Interns and Architecting

We’re taking on an intern. This has worked well in the past, with both Wojtek and Roe being a huge help in the office and learning enough to move on in their chosen spheres. In fact, Wojtek went straight from us to being Administrator at Paines Plough. I think internships have to work in this way, as a genuine exchange, and they have to be a fixed term, allowing that exchange to happen. Otherwise it just turns into slave labour. We put something to this effect in the job ad. So I was a bit surprised on the morning of the interviews to get a very angry email from the first interviewee, saying that he wouldn’t be coming because he felt that unpaid work was morally unacceptable. He’s entitled to his opinion, of course – but I can’t really see why, under the circumstances, he applied for the job at all… Anyway, it puts me on my guard for the rest of the day, and I make sure that all the other interviewees are fully on board for the exchange, and that I am clear what they want to get from it.

I end up offering the internship to a young woman from Sweden, called Annika Magnberg. Annika did a dance training in Gothenburg, and is aware of Teater Eksem. She’s also got a band here, and has done lots of PR and the like. But, most important, she’s passionate about theatre and intercultural dialogue. And has the right sort of energy to be around our office for a few months. Good luck and welcome to her! She may well be writing the odd posting on this blog too.

Long and creative discussion with Gabrielle from Polygon. We’re both very pleased with the work we were able to do together on Origins, and want to continue the association. Some very interesting ideas about keeping Origins moving until the next festival through the education work, and for ways of building on the education aspects of the Trilogy. We’re thinking about linking workshops in China and the UK, so that the interculturalism becomes a direct part of the education work too.

I went to see Architecting at the Pit on Friday. It’s a piece about America’s failures to rebuild itself, after the Civil War and after Hurricane Katrina. The main resource it exploits for this is Gone With the Wind, both film, novel and cult – and it’s all done with wit and intelligence. So this is, in many ways, just the sort of theatre that excites me. But I wasn’t moved. The intellectual side took over so much that there wasn’t a real human engagement with the characters, and many of them weren’t very well acted either. There was a lot of engagement with technical possibilities too – but these also weren’t very elegantly done. Ideas alone aren’t enough – you’ve got to pull them off as well.

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.

Back to China?

For quite a while, since February 27th in fact, I've been sitting on what could be the most exciting bit of news Border Crossings has had in a very long time. The reason I've been keeping quiet is that it's an EU grant for the Orientations Trilogy, and it's bureaucratically complex. I've kept feeling that if I put it out there, something is bound to go wrong. But I've just heard that the contact is on its way to us, and so it seems it will all happen.

Because we're quite a small organisation, the EU isn't really geared up to dealing with us. But they liked our list of partners, they liked the project.... and so they went for it. The only difficulty was that somebody has to guarantee to pay the pre-funding back if we don't deliver the project! We couldn't - we don't have sufficient resources to guarantee it. I have been searching a lot - finally Collage Arts agreed to be guarantors, and will be coming in to supervise the admin as a result - which is probably just what we need. They've done EU projects before, so they know what they're talking about. They'll be helping me interview potential Producers at the end of the month.

We open up the lines of communication to China. Nick Yu, from SDAC, is excited about the chance to host the devising workshop - but needs to check out just how many people they can actually look after (he's only had directors on their own before). The Shanghai Festival is keen to show Dis-Orientations this autumn, but needs a co-producing venue (possibly SDAC..). So the negotiations begin, and the frustration of nothing being tied down continues and grows. But we're getting somewhere, that's for sure.

Mr. President

Now I know how Nixon felt.

At 9.30 this morning, Director You (my Zhou Enlai for the day) appears in the hotel lobby with a huge car, in which we are driven across town. No translator, so we just keep smiling at one another politely and uncomprehendingly. Just after 10, we are in the very fast lift of the Yihai Building, being rocketed up to the 24th floor, where we are met by Forrina Chen (playing Nancy Tang for the day). I met Forrina in Hong Kong back in March: she's in the "International Liaison Department" of the China Shanghai International Arts Festival. And (thank god) is perfectly bi-lingual.

Forrina shows us into a vast meeting room, around the walls of which are huge armchairs, into which we sink. Mine is just to the right of the room's centre. There's a table in the very centre of the wall, which has a big pot-plant on it. Director You is seated to my right, and Forrina takes a chair to the left, leaving the centre-left space for the President. Then Mr Chen Sheng Lai arrives. He says "Hello" and I say "Ni hua", and from then on we're dependent on Forrina. It's just as well, because we both sink quite deeply into the chairs, and so we can't really look at each other, but end up playing hide and seek with our eyes around the pot plant. Or stare into the empty space in the middle of the room. It all feels just like the scene in Mao's library from Nixon in China.... So much so that even the photographer appears, and we all rise to our feet and stand in an awkward smiling line to mark the momentous intercultural encounter.

Luckily, what is actually being said at the meeting is all rather useful. Mr Chen likes the idea of a cross-cultural collaboration in theatre - they've only done this with music before - and the presence of Zhang Ruihong makes it a sure seller. He's intrigued about the ways we handle language in the production, and he like the thought of a piece set in contemporary Shanghai with Western performers, which also draws off the traditional culture here. He asks some astute questions about why we wanted to work with Yueju: I give quite a complicated answer about gender, identity and the changing world - I have no way of telling how Forrina translates this, but both President Chen and Director You nod sagely, so it must have been convincing on some level. I decide that I'd better take the opportunity to pre-empt any possible difficulties later on, and tell them that I've taken on board Mr Ke Yasha's recommendations about ways of making the piece more "suitable for a Chinese audience" - which means dealing with sexual and political content in a subtle way. More sagely nodding. I'm beginning to think this might just happen....

DVDs are taken, and I suppose much depends on these. I hope they can play them more readily than I could on the laptop yesterday.... Then Mr Chen give me a copy of the Festival programme for this year. It's a 200 page coffee-table book, bound in hard covers, with every page in full colour. And the list of performances is extraordinary. This explains the Presidential suite - it's the largest Festival in China, and one of the largest in the world. And here are we being backed by the Yue Opera Company, one of their main collaborators, to be a part of it.

I only hope they like that DVD.....