New Crowned Hope

Peter sends me the catalogue of his Vienna Festival to commemorate Mozart's 250th birthday: New Crowned Hope. It's staggering: a real tribute to what the intercultural future of the planet ought to be. Everything Peter dreamed of in his Adelaide Festival and was prevented from achieving is here, in this extraordinary gathering of creative people in a huge range of fields, paying tribute to Mozart and to the vision of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation which his final works, at once triumphant and meditational, embody. I love the presence of architecture alongside music, food alongside theatre, refugee work alongside dance. I must hold this model in my head as we start to work on the Origins Festival of First Nations Theatre which we're planning for 2008.

Meanwhile, other plans for 2008 lurch back and forth. I'm talking at length to people in China about possible presentations of Dis-Orientations and (I hope) the rest of the Trilogy there. There is still a degree of wariness about political content, which is entirely understandable - I keep mentioning Mr Ke's positive energy, and hope this filters through. The visit to Hong Kong will hopefully give me chance to do some reassuring in person - it's much easier than through email and translation.

2007 is also shaping up. Elsie Owusu is now going to do the set for Dilemma, which could be ideal since a) she's Ghanaian and b) she's an architect rather than a theatre designer. Given that this show will be going in to village spaces in Ghana (funds permitting) and probably a non-theatre space in London, we need to think about configuring space in a more radical way - redefining actor-audience relationships. Dzifa and Ama Ata both email today from Ghana to say how excited they are about this project. Mustn't let them down.