China re-opens

Ningbo Tianran Stage Theatre

This weekend, I was giving an online class to Rose Bruford students. Because the classes are done remotely, there are students all over the world, including China. One of them, Xuyu Zhang, lives in Ningbo, a city to the South of Shanghai where I used to go quite often to lead work for the University of Nottingham's campus there.

The class was about the effect Covid has had on theatre, using Rustom Bharucha's wonderful lecture series as a start point.  Towards the end of the class, the image of Xuyu went dark.  It turned out that she was in a taxi - although the connectivity remained perfect and she was still able to share a presentation while travelling!  She explained that the Grand Theatre in Ningbo was finally re-opening that evening, with a play called The Face of Chiang Kai-shek, and she simply had to be there.  I hadn't really taken into account the different speeds of re-opening, and the huge amount of pressure people in China must have been under as the rest of the world returned to social activity and performance, while they remained in their apartments, masked and isolated.  

As the class ended, the taxi drew to a halt, and Xuyu turned her phone towards the theatre.  She walked up the imposing staircase, and joined the very long queue at the Box Office.  It was wonderful to be there.  

The Face of Chiang Kai-shek

London Film Festival

Charlie's Country - David Gulpilil

London Film Festival is a fantastic research tool.  Yes, it has Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley on the red carpet.  It also has hundreds of films from all across the world, almost all of them in UK premieres, many of them never to be seen here again.  When it comes to keeping your pulse on the cultural currents flowing around the world - it's a good place to be.

A film I'd been eager to see for some time was Charlie's Country - the third in a series of films made by Rolf de Heer with the great indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil.  The first two, The Tracker and Ten Canoes, were quite extraordinary, breaking new ground in terms of indigenous film-making, with a full and genuine engagement between the film-maker and the indigenous culture, following the protocols and letting the culture speak in its own terms and its own rhythms.  In Charlie's Country, the process is brought powerfully into the present day, with Gulpilil providing not only a mesmerising central performance, but also the truthful underpinning of the story, much of which is painfully close to autobiographical.  In the first Origins Festival, back in 2009, we screened a British-made film about Aboriginal Australians, called This is Our Country Too.  Gulpilil appeared in the film, not as an actor but as a subject of documentary - clearly adrift from stability, poverty-stricken, awash with alcohol.  I have to confess that I didn't believe it - I did not want to believe it.  Seeing Charlie's Country, and hearing some of Rolf de Heer's very moving talk after the screening, confirms what was in Ishmahil Blagrove, Jr's film: but it also moves beyond it, as Charlie's Country gives this great actor a way back to himself, understanding himself and his cultural context through the process of performance, making sense of the conflicts in which he lives through the media of cultural expression.  It is a fantastic achievement, fully worthy of his Best Actor award at Cannes.  

At the end of the film, there is a sense of the way in which culture can offer the route to self-reclamation for indigenous communities, as the young of Charlie's tribe learn the traditional dances and songs.  I have long believed this to be the salvation of the dispossessed - an idea first clearly articulated for me by Yves Sioui Durand in that same landmark first festival, when he explained his ideas around the Theatre of Healing - a process that reconnects young indigenous people to their ancestors and their inherited cultural practice.  I also believe that these healing processes underway in indigenous communities are an example to the rest of the world - spaces where identity and community are reclaimed, and a sense of spiritual worth restored.  

There's a terrific blog by my friend Ian Henderson, which explores in more detail the "art activism" of indigenous Australia as seen in this film.  

The Dead Lands

The complexity and power of Charlie's Country was all the more marked by the contrast with the other indigenous film I saw - a film called The Dead Lands, which is actually in the Maori language.  Given that the only other feature ever to be made in Te Reo Maori is a rather conventional version of The Merchant of Venice, this was both a terrific opportunity and a great responsibility for the film-makers.  It turned out, listening to their Q&A, that the script had in fact been written in English, and was translated into Maori for performance.  So the subtitle "translation" was in fact the original script - a fact which is important given the very different epistemologies of Maori and western cultures.  What masqueraded as "authentic" was in fact a western construction of the Maori world - and the use of conventional Hollywood structures and tropes underlined this.  The film, ostensibly set in pre-contact Aotearoa, pandered to all the worst assumptions of the imperialist mind about the noble savagery of indigenous people.  There were conversations with a dead grandmother surrounded by green fairy lights, and long sequences of Jackie Chan-style violence, without the compensating humour.  I wouldn't be worried about this, were it not that the film's status in terms of language means that it will give off signals to the world, and they are not the signals that indigenous cultures want to be relaying.  It's not the first example of this exoticisation and regression to colonial structures that I've seen recently - the Canadian film about Inuit and Innu, Maina, was possibly even worse.  So I'm thinking that we need to have some active discussion of this in the next festival...  watch this space.  

Dearest

The other film I much admired was by Chinese director Peter Ho-sun Chan, and was called Dearest.  Closely based on a true story of child abduction (I never cease to be amazed what the Chinese authorities will and will not allow drama to talk about...), the film has a surprising and rather wonderful two-part structure.  The first half of the film focuses on the parents of an abducted boy, and in some ways is quite a conventional quest narrative. The second half is about the woman whose husband was the abductor.  He had died since his crime, leaving her with her "son" (whom he said he'd had with another woman because his wife was barren) and her "daughter" (whom he said he found on a building site).  As Peter Ho-sun Chan said after the film, it is no accident that the abducted child was a boy (greatly valued in Chinese culture), while the abandoned child was a girl.  In other words, it may well be that the dead husband's second story was true.   What's fascinating about this is that the abductor's wife and "daughter" themselves become victims of the crime, as they are separated from one another and from the little boy, whose natural father himself comes to say that the "second abduction" (from the family he had grown up in) did more psychological harm to his son than the first.  The mother deprived of her children is also played by the biggest star in the film, Zhao Wei - so Chinese audiences who came to see their equivalent of Julia Roberts spent the first hour of the film wondering if they were in the wrong cinema....  It's a great lesson in what we need our political and social dramas to do.  

Switch the viewpoint.  Start to see things from the point of view of somebody you thought was the enemy.  Open up that conversation.

Rehearsing China - and the French Revolution

Zhou Enlai

When Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked for his assessment of the French Revolution, he famously replied that it was too early to say.  A scholarly figure, like the Platonic philosopher king Mao, Zhou watched history with the same sharp eye he brought to bear on the present.  It informed and directed his view of future policy.

The same, it would seem, is true of his successors in what, elsewhere in the world, has become an altogether less studious age: one which tends to ignore history, or at best to prostitute it to patriotic indoctrination in the style of Michael Gove.  In China, however, John Gray reports in this weekend's Guardian that the new leadership around Xie Jinping have been making an avid study of Alexis de Tocqueville's book on the origins of the French Revolution: L'Ancien Régime.  Well they might.  Tocqueville pointed out that the French Revolution exemplified an important pattern in world history: namely that revolutions tend to occur not in times of despair, but when things are actually "getting better" in terms of economic growth, and particularly when they are getting better for one section of society more rapidly than for others.  Judged by these criteria, contemporary China, with its meteoric growth and ever-widening inequalities, would seem to be ripe for a revolution emerging from the peasantry.  This insecurity in the leadership, coupled with their enormous power, makes sense of much they are doing in terms of policy.

I have argued before in this blog that the globalisation of economics does not imply any inevitable liberalisation or westernisation of Chinese society.  Indeed, the financial crisis of 2008 may have pushed things in precisely the opposite direction.   Following the collapse of the Western banks, China no longer felt that the West was the model with which it had to catch up.  Rather, China could go it alone, creating a new model of state-sponsored capitalism.  This, to my mind, serves to underline the increasing emphasis on the distinct nature of Chinese culture which the regime is keen to promulgate both to its own people and overseas.

And Chinese culture is indeed distinct.  During this first week of rehearsals for Consumed, I have been reminded time and again that the Chinese colleagues we are so lucky as to have with us do not think about this art of theatre in quite the way we do.  In terms of making exciting intercultural performance, that is, of course, a huge advantage.  It would be very dull if cross-cultural work simply blanded everybody out, a cultural equivalent of global mass-production.  This week has seen us moving the Chinese and Western elements in our play further away from one another, looking deliberately for the differences, and so for the drama.  The fact that it's all expressed through the web, Skype, video and the other accoutrements of a global economy makes it all the more potent.  These forms which seem to bring us closer are in fact the media that most clearly expose our fundamental difference.

Week 2 starts tomorrow.  I can hardly wait.

Mo Yan and me

The picture isn't Mo Yan, of course.  That's Ning Li, the famous Chinese actor, who I picked up at Heathrow on Friday evening.  Tomorrow, I'll meet him at Tara Arts to start rehearsals for Consumed.  A couple of days later, we'll be joined by Song Ru Hui, on her third Border Crossings trip to the UK.  And this is our third production in collaboration with a Chinese company and leading Chinese artists.  It's a pretty important line of work.

So - I've been keeping a very careful eye on the way the media has been responding to the new-found fame of Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  We were in Shanghai in 2010, when it was announced that the Peace Prize had been awarded to imprisoned Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".  The TV screens went blank, and the firewalls went very high.  Some days later, there was an outbreak of calculated news coverage: the West was interfering in China's internal affairs, ran the official party line. No such fury over Mo Yan: the Chinese government has been delighted by the prize, and he has emerged as a national hero.

The response of the Western press, and especially the British, has been rather different.  Here, Mo Yan has been castigated as Beijing's poodle, condemned for not being a dissident, accused of acquiescing in totalitarianism.  Here, it would seem, we expect Chinese artists to be political rebels.  Nothing else will do.  The reviews of Mo's new novel Pow! have uniformly commented on what isn't there.  For example, Chris Cox in the Observer says that "Pow! doesn't land any blows on the Chinese regime."  Well, why should it?  Do we castigate Rose Tremain because she doesn't make overt attacks on David Cameron?

Actually, I suspect Mo Yan is a more political writer than the Western press, in search of heroic dissidents, has realised.  The clue is in the name.  "Mo Yan" is a pen name: it means "say nothing".  It is an echo of the advice that the writer's parents gave him during the Cultural Revolution.  It suggests the means whereby he has survived and thrived in a state which is not always friendly to freedom of expression.  In order to be subversive, art does not have to be direct.  In fact, direct criticism of government is close to suicidal in many parts of the world.  Magical realism, a genre close to Mo Yan's heart, was invented in Latin America as a means to cloak the political in fantasy and so to survive.  And by drawing so much attention to his "saying nothing" as to make it his own name, Mo Yan invites us to look under the surface of the novels for meanings that may not be immediately apparent, least of all to the naive Westerner in search of dissident heroes.

Pow! is about a young boy, Xiaotong, his village in modern China, and the prevailing obsession with meat.  This, in itself, is a central issue in the cultural change now sweeping the country: what was until recently a largely vegetarian society has become seized by the desire to consume meat as a mark of wealth and economic success.  The shift is having profound and damaging consequences for the global food chain and eco-system.  It is, in fact, one of the biggest problems confronting the contemporary world.  It is also symptomatic of the materialist drive which is possessing modern Chinese society.

Of course, Mo Yan, saying nothing, does not attack the regime that has encouraged all this.  He portrays the absurdity of the world he lives in and leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions.  This kind of empowerment could itself be regarded as an attribute of democracy.

Will our new play be similarly subversive, in a similarly subtle way?  We aim to take it back to China later in the year, and that does mean we have to reckon with the censor.  And yet, in 2010, we were able to show work there that treated the Cultural Revolution, the single child policy, homosexuality and infanticide.  We made no overt statements of our position, but rather opened the possibility of debate; and that, I think, is what theatre's role should be.  Consumed is about the current moment: it deals with high finance, corruption, greed, and consumerism.  It is also about the web.  None of this makes it an attack on Beijing - but it's no cosy bit of toadying either.

Wild Swans

I read Wild Swans when it first came out in the early 90s.  Thinking back, it was probably my first real encounter with modern China: a history and a culture that have become so important to my work and my life.  Since that time, we've done a lot of work around the contemporary Chinese experience and its relationship to the West.  I've met people who lived through the Cultural Revolution and the famine, people whose lives have been scarred by the horrors of the Chinese century.  And empowered by its energies and even its idealism.  So the stage adaptation of this seminal memoir, at the Young Vic, is an important piece of theatre for me. 

The book is huge and epic - and I had rather expected to sit down for a long evening somewhere between Wagner and Lepage, or perhaps more like a Shared Experience Tolstoy adaptation.  Not a bit of it.  The play is about 80 minutes long - and a sizeable chunk of that time is taken up with spectacular set-changes (which have their own power in terms of suggesting a nation very much at work, and a gradual revealing of history as one image is stripped away or exploded to reveal the next).  This means that the family saga with its complex political background is turned into something more like a parable around honesty and complicity in a corrupt society.  It's rather "Brechtian", in a way (the Brecht of the parables, not the historical epics), with a simplified acting style to match.

But Chinese history is not simple.  And neither were the moral and political questions faced by Jung Chang and her family - especially her passionately idealistic father, who was himself criticised in the Cultural Revolution and ended up in a labour camp, still hanging on to his faith in a benevolent Party.  The play is reductive in many ways - it is trying to make a very complex society and the experiences of people caught up in an especially turbulent period of its history seem "accessible", and in the process it shifts into a simplistic moralism.  The father's former girlfriend becomes a melodramatic villain: people did make use of criticism sessions for personal vendettas, but the cultural climate was ultimately more important than the private vengeance operating through it.  The unseen Mao gets the blame for an awful lot - and there's truth in this - but the implication that things suddenly got better after his death is naive, and the idea that a "modern" market-driven society is somehow inherently better than idealism gone awry is questionable in the extreme.

I should say that there is much about this production which is very strong - visually it is stunning.  But, because of the status it has been afforded in the World Stages season and the whole Olympic thing, it has a greater responsibility to its subjects in terms of cultural exchange, historical honesty, mutual respect and acknowledgment of complex truths.  Because of this status, it's getting glowing press like the Dominic Cavendish's review in the Telegraph which suggests that "it belatedly brings that vast country – and fast-emerging superpower – into our parochial modern theatrical arena."  Well, actually, no - Dominic.  Border Crossings produced Dis-Orientations; in 2006, and Re-Orientations in 2010.  Both of these were collaborations with artists from mainland China, which drew off their own direct experience of their history and their present.  And now we're working on Consumed, which will bring our journey right up to the present moment, while continuing to acknowledge the importance of the past.  Some of us haven't been parochial for a long time.  In fact, as long ago as the late 90s, I was working with Peter Sellars on Nixon in China at the ENO.  Alice Goodman's text really explored the many layers of the Cultural Revolution, and permitted no pat moralistic responses. 

Reactions from China

Roshni emails to tell me what the students had to say about the show on their return to Ningbo.

"Had an hour follow up discussion with the students. They were completely stunned by the play and said that, as I did to you, they found it difficult to know what their reactions actually were, having never experienced anything like this. We started by discussing what the play was about which was (rightly) tricky and we got a number of contradictory responses which was fruitful - play is about culture clash, play is about multiculturalism, play about culture mixing. I then asked for 5 most striking things to them as individuals and that have stayed with them since. We got some very good things, lesbianism being one. They almost all picked up on it - we were not convinced that they would. They were quite a literate audience by any standards. There was an energetic debate over the wrongs or not of Sammy selling his body. There was some good and honest reflection on the one child policy and female infanticide in China. I drew parallels to other countries, India being an obvious one. There was only a tiny bit of the-world-is-against-China paranoia. Someone suggested it was wrong and biased to represent China's past on the infanticide front but someone else said that this still happened. Big things happened in this class. Oh and someone said that lesbianism did not exist in China until foreigners introduced it. So, please send me details of the Chinese poetess so I can forward details to them. We talked openly about censorship! Someone had already leaked the answer to that last question to some of them. But the rest of them guessed or when they found out they were not suprised - ancestor worship being not even a religion and the kind of mumbo-jumbo that the Party disapproves of was the response. I pointed out that this is more than acceptable among the Chinese diasproa in Mauritius for example. And someone concluded that most Chinese do do these rites anyway in China, party line or not...

We talked about narrative techniques, non-linearity, multiple persepctives, paradox - all of which are the stuff that real and increasingly globalised life is made of.

Fascinating stuff. Several of them said that they found Linda to be an intriguing character - the packing in of a good job to be a dancer. I finished with the question of whether as English Studies students (as opposed to Business Studies which almost all parents try to coerce their children into) they were doing something similar?

I'm still gobsmacked by all this and it certainly gave me a sense of purpose and fulfilment as an academic that I would struggle to find amongst our more jaded English students."

And this is from a young Chinese audience member:

"You know, as human beings, we don’t really have the right to choose a lot of things; our gender is one of them. When we were born, we were decided to be girl or boy by the god. Usually we just accept it and go on to living as whom we are, and we maybe never thought of why we are women or men. When someone behaves in the opposite way, we just think “what’s wrong with him/her?” No one would think about the original life. And we cannot choose where to be born either.

Because of the gender and the place which we couldn’t even decide by ourselves, we living in very different ways. Someone faced to death directly, like Cuihua’s daughter. And someone who like to be a woman, but born to be a man, like Sammy. Though he is brave to change, and make money in his way, he has to burden a lot of course.

And as Alex, she is the one who cannot live with questions. She loves Song, Song loves her too, but her act of that, is escape, escape from the life, escape from “odd acting”. Maybe her parents’ marriage is a tragedy, which affects her; maybe she just wants to have the “mummy’s love”. She tried, but failed, so, to take rebirth is a better way for her, just like Velu’s feeling about his girl. She dances like a swan, and the swan lowed its head when Julian and Mary being together. Because of their acting, she came into this world, and that brings her a lot of sadness.

We should try new things, instead of ordered by other people or life. Actually, there are so many things in our life, which make us hard to change, hard to being ourselves, but that’s the real life. That’s what Linda. Maya and even Johan’s doing.

Just like this show, we couldn’t know what our life want to tell us, but we living in it.

In my opinion, this show is kind of having philosophy meaning. And I really surprised you can put those ideas into one show. The more I saw it, the more I want to re-consider my own life. That’s the interesting part for me---thinking.

One of my teachers said: yesterday is destiny, but you’re the master of your future. I like this, and it’s a good conclusion of Re-Orientations I think."

A bit more on censorship

Since I wrote about Chinese censorship the other day, the news has broken that Google may pull out of China because of attempts to hack into the gmail accounts of human rights activists. Having famously capitulated to the censor, Google is now saying that it wants freedom to publish as it will. You'll remember that access to this blog has been pretty erratic in China - at a rough guess it won't be very easy to find it today - the firewalls are up very high.

On the other hand, sexual morality just doesn't seem to be an issue any more. To underline what I was saying last time, a comment in Chinese has appeared on my entry "New Year blog". On closer investigation, it turns out to be a link to a Chinese porn site.

Happy surfing, everybody....

Theatre Assessment

The Arts Council has been running a consultation process called Theatre Assessment. I thought I should submit something! It's all done anonymously, but as in the past, I don't mind people knowing what I said, so here are my thoughts on the blog....

Looking at the last five years :

 what have been the major developments and changes in theatre? Have they improved or worsened the situation?

This is an incredibly broad question (they all are, actually), and I imagine it works better as a stimulus for debate than as a prompt for one direct response. I can only speak from a personal perspective.

Five years ago, the theatre was responding to a changing political environment. 2003 was the year in which the Iraq war began, and in which British political dissent was at its most vociferous for some time. Since theatre is a public art form, it reflected this, and became particularly visible, potent and (crucially) popular in a way we had not seen for some time. This revitalisation of theatre, which encompassed the entire range of scales from the National to the fringe, has not been sustained as many artists would have hoped. Theatre with a social or political awareness has been fragmented, with a growth in verbatim theatre, and in theatre looking at very particular issues. Work which tackles larger questions imaginatively and creatively is in short supply once again. This is partly the result of a loss of political momentum, but it is also to do with a sense that the vitality of 2003-4 was not endorsed by public bodies. We could contrast this with countries like Canada or France, where theatre that is critical of society is positively encouraged as a sign of a flourishing democracy.

 in what ways have relationships between theatre organisations and locally based companies/artists, and theatre organisations and their local communities, changed?

The Arts Council’s encouragement of audience development initiatives has definitely been fruitful, and there has been a stronger engagement with local communities. My only concern is how far this is cosmetic, and how deep it goes. Many larger organisations undertake specific initiatives which appear to engage communities, but which are in fact tangential to their main programme, which continues to focus on more conventional approaches. This is directly related to the artistic issues discussed above - the audience was at its most diverse and most articulate during the period 2003-4.

 has there been more engagement with diversity and if so, what effect has this had on theatre and on audiences?

Yes, there has. With the proviso I made in my previous answer, I would say that theatre is now very engaged with diversity - indeed, it could be said to be fulfilling its role as a social pioneer in this regard. The increased engagement with diversity has broadened audiences, and has as a result suggested a more integrated social model.

Until very recently, the stress which the Arts Council laid on culturally diverse work as being produced by BME artists and aimed at BME audiences was perhaps less helpful, since it could be seen as ghettoising the work and the audience. This issue is of particular interest to me as Artistic Director of Border Crossings, since our work (and our audience and governance) is incredibly diverse in the fullest sense of the term, even though we are not representative of, or led by, any particular ethnic minority group. Our audience figures over the last five years demonstrate clearly the potential for inter-cultural work to address a broad range of people, and to create a genuinely and fully diverse audience. It is perhaps surprising that we have not yet been considered for RFO status: and it is tempting to wonder whether this is because we do not tick boxes which have been imposed from outside.

It is very encouraging to see that the Arts Council is now looking at diversity in terms of a much broader paradigm.

 in what ways have audiences and their expectations changed?

As well as being more diverse, my sense is that audiences have become more actively engaged, and more vociferous. This is to do with the way in which theatre is seeking to de-mystify its processes, and to engage more directly with communities, and particularly with young people through education. With our own productions, the accompanying workshops tend to be very well attended, as do post-show discussions.
This is also part of a larger cultural shift, to do with the growth of more active media (e.g. the web, computer games). Audiences now regard art less passively, and theatre, as a live form, is ideally placed to capitalise on this. We at Border Crossings are interested in developing our work further in this direction.

 what effect have economic and political changes or any other external interventions had on theatre?

I am answering this question in the week of the worst economic crisis for sixty years, so it may be a bit early to tell the future! However, I would say that even before the crisis, it was getting more difficult to enter into partnerships with the private sector, which tends to regard culture, and perhaps theatre in particular, as a minority interest of little public concern (even though the figures show the exact opposite). There is a clear need to continue public investment in the form, if it is to survive - and theatre’s contribution to our economy is such that, even in blatantly capitalist terms, it really does need to survive!

As an internationally oriented company, Border Crossings is engaged with changes on a global scale. The rise of China as a major power has had a significant impact on our work, both in terms of artistic engagement, and in terms of our being able to access the opportunities offered by diplomatic initiatives. My sense is that our work is likely to develop further in these terms; engaging in dialogue with cultures which have something to offer our own, and exploring new ways of jointly inhabiting the global space. In this way, theatre can complement and develop political, commercial and diplomatic initiatives. Indeed, it can go further, since in the theatre people are able to meet as equals, whereas in other spheres there is no true equality.

It is unfortunate in this regard that the British Council should be scaling down its support for theatre, at a time when the form can deliver so much. The old model of touring "British" work overseas is outmoded, but the development of international collaboration as the future of theatre is surely something which should be supported at a political level, particularly in the run-up to 2012.

 what has been the impact of the Arts Council's Grants for the arts scheme, since it was introduced in 2003?

The scheme has certainly made it easier to apply to the Arts Council for project funding, and my experience has been that it is very well administered, and that the Arts Council has taken more care over its relations with clients and applicants since the scheme was introduced. The three-month turnaround for applications is longer than is ideal for companies.

The scheme has perhaps tended to localise the Arts Council’s concerns, since the regional offices now deal with everything, and there is little sense of overview, particularly with regard to touring and to international initiatives.

It seems to have become more difficult for companies that have received a number of project grants to develop to RFO status. There does not seem to be a structure in place which encourages the development of organisations beyond the model of working on a project by project basis, and so it becomes very difficult to sustain and nurture valuable organisations over time.

Holiday reading

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

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

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

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

China controversies

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

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

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

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.