The Producer's Travels

Penny was in China for much of last week - liaising with SDAC and SYT, as well as the Shanghai Festival, the British Council and the Mayor of London's representatives in Shanghai. It all sounds to have gone pretty well - although as ever with China, final commitments are difficult to come by. But Ruihong is on board for February, which is really important, and SDAC has made a pretty sizable commitment with hosting the workshop, so I feel pretty optimistic that this will move forward into performances in time.

On Friday, she was in Brussels - meeting our lovely EU liaison Katerina, and trying to work out just how the financial reporting works. I'm so glad that I've got Penny on this project - managing the unfathomable!

Meanwhile, I've been busy around the Origins Festival (again). The British Museum are now interested, and Visiting Arts are intending to host a Producers' Breakfast (very useful for the "added value" element for overseas funders). It's all building - and I feel incredibly nervous about it.... not least because the next three weeks I'm running a project at Central and can't give much time to this. And, of course, I'll be away through February.

The DVDs of the Tahoe Dream turn up - and I enjoy reliving bits of the summer. Oddly, a little extract from the show has turned up on You Tube. If you watch it, bear in mind the camera is following Art George, and not necessarily the centre of the action! But it's nice to see the Washoe contribution out there online.

American Dream

My production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened on Lake Tahoe last night. Although it's not a Border Crossings production, it (perhaps inevitably) reflects a lot of the concerns in our work, particularly in the way we engage with Native American culture and spirituality. Watching the ending, as the cast go out into the auditorium with their smudge sticks, Kelvin plays his flute and Art speaks his Washo prayer, as the moon shines above them and reflects in the lake, is extremely moving.

I spent the last day or so of rehearsals wondering about the strangeness of the audience in this open-air space. Never having directed outdoors, I wasn't really prepared for the way in which the daylight in which the first half of the play is performed makes the audience far less passive, far more likely to move around, to chat (admittedly about the play), to eat and drink. To begin with, I found it irritating, until we got to Act 5, the play within a play, and I realised that Shakespeare himself portrays an audience which does exactly that. The Dream was probably written for a wedding, so the party element at Tahoe is very much in keeping with the play. Realising that, I began to realise how the early part of the play, which is full of conflicts, actually serves to subvert the conventions within which it was placed. Realising this, we were able to rehearse a much more jolting, intense approach to the early scenes, which really energised the play, and set up an inspiring dynamic between the stage and the auditorium. Space educates again....

4th of July

I've never been in America on Independence Day before. The fireworks over Lake Tahoe, complete with orchestral accompaniment from the Reno Philharmonic, were certainly spectacular! But our afternoon's rehearsal was more so.... I had at last managed to bring a member of the Washo nation, Art George, into the rehearsal room. Art is quite a prominent activist among his people, and we've had a number of conversations about how this production can help heal rifts between them and the other communities here. We showed him our closing scene, the smudging ceremony; and then he told us why it mattered so much to him. For 150 years, Art said, the Washo have been dispossessed of their ancestral lands. Now, they believe that the time has come for their return - not removing the other people who live there today, but as custodians and guardians who care for the beauty and eco-system of this environment. He spoke of spiritual signs that this time was coming. And he thanked us that our work was welcoming and open to the Washo. I looked around the room, and could see that the actors' eyes were filling up. It's not often that our work receives this sort of validation.

The Dream is going to end with another Epilogue, beyond that of Puck and Shakespeare. Art comes onto the stage, bringing his shell and his sage. As the cast move out into the auditorium, he lights the sage from the fire. And then, as Kelvin's flute resonates through the space, he says a prayer in the Washo language, blessing the place, the land, the lake, and the people. He tells me that this will be the first time that these words have been spoken on this sacred land for 150 years.

Pow-wow

I took my Dream cast to a pow-wow which the Washo nation was hosting for Father's Day. Although I'm the foreigner, it seemed to be a new experience for them as well - very few Americans seem to have much contact with or knowledge of indigenous cultures.

To begin with, it seemed a bit like a village fete - although the stalls were selling sage sticks for smudging ceremonies and dream-catchers rather than home-made cakes and gigantic marrows. Once the dancing started, however, it was an extraordinary experience. The music came from a group of men around a huge drum, beating it together and singing in a very high voice, which seems somehow to be produced by tightening the throat - it's not falsetto. The sound is very mesmerising, and deliberately unvaried. Dancing to this sound, in their incredible bright costumes, people can easily move into a trance-like state: and of course that is the purpose of many First Nations dances - they help us to contact some other state. We were invited to have a go at the round dance ourselves - it's not exactly difficult.... you just face into the big circle and move sideways in time with the drum.... but the repetitiveness, even of this simple step, does take you into a slightly altered consciousness.

Under a clear night sky, with a nearly full moon, the landscape came alive.

Dinner with the Washo

I'm back at Lake Tahoe, in the US, directing A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Festival (and my old friend Jan Powell, the new Artistic Director here). One project often influences another, and I'm making use of all the ORIGINS work with First Nations people to explore the play's magic, its relationship to the environment, and its preoccupation with healing.

If there's one thing I learnt from Bullie's House, it's the importance of following the traditional protocols in dealing with First Nations people. It's not just that it's right and proper, it also enriches the process massively. Here, the traditional custodians of the land are the Washo people, and we need to be sure that they are not mis-represented in what we do. More than that, I want them to be represented in person - the Indian boy should surely be Washo, and perhaps there should be an adult present to give the whole thing weight and dignity.

Last night, I had dinner with some senior members of the tribe, and realised just how much dignity this might be. Steven, one of the Elders, said a Washo prayer before we ate. It was extraordinary to hear the language, which is very ancient (at least 10,000 years) and very musical. Totally unlike Indo-European sounds and rhythms. I asked them about ceremony and blessing, about music and dance, about clothing and face-painting. As with so many of the people from older cultures I've been lucky enough to meet, they were thrilled that somebody actually wanted to know.

The Washo are quite a small tribe today - about 2,000. There were more before a massacre in the 19th century, from which the nation has never really recovered. The community centre where we met to share our meal was in a small settlement next to the old boarding school, where Washo children were sent to teach them Western ways. The Elders reminisced about the time when their customs and language were illegal; how they had learnt from their own Elders in secret. Listening to Steven speak his Washo prayer, I wondered how long the language could survive at all.

A Tale of Two Lakes

I'm in Nevada, USA - on caucus day. On my way to a meeting yesterday, I passed through the University in Reno, and who should be there but Barack Obama. From the conversations I've had here, I suspect he will win in this state. It's rather inspiring that people here are talking a lot about the need for real vision in politics, and seem to be sick to death of pragmatism.

The reason I'm here is that my old friend Jan Powell, who I worked with at Tygres Heart Shakespeare in Oregon during the early 90s, is now Artistic Director of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival, and has invited me to direct A Midsummer Night's Dream here in the summer. I could hardly say no.... Tahoe is an amazing beauty spot - an Alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada. At this time of year, it's surrounded by thick snow. I'm staying at the Cal-Neva hotel (on the border between Nevada and California), which was the haunt of Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys and Marilyn Munroe. And, like everything else in Nevada, it's a casino. There are slot machines everywhere - even in the airport and the supermarkets.

Partly because of the amazing landscape, and partly because of what we've been doing with Origins, I've been drawn to the idea of using the Native American spirituality which is so powerful here, and relates so well to the landscape, as a route in to the magic of the Dream. I'm also, of course, very aware of indigenous protocols, as a result of our work on Bullie's House and since. So Jan, Catherine Atack (the Festival's Executive Director) and I bundled ourselves into a car and set out to meet the Paiute nation.

This involved a trip into the desert. Nevada is astonishing: the distance from the Alpine Tahoe to the lunar landscape of Pyramid Lake is really very short. Yet the contrast couldn't be greater - look at these pictures! Pyramid Lake is fed from Tahoe via a river, and the Paiute people have been fighting against its damming and to protect their environment for a full century now. At their beautiful museum near the town of Nixon, two Paiute men, Ben and Ralph, talk to us for a long time, with that incredible generosity of spirit shown by so many First Nations people, when the listener shows a bit of open-nes and interest. Ralph, the elder of the two, tells us stories in his own language, and then translates them into English. He talks about the 10,000 year history of his people in this place, about their brief relationship with white America (the first contact was 1844), and about the prophecies of global warming and climate change (see Titania's great speech at the start of the Dream). It's them, not us, who suggest that there might be ways to collaborate on the production, to involve them in our process, and to bring the children of the tribe to see it.

It's one of those rare, privileged days, when you remember just why theatre matters, and how cultural dialogue rally does have so much to give.

My visit here is very brief, so Jan and Catherine will have to contact the Wahoe people, whose traditional land is Tahoe itself, after I've gone. If the response is similar, we'll really be on to something.