Where do you stand?

Iman Aoun as Hecuba.  Photo: Richard Davenport

This Flesh is Mine has been running since Monday, and the response has been overwhelming.  The Guardian has a great piece by Ellie Violet Bramley about the making of the show and its relevance to the conflicts in Palestine, which is the main Editor's Pick today!  It highlights one of the main issues in the production - how it complicates the audience's relationship to the geo-political significance of the Middle East.

What's very exciting, watching the audience in the site-specific space at Testbed 1, is realising how the experience of the production itself leads to specific decisions.  Because there are no assigned seats, and the audience is free to move through the space, sitting or standing as they wish, their view of the events in the play is determined (quite literally) by where they stand.  You can be close to one of the stages, intimately engaged with the scene - or you can take up a perch on a distant sofa; or remain in the first space, seated at a regimented table, deliberately detached from the unfolding action.  You can lean on a pillar, sit on the floor, or move so that your viewpoint changes during the scene.  And all of this is political.

I hadn't planned this.  I had thought that the audience would essentially move in a block between spaces - but what in fact happens is much more interesting.  There is a clear awareness that the dynamics of the space as a whole encourage different types of engagement with the story - and this energy is disturbing and inspiring for the audience.  You become implicated in the piece's Middle Eastern resonance, whether by being detached or by being fully engaged.  The play in any case problematises Achilles' "liberal" stance as the man from the invading force who refuses to fight - and this knocks on into the audience.  It's a really extraordinary thing - and it could only happen in the form of live theatre.

Sunday's show will add to this, when "Two Schmucks, Three Opinions" (blogged here a few months ago) gets presented as a 12 noon show with lunch before the 4pm performance.  It's a fantastic way to approach the debate!

One week in

The show has been playing for a week now - two previews, press night and the first "real" shows. The press night was a wonderful evening - a real pay-off after such a long process of creation. Everything melded very beautifully, and the audience response was ecstatic. Quite a few people on their feet. My friend Stewart, who runs the Barbados Festival, said it was like the best meal he'd ever eaten - there were so many different dishes, so beautifully blended.

The first reviews are out too. There are brilliant ones on Londist and spoonfed, suggesting (as I suspected) that this is work with a strong appeal to younger, web-savvy, cosmopolitan people. There are some great comments in the newspapers too - The Guardian calls it "Impressive, bold in ambition and fluid - like Robert Lepage on a teeny budget" and The Times talks about the way "Lives and cultures collide — sometimes violently — in this kaleidoscopic drama.... intersecting stories set against a backdrop of hectic, often striking visuals."

As sometimes happens, some of the most illuminating comments are actually ones which are intended negatively. The broadsheet critics are clearly coming from a tradition of lit.crit., and are looking for well-made plays with psychological, naturalistic solutions. Which isn't quite what we do! In The Times, Sam Marlowe says that "The characters are manipulated by the multi strand plot, like lifeless puppets." She doesn't mean it as a compliment - but it's exactly right. Indeed, at times we clearly show the characters as puppets - as in this photo of Hui! The point is that people are not always autonomous individuals in control of their own destiny, as western thought would like us to believe. They are very much at the mercy of history, of culture, of structures. In the Asian theatre, actors are always manipulated in some way - by puppetry, by masks, by the form. In drawing off these traditions, we're finding a more radical way of looking at the world.

Problems of a global audience

In this weekend's Guardian, there's an article by Pankaj Mishra which talks about the problems of writing for a global audience. Writers from non-Western countries, he suggests, may often end up perpetuating the exotic cliched way in which the West looks at their cultures, because that is what sells to the monied Western audience. So Cuba is sex and salsa, Africa is starvation and corruption, India is poverty and spirituality in equal measure. I've written a bit about this before, thinking in terms of the Indian novel, and how often it is actually written with an eye to British and American readers, for all its "authenticity".

Usually, this isn't an issue which affects theatre. After all, theatre tends to address a specific, often very localised audience, about particular issues and concerns. Often its power comes from its very specificity. But in the case of work created cross-culturally, and intended to be seen in more than one country, this is no longer so. And so, if we're not careful, the globalised cliches could easily sneak in through the back door.

The sentence in Mishra's article which set the alarm bells ringing ways near the end: "Perhaps, one day soon, a Chinese novelist aspiring for an international reputation will be able to steer clear of the misery of the cultural revolution or the massacre in Tiananmen Square (perennial favourites in the west). " Dis-Orientations includes (admittedly very subtle) references to both of these things, and the imagery continues into Re-Orientations. Does that mean we are simply doing what the West expects / wants us to do? I remember Wang Jue being worried that the image of China presented in the plays might be too negative (although I do feel there are many, many positive things we say about the culture). On the other hand, part of the point of this work is to deconstruct the exotic cliche of the Orient: if you don't show aspects of this, then you can't overturn it.

Great press for Origins

Five days into the Origins Festival, and the press is buzzing with the excitement of this extraordinary programme.

In today's Guardian, Lyn Gardner reviews Strange Resting Places at Soho Theatre:
"The feast plays a central part in Maori culture, and it does too in this charming three-hander which tells the stories of the 28th Maori Battalion who fought in Italy during the second world war. It was clearly an army that marched on its stomach even more than most..... A little show with a big heart. It introduces personal tales into the weave of history and makes connections across thousands of miles and many generations.... Strange Resting Places takes the lost stories of small people caught up in war, and magnifies their tragedies with respect and a smile."

In The Times, Sam Marlowe says of the same production:
"It exerts considerable charm... Leo Gene Peters's production has a cartoonish vivacity... some lovely lucid moments of emotional connection, conveyed in dialogue, zany clowning and music that embraces Italian folk tunes and the sung traditional Maori waiata, as well as hints of big band jazz in on the wings of American fighter pilots."

And Jay Griffiths has written a Comment piece in today's Guardian about the importance of the Festival as a whole:
"Opening with the crazy thunder of Maori performers, parts of the festival are wryly amusing, including the satirical docucomedy Qallunaat – Why White People Are Funny, an Inuit reversal of the anthropological gaze..... In its very programming, it reveals what art itself can mean for indigenous people as something inextricably tied to healing, ecological balance and spirituality."

Exciting times....

And a Happy New Year....

Just before Christmas, Penny, Seema and I drove up to Manchester for lunch with Chris Honer and his General Manager Adrian at the Library Theatre. It's a lovely, very comforting space, in the basement of the magnificent City Library. Chris has been very excited by the DVDs of the Trilogy so far, and wants to co-produce the whole thing in early 2010. This means that the trajectory of 2009 is mapped out in terms of preparing it: we workshop in Shanghai in February, followed by a period of dramaturgy with Brian; then we do the first version of Re-Orientations as a work-in-progress presentation at Goldsmiths in the summer, prior to getting the whole thing ready for 2010. I think that's a good way to time it - we can think a lot and not panic too much.

Christmas took me all over the place, including to Aberystwyth, where I managed to squeeze in a swift and fascinating meeting with Jeremy Turner, who runs Arad Goch there. With all my work on First Nations theatre and languages, it's as well to remember there are people doing indigenous theatre right here in Britain, and fighting the corner for minority languages. Jeremy will be in rehearsals when Origins happens in May - but is keen to come down for the middle weekend, and to talk on a panel about theatre and the survival of minority / indigenous languages and cultures.

The Guardian was nice enough to print my books of the year on Saturday, so I won't repeat them here! But it's been an exciting year for watching theatre and film too, especially at the wonderful Barbican, where I saw the amazingly contemporary German Hedda, the justly famous Black Watch, and Yael Farber's brilliant South African re-working of the Oresteia in the light of the truth and Reconciliation Commission, Molora. Elsewhere, I loved Yours Abundantly from Zimbabwe at the Oval House for its directness and its honesty, and That Night Follows Day at the Gothenborg Festival, for the same reasons. In film, I've had a great year watching First Nations films which we'll be screening in Origins in a few months: especially Tkaronto, The Waimate Conspiracy and Kanehsatake – 270 years of Resistance. Elsewhere, I loved Garin Nugruho's Under the Tree - which was also very valuable for the Trilogy!

See you in 2009.

The Culture Secretary

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

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