2011

The end of a rather wonderful year for us at Border Crossings. The highlight, of course, was the Origins Festival back in the summer, with the amazing theatre of Noel Tovey and Robert Greygrass, great concerts at Rich Mix and on Hampstead Heath (with Pacific Curls a particular highlight of both), and a film programme which earned two Critics' Choice mentions in Time Out, plus one in the Guardian. The legacy of the Festival is still continuing into 2012, with our Māori Heritage Project developing further into oral histories and a new website. So watch this space....

It's also been a year in which we've been able to grow and develop our organisational base, thanks to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's support, with Lance Bourne, Carissa Lynch and Sheelah Sloane as core team members at various points through the year, plus a really exciting selection of international interns. There are a great many new initiatives underway for 2012 - the first of which will be a devising workshop in Shanghai, with our old friends at SDAC, developing a new production. The work we did in Botswana during 2011 will be built on as well, with some exciting plans to help develop the theatre scene there.

Looking at the arts elsewhere, the most inspiring theatre I've seen during the year has been in the form of pieces dealing, in some way or other, with the processes of healing we need to undertake in today's world. Peter's new piece with Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Desdemona, is one really powerful example, and debbie tucker green's brilliant new play, Truth and Reconciliation, is another. My other theatrical highlights also followed the theme, though perhaps in more oblique ways: Marc Bathuni Joseph's Red, Black & Green: A Blues, which I saw in San Francisco, and ATC's production of The Golden Dragon.

San Francisco also gave me the chance to see my film highlight of the year - If Not Us, Who? - which I very much hope will get a UK release in 2012. Among mainstream films, the best by far was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This morning's Guardian includes my books of the year - but rather heavily edited - so here's the full version:

I read Amy Waldman’s The Submission (Heinemann) in the USA around the time of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. In the midst of uncritical collective self-pity, it was refreshing and invigorating to encounter this penetrating and complex novel. There are no heroes and (more importantly) no villains here – but a Dickensian nexus of interconnected characters, each striving to achieve and express some kind of identity in a world that militates against the creative impulse. The Raw Man by George Makana Clark (Jonathan Cape) brings a powerful and unique new voice to the African novel. The narrative moves beautifully between mythic and realistic dimensions, denying, as African thought does, any distinction between the two. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero Books) is a brilliant, succinct and brief analysis of the social, political and psychological structures at work today. It’s the best, and most deeply disturbing account I’ve read of the appalling state we are in.

Moving away from the arts to wider questions: the last month of the year has given me the chance to think a bit more about identity politics in relation to two small, comparatively new countries. The Platform for Intercultural Europe held its 2011 Practice Exchange in Slovenia - an interesting contrast to the one we hosted in London in 2010. In this small state, which emerged from the former Yugoslavia, the impulse towards generating a national identity seemed to be a negative factor - one which was causing a lot of concerns for minority groups like the Roma and the Muslims (although the latter are themselves predominantly Slovene). I was left feeling that we need to move away from the nation as the means to self-definition, indeed that we should be moving away from identity politics altogether, since identities are by their nature forms of closure, which prohibit fluidity and undermine the possibility of change and flux. And then, I went to Mauritius for Christmas with our family there (hence the picture). And, in this emerging multicultural nation, the converse seemed to be the case. Because everything was provisional, developing, unfinished, nothing was really being achieved. Because culture was perceived as being outside the space, there was an inherent alienation. Because nationhood and the defining force of national identity, the language, was being denied, there was division and communalism rather than the true intercultural space which Mauritius could become.

It's a complex set of questions. Hopefully the new initiatives for a drama course at the University of Mauritius will allow us to engage more in this during 2012 and beyond.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Praise Singing

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

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

Beautiful and humbling. Thank you fabulous artists.

More from Gabarone

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

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

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

Wonderful Batswana

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

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

And the sun is shining too.

Arrival in Botswana

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

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

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

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