2013

Song Ru Hi in Consumed - with Zhang Ying on video.  Photo: Richard Davenport

It's been a very remarkable year for Border Crossings.  To start with the headline figures: during 2013, we
 - attracted audiences of 7,425
   and 969 public participants
-  presented 75 performances or exhibition days
   and 127 workshops or participation sessions
-  worked with 121 artists
   and 25 venues
-  travelled to 6 countries
   to involve their artists in our work
-  toured our new piece Consumed
   and presented the third Origins Festival

Consumed was a hugely exciting project for us, bringing our devised work to a new level of sophistication, and really embracing the complexities of working across languages, using new technologies as part of the drama itself.  Working again with Song Ru Hui and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, we were able to deepen the collaboration and build on the trust.  The results were very remarkable.  There's a terrific TV documentary about the play in the Chinatown series by Propeller (which broadcasts to over 10 million viewers) - you can see it online at http://propellertv.co.uk/programmes/chinatown.

Origins was also an extraordinary experience, bringing together some of the most important artists in the world today.  It was a huge privilege to host Diane Benson, Victoria Hunt, Trevor Jamieson, Dalisa Pigram and Indigie-Femme in London - as well as the many other indigenous performers, artists and thinkers who gathered here for those rich and invigorating couple of weeks.  What makes the Festival really special is the way it connects international "high art" with the communities of First Nations people living here - and this year was especially exciting in that respect, with both the Samoan and indigenous Mexican communities being featured prominently.  The Day of the Dead event at Rich Mix is something we will never forget!

Origins: The Day of the Dead

It's also been the year in which our Community Engagement work really took off, with Lucy Dunkerley leading participatory projects for young people in schools and community settings across London and in China.  She also began the engagement with Muslim communities that is going to be a key part of our work in the next couple of years.  Back in June, Brian Woolland and I were in Lebanon, working on a new piece called This Flesh is Mine, which we are planning to produce in May.  It's going to be a co-production with Ashtar from Palestine, and has the potential to be a really extraordinary piece of work - bringing home the emotional experience of the contemporary Middle East and galvanising the debates we really need to have around the geopolitics of the region.

Looking back over the wider cultural experience of the year, it seems to me that the arts in general, and theatre in particular, were rather restrained, even conservative.  I know that's not a common view - and of course there's been plenty of "innovation" on show, but it's largely been of the "look at me, aren't I clever?" kind, rather than genuinely seeking out and generating new meaning and significant ideas.  It's the sort of innovation that is generated by insecurity - a competitive, rather than a sustaining approach to art.

There are exceptions, of course.  I hugely admired Sons Without Fathers at the Arcola - Helena Kaut-Howson's response to Chekhov's Platonov, which gave the play an incredibly sharp contemporary edge and banished all thoughts of this writer as wistful and bourgeois.  It was wonderful to see A Season in the Congo performed in London, especially with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing Patrice Lumumba.  Ashtar themselves made a brief visit to Rich Mix, with their piece 48 Minutes for Palestine, directed by Mojisola Adebayo.  But my theatrical highlight of the year was actually a piece I saw in Norway, performed by a Maya theatre company from Guatemala. Oxlajuj B'aqtun by Sotz'il Jay is a staggering performance, deeply rooted in Maya culture and spirituality, made in response to the death of Lisandro Guarcax González, "guide and founder of Sotz’il Jay, who was murdered on the day Oxlajuj B’atz’(Monkey 13) (25th August 2010). Because, as he said: “Nqarayij chi ronojel qasamaj nk’atzin chi nkitamab’ej nk’aj chïk winaqi' ”. We long for all our efforts to be transformed into the knowledge of the other."

This sort of communally created, culturally immersed, deeply felt and politically committed work is exactly what our culture needs at the moment, and it's something we see less and less.  More private and personal cultural forms - the novel, in particular - are very much alive and vital.  But culture in the public arena, where the theatre operates, is being drained of its lifeblood.  A theatre that is forced to justify itself in economic terms, a theatre that is reduced to simplistic pre-conceived social "SMART objectives", a theatre embarrassed by its spiritual role - this is a theatre in terminal decline.  2014 has to be about reasserting the vitality and necessity of the art form - not as something which contributes to economic growth or attracts tourism, not as a luxury which we add on once we've dealt with other needs apparently more basic, but as something which is itself basic to any healthy and dynamic society in its own right.  Survival alone will be an achievement this year - but it's also pointless if we don't survive as something truly necessary: as a space within our darkling work that offers healing and contemplation, regeneration and provocation, energy and light.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The amazing Song Ru Hui

Song Ru Hui.  Photo: Richard Davenport

I've known, and worked with Song Ru Hui since 2009, when we started the development process for Re-Orientations in Shanghai.  That makes this period of rehearsal for Consumed the fifth block of work we've done together in four years.  It's a fascinating and evolving creative collaboration, made all the more intriguing and challenging by the fact that we don't speak the same language.

Consumed was Hui's idea.  She'd been excited and stimulated by the devising process around Re-Orientations, and wanted the opportunity to develop a new piece with a smaller cast, working on similar lines but with more depth for specific characters.  We've ended up with a three-hander: Hui and two men.

The workshop process in Shanghai last year was actually quite complex for Hui.  Her training and method as a performer is very Stanislavskian - she needs to know everything about a character before she can play her.  That's almost diametrically opposed to my devising approach - where we create scenes, events, happenings - and slowly hang them together until a storyline emerges.  For me, the character is the person who does those things.  The psychology emerges from the events, rather than being there to motivate them.

But the dramaturgical period since the workshop has allowed a strong story to emerge, with three clear characters, each of whom has a very carefully worked out journey.  Our rehearsals over the last few weeks have been about charting that, in a way far closer to Hui's accustomed approach.  And the results are very remarkable.

Serge Soric and I were discussing her acting on the train after rehearsals last week.  It's not just a Stanislavskian, absorbed performance.  At the risk of sounding pretentious, it's a transcendent happening.  I've no idea whether Hui is a religious or spiritual person in any way - although I do feel that she emerges from a heritage of Buddhist culture which empowers the internal life.  It seems to me that acting, for her, is not a craft or a discipline so much as a spiritual practice, a way of being.  More than any actor I have ever worked with, she transforms on stage, becoming more than herself. She takes her art to another dimension, and so transforms the space around her. 

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.

After the workshop

The workshop came to an end last week, with a sharing session for the SDAC management, and a few other invited guests.  We deliberately called it a "sharing" rather than a "showing", as we really didn't feel we had got to a point where anything was in a state to be "shown" to an "audience" - although we were definitely in a place where it was helpful to share our work with interested parties, and get their responses.

Happily, the responses were really excited.  A lot of the work we shared involved the use of technology - not because the show is necessarily going to be technology-heavy, but because those are the scenes around which we've hung the structure of the play as it's evolved so far.  We're aware of the need for more naturalistic scenes around them, and have made versions of some of them which we have since jettisoned - but they don't yet exist in a version which makes sense for the final play.  As a result, I felt the sharing was perhaps a bit imbalanced, but nobody else seemed to think that - and, very pleasingly, there was a strong sense that our approach was allowing technology to interact with live performance in a way that lifted the human story and made sense of how it operated, rather than swamping it (always the danger with new media in theatre).  The scenes which attracted the most comment were the ones which involved interaction between actors and technology to do something totally new - as I guess you'd expect.  Very pleasingly, the multi-lingualism of the piece drew no comments at all: it just seemed natural, and everybody understood as much as they needed to.

Liu Liang, the Artistic Director of SDAC, was very excited by the potential of what we've got.  He told me that the piece was much more developed and inspiring than Re-Orientations had been at the same stage.  I think he's probably right: the previous piece was apparently more polished in the "showing", but in fact very few of the characters had interesting psychological journeys in the way they do for the new play, and I ended up cutting vast swathes of the material we had shown.  This time, the sense was one of building on what had been achieved so far, rather than re-thinking anything fundamental.  Nick Yu, who is a wonderful dramaturgical adviser, suggested that we create a scene for Tony and Hui's characters "where language is not the problem".  This is spot on - we need to deepen the idea of failure in communication, so that it becomes about something very deep in the contemporary condition, way beyond the banalities of language, culture, gender and class.  

Feels like we are on the way. 

Ningbo and after

The public workshop with the students in Ningbo was really helpful to us - not least because it showed us some aspects of the play that weren't really hanging together.  We'd been a bit wary of the fact that the play is set in the business world, and opted to make the work-related story about the making of an advertisement, because we felt closer to that world. But the result was that the cultural conflicts we tried to introduce felt forced and artificial - Chinese advertising actually works in a very similar way to Western advertising - it's just that the cultural tropes employed are specific and local - as they would be anywhere in the world.  So there's not enough to hang drama on.  Good to find this out at such an early stage - and good to be pushed back towards the alien world of high finance, which is really an altogether more meaty prospect at the current moment.  We've been looking at characters caught up in a web of inter-personal connections - and, of course, they are also caught up in the complexities of the financial system.  The complexity actually is the point.  I send out some emails to various contacts who know a bit about Sino-British financial relations.  Very pleased to see that they are willing to have their brains picked.  I don't think this strand of the play is something we can create through improvisation during the current workshop - we need to put it on ice and collaborate on a writing process after the research work has been done more fully.  We know the function of the scenes in terms of the personal stories we want to tell - now we need to bring in another level.

Yesterday was spent filming some scenes which we're planning to project in the final production.  We brought in two young actors - Tie Zheng and Zhang Ying - to play younger versions of Li and Hui's characters.  Ying even looks rather like a younger version of Hui, and she has the same ease of access to her emotions - the parting scene is beautiful and very moving.  Great to bring some younger people into this process, especially after the very fruitful encounter with the students in Ningbo.  Roshni Mooneeram, our former board member who now teaches there, tells me that they always seem to be "unlocked" by our drama workshops there.  That, of course, is what theatre is for.....

Devising behind the firewall

I feel like a smuggler. When I've been to China before, writing this blog has been OK, even though I sometimes haven't been able to read it. Facebook and Twitter have long since been barred here - and now it seems that Western blogs are also subject to the Great Firewall of China. It all seems very strange and ambiguous, given that the Chinese version of Twitter, weibo, is much larger than its Western counterpart, and was buzzing all week with political gossip around the ousting of Bo Xilai. Anyway - for whatever reason - I am sending this post out by email so that Sheelah can put it online from the office. All very under the table in smoke-filled rooms.... very Shanghaiese.

We gathered on Wednesday morning in the rehearsal room at SDAC. Tony Guilfoyle had flown in from Quebec, where he's been working on the new Robert Lepage production, so he's been battling with a 12-hour time difference. For Dori Deng, who grew up in China, it's a homecoming: she's never worked in her home country before, and now she's experimenting with multi-media and bilingualism. I don't know what I'd do without her shuttle diplomacy! Song Ru Hui, who cooked up the idea of this new show with me back in 2010, is probably even more intense and fascinating than I remember her. She's always incredibly truthful and engaged when she performs - and for precisely that reason she can't do it until she's 100% sure of and committed to what she's doing.

Our new addition is Ning Li - and he's a real find, courtesy of Nick Yu and Jackie Zhang from SDAC. Li started his career in Shanghai, but has been in Beijing recently. He's also lived in the States, and is married to an American, so he has a foot in both cultures. Devising is totally new to him, but he has shown a wonderful openness in these first few days.

So far we have spoken to people from the business world - both English and Chinese; talked amongst ourselves about the current historical moment, about culture, identity and change; played games with language and style; experimented with cameras and the web; improvised scenes and potential stories. As usual in work of this kind, the great benefits are the things you're not looking for, and the knowledge that people bring of their own culture. Yesterday Li and Hui gave me a totally new idea of what it was like to be a young Chinese person in the 1980s - leading to a very intense and touching scene, redefining how I would think of a lovers' parting.

It's very early days, and we're still unsure of what this play will be. But it feels like something very exciting is happening. Let's hope it doesn't get censored!

The Antonioni Project

To the Barbican for a production by Ivo van Hove and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam. I had very high hopes for this work, after their extraordinary production of The Roman Tragedies, which I saw in 2009. Like that show, there's a lot of multi-media in The Antonioni Project - not totally surprising, given that the production is based on three films by Michelangelo Antonioni. In The Roman Tragedies, the film was to do with the constant exposure of political lives, both public and private, to the scrutiny of the media. Here, the film-making itself almost became the subject: the production's probably best described as a live film - every scene is shot and projected as it is being performed. At times this can be stunning - for example, when bluescreen is used to place actors who you can see on stage into a pre-recorded and totally "real" environment - but very often it feels as if the technology has been allowed to become the point. The narrative and the characters just aren't interesting enough to hold their own against all this, and so the production seems rather "New Labour" - all style and no substance.

At the same time, it's very fascinating and suggests lots of possibilities for a future project I'm currently mulling over. The characters are living in a world where everything is conceived in mediated terms, perhaps especially human relationships. So they can only operate through layers of media-tion: and the apparent distancing achieved by the technology is a powerful metaphor for the way they see their own lives.

All this made sense to me intellectually as I watched the piece - but it didn't work in terms of emotional engagement. There was no compelling narrative to pull you along, no character to draw you in. I want to treat these subjects in the new play I'm planning with Hui and Tony - but we've got to make sure we don't lose the humanity.

Great reviews for Re-Orientations

Reviews for Re-Orientations are really exciting - and so is the audience response. I hadn't realised until I saw the show at Soho just how funny it is!

Here are some quotes from the reviews and links:

"Deeply felt, powerfully performed, beautifully staged production" -Londonist

"Impressive, bold in ambition and fluid - like Robert Lepage.... Exquisite moments.... a terrific scene milking the comedy of cultural confusion" - Guardian

"Lives and cultures collide - sometimes violently - in this kaleidoscopic drama... intersecting stories set against a backdrop of hectic, often striking visuals.." - Times

"The visuals are stunning with video integrated into the action and choreography by French dance company a fleur de peau. I also love the way the company interweave different art forms and acting styes.... the company has also scored a real coup in engaging the talents of the great Chinese actress Song Ru Hui" - Theatreworld

"A two hour visual feast... Outstanding performances by Spatica Ramanujam with her exquisite comic timing and superb characterisation, and Qi Bai Xue's striking stage presence" - spoonfed.co.uk

There's only a week left to catch this acclaimed production at Soho Theatre before it tours to Shanghai and Sweden. Click here to book now!

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.

Many Cultural Experiences

The workshop grows. Friday afternoon was incredibly exciting - we found a very theatrical way of creating Sammy's sister's response to his life in Shanghai, which led to a really powerful climactic moment. Great to find these plot points through physical action, rather than by talking and thinking.

On Friday night, we were all the guests of Zhao Zhigang and the Yue Opera Company at the Yi Fu theatre. I hadn't seen Yueju with men in the cast before: it's a new innovation and I'm not totally sure that I approve! The story of this piece came over as rather sexist - the hero is in love with a young woman, but his parents make him marry another. The wife manages to bring him back from his pining sickness, and seems generally rather wonderful, but both she and the girl he loves end up killing themselves, while he finishes the piece contemplating it all rather poetically. If Ruihong or another female performer were playing the hero, then the patriarchal assumptions behind the legend would be questioned and de-constructed by her very presence: you would get not only the story but also the female viewpoint on that story. In a more "realistically" cast version (which, incidentally, is also less choreographed and codified than the all-female performances I've seen), you only get the patriarchy. Which said, it was wonderful to be back in the Yi Fu, and to hear the singing and the orchestra again. The designs are beautiful, too, even if the snow machine is very noisy! The audience amazes the European performers, who are astonished by all the talking, the lack of applause at the curtain call, and the rush towards the stage to take pictures of the stars.

Saturday night, by contrast, finds several of us visiting Shanghai's new gay scene, to research the background to Sammy in the plays. We manage to find a gay bar called Shanghai Studio, concealed in a deep cellar behind a red door in a back alley of the French Concession. Literally underground, the bar is very smart, very Chinese (down to lattice screens secluding different seating areas), and very safe in ambiance. Nancy gets into conversation with a young girl who wants to be a make-up artist, and she in turn introduces "a little boy" calling himself Barry, who wants to be an actor. Barry is a very shy, gentle person, who is overjoyed that there are British performers in his orbit, and who (like Sammy) does drag performances in this gay club. He shows me images of himself in wig, make-up and fish-nets on his laptop - and promises he'll send me some on Facebook! This is very valuable research - and I hope he'll follow up on the contact, so I can put him in touch with the appropriate actor. But for now, it's good to know how very real the world we've been creating seems to be.

Today is Sunday, and the SDAC turns off its heating system. Rather than have the cast shiver through the day, I try to get the Chinese performers to guide us around Shanghai. It doesn't really work, since almost all the things I thought we should see - for example the notorious Sex Museum - turn out to be closed or defunct. At least we are able to submerge ourselves in some Buddhist culture at the Jing An Temple. Ru Hui shows me the little private rooms along the sides of the temple, where families come to observe various forms of ritual and prayer with the help of the monks. Most interesting for us are the prayers for the dead. In one room, there is a large family praying for a woman who died exactly ten years ago in the Chinese lunar calendar. With the usual Chinese politeness to interested foreigners, they invite us into the room, and tell us about what they are doing. The woman's dignified photograph is displayed on a table, surrounded by offerings of food and incense. There are boxes of paper objects - houses, cars, TVs, money - which they will burn as part of the ritual.

I ask Hui if this event has to be after ten years. No - she says a family can do it whenever they like - and then explains that in Chinese culture there is a word which means that something is "meant to be". These rituals happen when they are supposed to happen - when the people involved feel that it should be done. And she adds, very movingly, that until two weeks ago she had not known that we would be doing this work together. This, she says, was meant to be.