director of the recently-created International Festival of Theatre in Beijing, talks about a Festival dedicated to Ibsen, another to Chekhov, and one coming up around good old Shakespeare. The invited companies to date are the stalwarts of naturalism, and the Chinese companies appear to be trying to imitate them: Lu shows some images of Chinese actors with spirit-gummed European beards. When he’s pushed a bit, he happily admits that these productions were chosen precisely because of their irrelevance: the less something has to say, the more chance there is of getting to say it.

Hong Kong, of course, is not like mainland China, and retains a significantly higher level of free expression. I see Falun Gong supporters protesting by the Star Ferry, as they do outside the Chinese Embassy in London, with images of alleged torture on the mainland. Grace Lang, the Programming Director of the Hong Kong Festival, is very open to the idea of the Trilogy coming here in 2009, and is genuinely excited about work which says something immediate. At the same time, she too has to be cautious. She had looked at Nixon in China once; but Chairman Mao having a blow-job from his Secretary is too much even for the SAR. I decide to tell her from the outset about the political and sexual elements in our work – she doesn’t seem fazed.

Censorship and democracy, free expression and clamp-down: the balance feels very delicate, even in this space which is not quite China. The South China Morning Post is full of the re-election of Donald Tsang to be Chief Executive of the SAR, and the spin being put on it is that this is a blow for democracy – though how that is possible when the electorate is 800 and the population is 7 million I do not know. Not that an Englishman has any right to criticise: it wasn’t until the tenure of the very last Governor, Chris Patten, that the British took any steps at all towards democratising this place – it’s only when it looks like somebody else’s despotism will take over from our own that we suddenly get worked up about political freedom.

In the midst of all this, two remarkable women shine out as beacons of hope. One of them is Ary Sutedja, who isn’t actually from China at all, but Indonesia, where she runs the JakArt Festival. Indonesia has very different problems from China (and from the West), though the globalisation demon is significantly present there too. At the end of a morning which has been filled with discussions of multiple funding sources, and glib comments from British producers about never turning money down, Ary tells us about the making of art with no resources at all except for passion and goodwill. She tells us how, when she finally got government backing, a civil servant turned up with the grant having removed 40% as the customary corruption figure, and she had felt obliged to reject the rest so as to avoid being implicated in this institutionalised bribery. It’s a very salutary moment. A lot of tired and cynical bureaucrats suddenly start to count their blessings.

The other remarkable woman in Jin Xing. I had wanted to meet her since reading her story in Laurence Senelick’s book The Changing Room, and since Xu Zheng told me I had to talk to her. Jin Xing was born a man, and even became a Colonel in the Chinese army, before having a sex change. The fact that this was possible, and that it was done so openly that she could make dance pieces about it, suggests either that she has the most forceful personality, or that China is in some ways more liberal than we suspect, or a bit of both. Probably both. Jin Xing is now China’s leading contemporary dance practitioner, based in Shanghai, and runs a new Festival called Shanghai Dance. She is also one of the few Chinese artists who can say whatever they like and get away with it. Her contributions to the Symposium are outspoken, outrageous and right: she lays into the star system, and the West’s ongoing exoticisation of Chinese culture. Over a glass of wine, I tell her about the Trilogy in far more detail than I’ve dared discuss it with anybody else here so far. Her response is the one I’d hoped for: fascination. “You must bring it to my Festival”, she says. I decide I’d better point out it’s theatre with dance in it, not the other way round. She welcomes that. I hope this works out: this would be a natural home for this work.

More surprises on Saturday night, when we go to the Studio Theatre at the vast Hong Kong Arts Centre to see Lost Village. This is a brave commission from the Festival, bringing together mainland Chinese and Japanese theatre-makers to look at history and how we deal with it. There’s even a reference to the recent row over Japanese school history text-books. Again, I find myself wrong-footed and surprised about what can be done, and is being done, in contemporary Asian theatre. The play isn’t entirely successful for me – the various storylines never quite gel, and don’t seem to relate dramaturgically to the grand themes which keep getting trumpeted. This may be partly an issue of accessibility: to my ear, Chinese and Japanese sound horribly similar, and if I look up to see the supertitle, I often miss which character is speaking. Lots of lessons on the language question. But I just love the fact that the play is being done at all.

Sunday is my tourist day, and I cram in all I can. There’s a fun exhibition at the Museum of Art about Chinglish – the emerging Hong Kong hybrid language which, the curator argues with some force, may turn out to be the world language of the 21st century. The heavy polluted mist which has hung over the City since I arrived, lifts for an hour or two, and I take the Star Ferry across the harbour, and the tram up to the Peak. I do a spot of shopping in Temple Street night market, and sink a sun-downing beer in Lan Kwai Fong, where I get talking to some German businessmen en route to Shenzhen. “Hong Kong still feels very British”, they say. “They queue up. Not like China, where you just get hit by a wave of people.”

I have dinner at the Yung Kee Restaurant: one of the fifteen best in the world, according to some American magazine. The roast goose is famous: Yung Kee has it own farm to ensure the quality. This, plus vegetables in oyster sauce, fried rice with prawns and two glasses of very good red set me back HK$300, which is about £20. This may be the capitalist city run mad, but it is also remarkably cheap. Yet another little mystery in the globalised world.

Jet-setting Lunacy

I’m waiting for the plane from Athens to Doha, from where I’ll connect on to Hong Kong. How mad is this? I’m going there for the British Council’s Connections through Culture get-together at the Hong Kong Festival, hoping to make some links for the future, and especially to get the Trilogy in to some of the key Asian festivals, which are perhaps its most obvious home. It’s Thursday lunchtime, and I came directly here from the morning opera rehearsal. I arrive in Hong Kong Friday lunchtime; go to a performance tomorrow night, then a full-day symposium on Saturday, prior to another night at the theatre, and late-night jazz with more essential exchange of business cards and DVDs. Then I’m planning to meet up with Ieng Un on Sunday, before getting the plane back on Monday, sleeping in Doha airport while cuddling this laptop; then catching a connecting flight which gets me back in time for Tuesday evening’s Nixon rehearsal in Athens. Fred is holding the fort in the meantime, but on Tuesday lunchtime he flies to London for Amrita’s season at the Barbican, so neatly passing the operatic baton. I’ve no idea how we managed to dovetail this so neatly, but we did. Two madmen working in opera and linked to Asian theatre, albeit in very different ways.

These last couple of weeks have been characterised by our difference, in ways which Zhou Enlai (whose Shanghai Communiqué is full of the sense that it’s fine to be different) might well have approved. Fred is the blocking man: he knows this staging backwards, having worked on the opera in virtually every incarnation since 1987. Which is a long time in politics and opera alike. He’s both patient and precise. My job is to help flesh the staging out, to talk about history and poetry, character and emotion. There’s a very clear division of labour, and it works. The trips have come at the right time in this sense too. By the time I’m back, Fred will have staged everything, leaving me to energise it next week.

Sometimes, I feel as if I’m reading Fred’s recreation of Peter’s staging as (if I were directing something new) I might read a text or a score. Thinking about what it might mean – what resonance this work might acquire through the personality of this particular performer in this particular time and place. It’s good discipline, and oddly similar to some other things I’ve been doing, especially in the Trilogy. The elements of Yakshagana in Orientations, and of Yueju in Dis-Orientations, were in a way “authentic” (dread word), because they were quotations from traditional performances (very precisely so in the case of Ruihong and Haili’s work from The Butterfly Lovers in Dis-Orientations). My job became to give it resonance through context. It’s a really interesting approach to how we might go about making new theatre for the globalised age.

It’s also very Asian. Like the tight discipline of the inherited routines in traditional Asian theatre, the rigour of this inherited staging, so alien to my Western spirit of individual free creativity, can in fact be a very liberating and empowering thing. I’m forced to be more creative because the restraints are so extreme. In the same way that Ruihong and Radhakrishna make something new and beautiful out of an inherited structure.

I wonder whether what I’m doing on Nixon should be classed as direction, or as dramaturgy. Then I decide it doesn’t really matter.

To the plane.

Nixon in China, Putin in Athens

Between rehearsals I've been doing another application to the Columbia Foundation, who funded Dis-Orientations: I hope they'll also come on board for Re-Orientations and the Trilogy. It's a complicated application, not least because it needs printing on recycled paper (thoroughly commendable, but try finding it in a distinctly un-green city like Athens, where you have no command of the language), and I don't have a printer with this laptop. Fabulous Fred Frumberg to the rescue: my co-director seems to be running the whole of Cambodian dance from his apartment, and has a full office in there.

So, today it was finally finished and ready for dispatch, and I trundled down to the Post Office in Sindagma Square, which also happens to be where the Parliament building is. I manage to time my arrival to coincide with that of Vladimir Putin. The Russian President is here for a Nixon-Mao style summit with Costas Karamanlis, signing the deal on the Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline project; and the home of democracy has decided to greet him with a serious display of what it does best. There was a huge demonstration - presumably about the human rights record of the Russian Federation, though I couldn't read the placards or understand the chanting. There were also armed police EVERYWHERE - full riot gear, shields, helmets, gas masks, machine guns, tear gas canisters. Outside the Parliament they stood ranged across the street, their vans behind them like a road-block, while the front rank of protesters yelled in their faces. Then, with total surrealism, three National guards with fezs on their heads and pom-poms on their shoes, performed what can only be described as a poncey goose-step along the adjoining pavement.

I keep saying this place invented democracy and theatre at the same time. It also followed its tragedies with satyr plays.

The Arts Debate

The Arts Council sent me a letter a few weeks ago asking me, as Artistic Director of Border Crossings, to participate in the Arts Debate. I wonder quite what the idea behind this is. I suspect that it's a lobbying exercise, intended to show the government how significant the arts are in the lives of voters, and how mad it would be to cut them back. If so, then I'm right behind them! On the other hand, it may be a more genuine consultation about the future of arts policy; in which case the voice of Border Crossings had better be heard, since I suspect we divert from the mainstream in quite a few ways.

I've sent back a consultation form and posted some responses on the website - but I thought I might as well put them on the blog too, since there is an element of the position statement here. The questions are theirs - the answers are mine (with the benefit of discussion with other artists involved in the company).

1. What do you value about the arts?

I’ve been asked to respond to this consultation as Artistic Director of Border Crossings, which is an intercultural arts organisation, and my answers will of course be coloured by that perspective. But I feel that what we offer, as a company working in intercultural theatre, is in many ways representative and characteristic of art more generally, and is able to highlight the incredible value of art and culture in any society.

I happen to be writing this in Athens, because I’m working with the National Opera of Greece at the moment. It’s an appropriate place in which to try to answer these questions, especially for a theatre practitioner like myself, because it was here that western theatre was invented. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was also here that western democracy was invented. Democracy, contrary to the implication of much US-UK foreign policy, is not something which can be imposed upon a society, or latched onto the coat-tails of capital. It is something which arises out of a culture, an atmosphere. As artists and cultural workers, our role is to create such an atmosphere. The arts make moods amongst their audiences. They empower those audiences through the atmospheres they generate. They make certain things thinkable, and other things unthinkable.

At the present moment, much of what, throughout the history of western civilization, we have regarded as unthinkable within democratic structures and traditions, is becoming thinkable. I mean the erosion of civil liberties, the institutionalisation of racism, the criminalisation of the victims of human trafficking, the labelling of people fleeing persecution as illegal migrants, the deliberate impoverishment of people in other countries by multinational corporations… I could go on. These things happen because we have become capable of thinking the unthinkable. They can only be stopped by a concerted campaign in the hearts and minds of the public.

In Periclean Athens, theatre was a civic duty – both for the performers and the audience. The entire citizenry went to hear and see a complex performance in which there were many voices; refined and made special through poetry, song, dance and image. The voices they heard were often those of the excluded – so many Greek plays have the names of women as a title, and the Chorus is so often a group of older people, or young people, or foreigners. Because in the arts, in the cultural space, people can meet as equals. There is no equality in the market-place or on the battlefield. We have no political, social or economic equality. But in the empty space of the theatre – there we stand as our naked selves. And that is where we must begin. In 5th century Athens, going to the theatre was a compulsory preparation for the legislative process and for jury service. If we are searching for ways out of our current moral bankruptcy – and I believe many of us are – then we could do a lot worse than look to this Greek cultural model.

So, if we desire a better society, a more democratic society, a more secure society, a more just society, we must invest in art and culture. Because when people explore what it is to be human, it enables them to become more humane.

2. What principles should guide public funding of the arts today?

I am very wary of the idea posted elsewhere in the consultation that the Arts Council should divide its funding programmes into three pots: community, national and individual. I am wary of this because it implies that these are the sole priorities for public funding, and this is surely nonsense. Yes, there is a clear need for national institutions which in some way reflect the nation to itself; yes, there is a need for community organisations which allow participation and self-expression. But the largest need by far is found in the middle ground between these two spaces; where the bulk of artists practice their work, making art which sometimes involves communities (but should not be compelled to, because sometimes a community benefits more from being described than from describing itself), and which sometimes deals with national concerns, but which can also focus on the local, the international, or the personal and internal.

The problem with these categories is that they are political and social categories, not artistic ones. I am acutely aware of the arts operating within political and social structures, and in dialogue with those structures – but to confine them within those structures is to deny their role as a critique and a source of alternative paradigms. The structures of funding should facilitate the creativity of artists, not confine them within rigid categories. In this sense, the current Grants for the Arts structure is better than the proposed alternative.

3.What are the responsibilities of a publicly funded arts organisation?

To bite the hand that feeds it.
To be the jester at the court.
To embrace the complex and to assert that to be accessible is not to be simplistic.
To reflect upon and to create new worlds.
To be our prophets, our secular priests, our dreamers and our clowns.

4. When should an artist receive public money?

When they have proved themselves capable of dreaming on behalf of the public.

5. Should members of the public be involved in arts funding decisions?

As with any aspect of policy, governments and quangos should talk to people capable of holding the conversation. Members of the public are sometimes involved in decisions about (say) science policy, if (and only if) they have an expertise in that area. The arts and culture should be no different.

BC Blog at the BBC

It's nice to see that a section of this blog is now on view in prestigious places: the BBC's African website. Check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/africabeyond/africanarts/17676.shtml. It's some extracts from the blog when I was in Ghana last year, plus some of the interview I did with Ama Ata Aidoo while I was there. Interestingly enough, it's next to another interview with Ngugi wa Thiong'o: I'm just starting to read his work, which is fascinating in terms of the language debate. This was another thing Ama Ata and I dealt with; partly in response to the fact that Aunty Ama speaks very little English, but also because of reflecting the social realities of modern Ghana. We're looking to make our Dilemma a multi-lingual production. Like so much Border Crossings work.

Language has been much in my mind this week, since I'm back in Athens, and once again rehearsing Nixon in China with Fred co-directing. There are British and American soloists, plus two Greek ones, Greek musicians and stage staff, a Greek chorus (!) and some Chinese actors, two of whom speak neither English nor Greek. In the actors' rehearsals, English direction is translated into Greek and Chinese. For a piece so intensely pre-occupied with language and communication, it seems highly appropriate. It's also a bit perturbing that so much of the opera is about non-communication.

There's quite a bit of the latter around this first week. Teething troubles, I'm sure. Our first Chorus rehearsal doesn't happen because our decision to cancel the principals gets interpreted as "cancel everybody". Our second chorus call gets mired in a union dispute: apparently the rehearsal room has bad air. We end up crossing town to the company's little resident space (not the one we'll be performing in) and give an hour's introductory talk in the foyer. We can't do any staging, though. And there isn't another Chorus rehearsal for a week, because they're doing Tosca. Meanwhile, the dispute remains unresolved. I try to rise above it all, and spend Friday evening talking to Jeremy Huw Williams about the extraordinary figure of Zhou Enlai. In this opera at least, and perhaps in history, he is a profound and spiritual figure, continuing to work and to do as much as he could for hope and a future, while all around him there was unbelievable chaos.......

This blog is meant to be about Border Crossings, but this particular piece of freelance work is so much part of that intercultural project in terms of my involvement and thinking about it that I suspect I'll be mentioning it rather often. For some reason, the company rehearses 10-1 and 7-10, which means that the afternoons are good for admin and blogging, so long as I can avoid the natural temptation towards the siesta.

Corridors of Power

Here I am, back at Heathrow, waiting to go back to Athens again and in a mildly poisonous mood, given that Olympic airlines have just charged me £50 for excess baggage – mainly books which I have to take to do this job properly. On the other hand, I’m typing this on my brand new laptop, which has to be good news! I’d been wondering about getting one for a while, given the increasing travel involved in running Border Crossings, and the ever-greater necessity of constant email contact. The clincher was when the email came from the Greek National Opera promising an apartment with an internet connection “for your laptop”. Assumption breeds purchase in this market-driven world. I do hope it will still be possible to disappear from time to time. There has to be wilderness, doesn’t there?

Much of the last few days in London have been devoted to the Origins Festival. This is Gordon Bronitsky’s idea for a Festival of First Nations Theatre in London, fronted by Border Crossings, with me as Director. It’s acquiring momentum: I think you’ll be hearing a lot of this in the pages of this blog. At the moment, we’re pulling together a launch event for later this year, when our advisory panel of First Nations theatre-makers will meet, give workshops and talks, create buzz and generate excitement, as well as begin the process of creating a Festival proper for 2008. We’ve attracted some exciting people to this board: Wesley Enoch, Hone Kouake, Drew Haydn Taylor….. and growing.

I went to a meeting with the Cultural Attachés at the US Embassy. It was scheduled for 12 noon, and that’s when I (somewhat naively) arrived. Half an hour later, I was still battling my way through the security measures. Tank-proof barriers, endless queues for paperwork checking, photo i/ds, shoe removal, airport-style body scans, confiscation of mobile phones, car keys (car keys?!) and USB sticks, police with machine guns everywhere….. by the time I got in, I was more than ready to discuss Native American culture, its spirituality, its green-ness and what it could teach the mad Western world about living in harmony! Of course, there’s a serious element of the warrior brave to this culture, but the war on terror more than dwarfs the efforts of Crazy Horse. The Embassy is very supportive – but also a bit cagey about committing money (as so often). The reasons are instructive. “In a normal year”, they say, “we’d do this at once. And I’m sure we’ll be able to manage something….. It’s just that our discretionary budgets have been really squeezed.” If the richest nation on earth is feeling the squeeze on cultural exchange, what hope for the rest of us? It’s the war, of course: Bush’s Middle Eastern lunacy is stopping any money going anywhere useful. And, of course, America doesn’t really believe in public money for culture anyway.

The Australian High Commission is an altogether easier affair. For one thing, it only takes a moment or two to get through the door. Kirsten Moore, the Cultural Advisor, knows all about Border Crossings, having studied the website in some depth, and we talk at length about Bullie’s House, about indigenous protocol, about Wesley, and about the real value of First Nations cultures for the contemporary world. By the time I leave, she’s offered us the use of Australia House for our launch event in September, and the presence of the High Commissioner or his Deputy. Plus lots of email addresses and contact for likely funding sources in Oz. I’m sure the charming Americans would have loved to offer their building too – but it’s a bit of problem doing a public event in what feels like a high security prison.

New Spaces

I spent yesterday morning at the new Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham. Actually, it's not even new yet - it opens in September, and is currently a building site. Gaylene Gould, the programmer, and I walk around in yellow anoraks, wellies and hard hats, imaging where the stage will be. It's a space full of potential - a cross between the larger space at Riverside and the Tricycle. About 300 seats. And there will be creative businesses on site, a rehearsal /workshop space and so on. All rather lovely.

Gaylene is keen to bring Dilemma here, and it's easy to see why. As I walk from the tube, I spot at least three shops advertising the facility to send money home to Ghana. We're right in the heart of London's Ghanaian community here, and that's the audience this centre has to reach if it's to make any sense at all as a focus for black arts. Not that this is an easy job. Gaylene seems very aware of the size of the task ahead - lots of her community contacts have involved people not really even knowing what a theatre is (they tend to think it's a cinema or a music venue). It could so easily go the way of so many of those Lottery-funded white elephants that now populate the country..... But somehow I suspect it won't. There seems to be a huge momentum behind this place, both from the management, the community and politically. It should be very exciting to be in there at the start.

In the evening I meet up with Elsie at the South Bank. It now looks as if our London run will be split between the Bernie Grant Centre and the new space here, known as the Front Room. Both managements seem happy about there: there's not likely to be any real overlap of audiences. The Front Room is a stage in the foyer - a rather odd idea as a theatre venue. I had been rather worried about this, but as we talk I start to see possibilities. After all, I've been saying all along that this production will need to feel as if it could happen in an African village clearing (indeed - all being well, it WILL happen there), so a space which has the same informality is actually rather appropriate. We find ourselves talking animatedly about ways of integrating the audience into the piece - as if they are surrounded by the ghosts of slavery (which, of course, they are).

Anti-Slavery International agree to collaborate on the production. This is all very good!

Athens and Africa

I'm in Athens for three days, getting things sorted out for the next incarnation of Nixon in China with the National Opera of Greece. Extraordinary hectic days, rushing around trying to work out how to schedule it all, and who will actually be here (!), at the same time as breathing in a sense of this city.... this city where theatre truly began. Or Western theatre, I should say. More time for that when I'm here for two months in March and April. The Acropolis and the Theatre of Dionysus - glimpsed today from flying taxis - I can hardly wait.

As usual with working abroad, the evenings are a bit of a limbo. Email, reading and blogging. Last night I went to see The Last King of Scotland (in English with surreal Greek subtitles). There's a moment when Idi Amin says the Greeks stole their philosophy from Africa, which of course brought the Athenian house down.... but he's kind of right, actually. Read Black Athena.

The film is fabulous. All the traps of Hollywod Goes to Africa have been subtly and wonderfully avoided (except perhaps for the presence of the Caucasian Angel - though this particular altruistic medic is played by Gillian Anderson, so seems human, and is offset by James McAvoy as the cynical, opportunistic, and frankly exploitative Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, through whose eyes we see Uganda - so I forgive them!). Forest Whitaker is stunning as Amin: I'm told he went all "method" and was like that even when the cameras weren't rolling, which must have been by turns hilarious and terrifying for everybody else. What's so brilliant about this performance and the film as a whole is that it only slowly emerges how monstrous this regime was. Through the first sections of the film we get Amin the clown, Amin the charmer, even hints of Amin the liberator. It's only gradually that this transforms into total horror - a horror that should make the West sit up and take notice, because the film is quite clear that Amin was the creature of the West: his coup engineered by Britain when the previous regime got "uppity". Just like Saddam Hussein in fact. As Peter Sellars says, if you want to know where the next dictatorship will be, just check out who the CIA and MI5 are being nice to.

I'm reminded of the very different approach to Amin in Third World Bunfight's pantomime of horror, Big Dada. There too, you saw how easily people were won over. I remember talking to Brett Bailey about the production, and his characteristic response, disturbing in its blank honesty: "Idi Amin was a funny man. I liked him."

Victory

For the last few weeks, I've been back at Rose Bruford, directing Victory by Howard Barker with second year students. Although it's a different group of actors, the choice of play is a deliberate continuation of the work on non-naturalistic / political text which I did there before Christmas. Not that Barker is even remotely Brechtian, or at all PC. This is a play in which the "c" word is proclaimed nine times in less than two minutes in the very first scene. If ever there was a statement of iconoclastic intent.....

I've not directed Barker's work before, and I've always felt a bit dubious about it, although I've seen a lot of his plays (and boy is he prolific). Chris Corner's invited me to most of the Wrestling School shows over the last few years - I enjoyed The Seduction of Almighty God at Riverside in the autumn. And I have very fond memories of the Almeida's productions in the early years of the McDiarmid-Kent regime there: Scenes from an Execution and A Hard Heart. But my suspicion has tended to be that this is cold, intellectual work, with only a wilfully perverse and oblique connection to human behaviour, and little real political edge. How wrong I was! Working on Victory, I've come to feel this is incredibly powerful, funny and pertinent writing. It yields a lot of fruit in the rehearsal room. I'm left wondering whether the Wrestling School doesn't suffer a bit from Barker directing most of the productions himself: it seems to me that he directs the humour out of his own work.

Victory is set in the Restoration, with the returning Cavaliers taking revenge on the Puritans. Not that the piece is at all historical (the central character is Susan Bradshw, the widow of Richard Bradshaw, who was President of the Court that condemned Charles I - the historical Mary Bradshaw was married to John, and died before he did!). The razor wit and wild debauchery of Charles II is there, as is the deep seriousness of the Revolution - but it's really a play about modern times (it dates from 1983) dressed up in period frocks. The power of money is at the heart of it (great scene in the Bank of England) and alongside that sits the deep malaise of the present moment - the lack of any real dream, any real hope for the future.

Doing the play with young people, that theme emerges more painfully than ever. For all the success of their acting (and they've done this difficult piece incredibly well), there's very little understanding of, or interest in, this key theme. It's as if Thatcher's Children have taken over the younger generation: not only is there very little idealism, there isn't even much sense of its absence. The ending, when Bradshaw's daughter declares her intention to publish her father's visionary book, feels very moving in this student performance precisely because of its incongruity. This isn't the fault of this talented bunch of young people, of course - but of the world in which they are growing up: a world obsessed with the material success of the self, and with the utilitarian value of culture, education, everything. Because, in spite of everything, they DO have all the energy and vitality that youth has always had - it's social and educational conditioning which makes this so difficult to focus towards any sense of an impossible dream.