Corridors of Power

Here I am, back at Heathrow, waiting to go back to Athens again and in a mildly poisonous mood, given that Olympic airlines have just charged me £50 for excess baggage – mainly books which I have to take to do this job properly. On the other hand, I’m typing this on my brand new laptop, which has to be good news! I’d been wondering about getting one for a while, given the increasing travel involved in running Border Crossings, and the ever-greater necessity of constant email contact. The clincher was when the email came from the Greek National Opera promising an apartment with an internet connection “for your laptop”. Assumption breeds purchase in this market-driven world. I do hope it will still be possible to disappear from time to time. There has to be wilderness, doesn’t there?

Much of the last few days in London have been devoted to the Origins Festival. This is Gordon Bronitsky’s idea for a Festival of First Nations Theatre in London, fronted by Border Crossings, with me as Director. It’s acquiring momentum: I think you’ll be hearing a lot of this in the pages of this blog. At the moment, we’re pulling together a launch event for later this year, when our advisory panel of First Nations theatre-makers will meet, give workshops and talks, create buzz and generate excitement, as well as begin the process of creating a Festival proper for 2008. We’ve attracted some exciting people to this board: Wesley Enoch, Hone Kouake, Drew Haydn Taylor….. and growing.

I went to a meeting with the Cultural Attachés at the US Embassy. It was scheduled for 12 noon, and that’s when I (somewhat naively) arrived. Half an hour later, I was still battling my way through the security measures. Tank-proof barriers, endless queues for paperwork checking, photo i/ds, shoe removal, airport-style body scans, confiscation of mobile phones, car keys (car keys?!) and USB sticks, police with machine guns everywhere….. by the time I got in, I was more than ready to discuss Native American culture, its spirituality, its green-ness and what it could teach the mad Western world about living in harmony! Of course, there’s a serious element of the warrior brave to this culture, but the war on terror more than dwarfs the efforts of Crazy Horse. The Embassy is very supportive – but also a bit cagey about committing money (as so often). The reasons are instructive. “In a normal year”, they say, “we’d do this at once. And I’m sure we’ll be able to manage something….. It’s just that our discretionary budgets have been really squeezed.” If the richest nation on earth is feeling the squeeze on cultural exchange, what hope for the rest of us? It’s the war, of course: Bush’s Middle Eastern lunacy is stopping any money going anywhere useful. And, of course, America doesn’t really believe in public money for culture anyway.

The Australian High Commission is an altogether easier affair. For one thing, it only takes a moment or two to get through the door. Kirsten Moore, the Cultural Advisor, knows all about Border Crossings, having studied the website in some depth, and we talk at length about Bullie’s House, about indigenous protocol, about Wesley, and about the real value of First Nations cultures for the contemporary world. By the time I leave, she’s offered us the use of Australia House for our launch event in September, and the presence of the High Commissioner or his Deputy. Plus lots of email addresses and contact for likely funding sources in Oz. I’m sure the charming Americans would have loved to offer their building too – but it’s a bit of problem doing a public event in what feels like a high security prison.

New Spaces

I spent yesterday morning at the new Bernie Grant Centre in Tottenham. Actually, it's not even new yet - it opens in September, and is currently a building site. Gaylene Gould, the programmer, and I walk around in yellow anoraks, wellies and hard hats, imaging where the stage will be. It's a space full of potential - a cross between the larger space at Riverside and the Tricycle. About 300 seats. And there will be creative businesses on site, a rehearsal /workshop space and so on. All rather lovely.

Gaylene is keen to bring Dilemma here, and it's easy to see why. As I walk from the tube, I spot at least three shops advertising the facility to send money home to Ghana. We're right in the heart of London's Ghanaian community here, and that's the audience this centre has to reach if it's to make any sense at all as a focus for black arts. Not that this is an easy job. Gaylene seems very aware of the size of the task ahead - lots of her community contacts have involved people not really even knowing what a theatre is (they tend to think it's a cinema or a music venue). It could so easily go the way of so many of those Lottery-funded white elephants that now populate the country..... But somehow I suspect it won't. There seems to be a huge momentum behind this place, both from the management, the community and politically. It should be very exciting to be in there at the start.

In the evening I meet up with Elsie at the South Bank. It now looks as if our London run will be split between the Bernie Grant Centre and the new space here, known as the Front Room. Both managements seem happy about there: there's not likely to be any real overlap of audiences. The Front Room is a stage in the foyer - a rather odd idea as a theatre venue. I had been rather worried about this, but as we talk I start to see possibilities. After all, I've been saying all along that this production will need to feel as if it could happen in an African village clearing (indeed - all being well, it WILL happen there), so a space which has the same informality is actually rather appropriate. We find ourselves talking animatedly about ways of integrating the audience into the piece - as if they are surrounded by the ghosts of slavery (which, of course, they are).

Anti-Slavery International agree to collaborate on the production. This is all very good!

Athens and Africa

I'm in Athens for three days, getting things sorted out for the next incarnation of Nixon in China with the National Opera of Greece. Extraordinary hectic days, rushing around trying to work out how to schedule it all, and who will actually be here (!), at the same time as breathing in a sense of this city.... this city where theatre truly began. Or Western theatre, I should say. More time for that when I'm here for two months in March and April. The Acropolis and the Theatre of Dionysus - glimpsed today from flying taxis - I can hardly wait.

As usual with working abroad, the evenings are a bit of a limbo. Email, reading and blogging. Last night I went to see The Last King of Scotland (in English with surreal Greek subtitles). There's a moment when Idi Amin says the Greeks stole their philosophy from Africa, which of course brought the Athenian house down.... but he's kind of right, actually. Read Black Athena.

The film is fabulous. All the traps of Hollywod Goes to Africa have been subtly and wonderfully avoided (except perhaps for the presence of the Caucasian Angel - though this particular altruistic medic is played by Gillian Anderson, so seems human, and is offset by James McAvoy as the cynical, opportunistic, and frankly exploitative Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, through whose eyes we see Uganda - so I forgive them!). Forest Whitaker is stunning as Amin: I'm told he went all "method" and was like that even when the cameras weren't rolling, which must have been by turns hilarious and terrifying for everybody else. What's so brilliant about this performance and the film as a whole is that it only slowly emerges how monstrous this regime was. Through the first sections of the film we get Amin the clown, Amin the charmer, even hints of Amin the liberator. It's only gradually that this transforms into total horror - a horror that should make the West sit up and take notice, because the film is quite clear that Amin was the creature of the West: his coup engineered by Britain when the previous regime got "uppity". Just like Saddam Hussein in fact. As Peter Sellars says, if you want to know where the next dictatorship will be, just check out who the CIA and MI5 are being nice to.

I'm reminded of the very different approach to Amin in Third World Bunfight's pantomime of horror, Big Dada. There too, you saw how easily people were won over. I remember talking to Brett Bailey about the production, and his characteristic response, disturbing in its blank honesty: "Idi Amin was a funny man. I liked him."

Victory

For the last few weeks, I've been back at Rose Bruford, directing Victory by Howard Barker with second year students. Although it's a different group of actors, the choice of play is a deliberate continuation of the work on non-naturalistic / political text which I did there before Christmas. Not that Barker is even remotely Brechtian, or at all PC. This is a play in which the "c" word is proclaimed nine times in less than two minutes in the very first scene. If ever there was a statement of iconoclastic intent.....

I've not directed Barker's work before, and I've always felt a bit dubious about it, although I've seen a lot of his plays (and boy is he prolific). Chris Corner's invited me to most of the Wrestling School shows over the last few years - I enjoyed The Seduction of Almighty God at Riverside in the autumn. And I have very fond memories of the Almeida's productions in the early years of the McDiarmid-Kent regime there: Scenes from an Execution and A Hard Heart. But my suspicion has tended to be that this is cold, intellectual work, with only a wilfully perverse and oblique connection to human behaviour, and little real political edge. How wrong I was! Working on Victory, I've come to feel this is incredibly powerful, funny and pertinent writing. It yields a lot of fruit in the rehearsal room. I'm left wondering whether the Wrestling School doesn't suffer a bit from Barker directing most of the productions himself: it seems to me that he directs the humour out of his own work.

Victory is set in the Restoration, with the returning Cavaliers taking revenge on the Puritans. Not that the piece is at all historical (the central character is Susan Bradshw, the widow of Richard Bradshaw, who was President of the Court that condemned Charles I - the historical Mary Bradshaw was married to John, and died before he did!). The razor wit and wild debauchery of Charles II is there, as is the deep seriousness of the Revolution - but it's really a play about modern times (it dates from 1983) dressed up in period frocks. The power of money is at the heart of it (great scene in the Bank of England) and alongside that sits the deep malaise of the present moment - the lack of any real dream, any real hope for the future.

Doing the play with young people, that theme emerges more painfully than ever. For all the success of their acting (and they've done this difficult piece incredibly well), there's very little understanding of, or interest in, this key theme. It's as if Thatcher's Children have taken over the younger generation: not only is there very little idealism, there isn't even much sense of its absence. The ending, when Bradshaw's daughter declares her intention to publish her father's visionary book, feels very moving in this student performance precisely because of its incongruity. This isn't the fault of this talented bunch of young people, of course - but of the world in which they are growing up: a world obsessed with the material success of the self, and with the utilitarian value of culture, education, everything. Because, in spite of everything, they DO have all the energy and vitality that youth has always had - it's social and educational conditioning which makes this so difficult to focus towards any sense of an impossible dream.

New Crowned Hope

Peter sends me the catalogue of his Vienna Festival to commemorate Mozart's 250th birthday: New Crowned Hope. It's staggering: a real tribute to what the intercultural future of the planet ought to be. Everything Peter dreamed of in his Adelaide Festival and was prevented from achieving is here, in this extraordinary gathering of creative people in a huge range of fields, paying tribute to Mozart and to the vision of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation which his final works, at once triumphant and meditational, embody. I love the presence of architecture alongside music, food alongside theatre, refugee work alongside dance. I must hold this model in my head as we start to work on the Origins Festival of First Nations Theatre which we're planning for 2008.

Meanwhile, other plans for 2008 lurch back and forth. I'm talking at length to people in China about possible presentations of Dis-Orientations and (I hope) the rest of the Trilogy there. There is still a degree of wariness about political content, which is entirely understandable - I keep mentioning Mr Ke's positive energy, and hope this filters through. The visit to Hong Kong will hopefully give me chance to do some reassuring in person - it's much easier than through email and translation.

2007 is also shaping up. Elsie Owusu is now going to do the set for Dilemma, which could be ideal since a) she's Ghanaian and b) she's an architect rather than a theatre designer. Given that this show will be going in to village spaces in Ghana (funds permitting) and probably a non-theatre space in London, we need to think about configuring space in a more radical way - redefining actor-audience relationships. Dzifa and Ama Ata both email today from Ghana to say how excited they are about this project. Mustn't let them down.

John Adams

I went to the Barbican on Sunday night to hear John Adams conducting three of his own pieces. In a way, this was homework for the forthcoming revival of Nixon in Greece; but, as so often, the real benefits were elsewhere. I'd wanted for some time to hear On the Transmigration of Souls, which is John's response to 9/11. It's a stunning piece - with the music emerging from a city soundscape, and the recorded voice of a boy repeating the word "Missing, Missing". The ambiguity of the single word sets the tone for the whole piece: even its title has double meanings: the souls of the dead migrate and transform, but so, in a time of crisis, do those of the living. The cataclysm of 2001 has shifted so many souls into a different space, whether we accept it or not.

But the piece which truly amazed me was John's concerto for an electric violin: The Dharma at Big Sur. Against a classical orchestra, Leila Josefowicz was like a combination of Dave Gilmour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And this use of styles from outside the Western classical tradition questions and probes the canonical value of that tradition, just as we try to do with Border Crossings. It's to do with realising what political, social and moral values our limited approach to music or theatre implies, and expanding it to incorporate alternative views - to be in dialogue with those views. To accept the world we live in. In The Dharma at Big Sur, this is done by using the way in which Asian and African music really exists, is most alive, in the space between the notes - is as dependent on the journeying, the slurring, the leaps and slides of the performer as it is on what is written. And this should also be true of our theatre - in the 21st century we have to move away from a narrow reliance on the textual tradition (the notes), and work instead with the musicality of transition and journeying.

From Slavery to Salesmanship

The latest edition of African Theatre is out, edited by Michael Etherton. He's a writer who has always interested me, since I read his book on Contemporary Irish Dramatists years ago, and started to understand how colonisation has shaped theatre in so many parts of the world. My production of Spokesong for Stage One, back in the early 90s, was really the start of my journey into post-colonial theatre, and owed a huge amount to him. So it's very exciting for me to be in communication with him, and to hear how much he likes the website and ideas behind Border Crossings!

The African Theatre book is subtitled Youth, and is about work around Theatre for Development, empowering young people to articulate their concerns, and to make real changes in the attitudes of adults, with political results. This makes me think more about the issues around contemporary slavery and near slavery, and I email Michael about theatre which is tackling these issues in the modern world. He's put me in touch with some extraordinary people, mainly working with NGOs on the Indian subcontinent, who are helping child labourers and bonded labourers to make theatre pieces and videos which articulate their lives and effect change. So, this is material which must go into the planned book on Theatre and Slavery.

The book is intended to sit alongside the Dilemma production - at the moment a lot of energy is going into selling this into venues. There's a lot of interest, and some definites outside London, but the key London venue is still not secured, in spite of several requests for the script, meetings and so on. I suspect this is the bit of the job I do least well - I've always been a bit bad at the selling side of things - there's a bit of me somewhere that believes nobody would want anything from me...... Deborah comes with me to one meeting and I ask her for some notes afterwards. "You're very honest" is her only comment. I guess City people find that quite surprising in what is, essentially, a sales pitch. It would really help if somebody else could somehow take this on......

I feel more at ease when the meeting is more speculative, like my hour with Angharad at LIFT on Tuesday. She's still talking with great excitement about Dis-Orientations, and would be interested in the Trilogy being part of LIFT 08. It's not her decision, though: programming these days is the work of the "Seekers". That's fine - we initiate a dialogue with Wen Hui (who I sort of know anyway). In the meantime, Meijing invites me to the Hong Kong Festival as the guest of the British Council to make contacts for taking the Trilogy over there..... and it all feels quite buoyant. And Angharad has asked if I'll be a Seeker for LIFT 2010 - which is a real recognition for what we've been doing.

Awards for All

Good news to end the year. Awards for All agree to fund the Laboratory for 2007. This is a really exciting step forward for us in terms of research, development and training. To date, all the workshops (like the recent Natya Chetana one) have had to be self-financing, so they've depended on popularity, sales and a bit of goodwill. Now, with funding behind us, we can open them up to more people, and bring in the practitioners we really want to learn from.

Happy New Year......

Art and Politics

Art (perhaps theatre more than any other) and politics are so closely linked that sometimes they seem to be the same thing. We?ve been juggling the Ghana project around the needs of the Ghana @ 50 Secretariat, which has set its own programme of plays, and now needs us to come in December 2007, rather than September, which means we?ll be rehearsing in London after all. That?s probably OK. I meet Nigel Tallantire, who is co-ordinating the Africa ?07 initiative for the British Council, and it seems to work well for him. I read between the lines of our discussion, and shift one or two of the priorities to bring the project closer to their programme.

The effect of all this is probably going to be quite good for the project. We?ll be able to tour outside Accra, bringing the work to a broad range of Ghanaian communities. This is very much in line with the way my vision of the play is developing: I want it to feel as if it could happen in an open space in an African village - and that?s a lot easier if it actually will! Quite how a production like that works on the UK stage is another matter. The London venue is the key: we need to work the space so that the roughness is there, but in way which is honest to both the play?s African origins and the fact that it is being done in dialogue with the West (and is actually about that dialogue). I meet David Lan at the Young Vic, and look at the refurbished building with him. The Studio space is totally flexible, and could work very well for us. David, who used to live in Zimbabwe and wrote Desire in response to his time there, is programming quite a bit of African work. He?s unsure whether that?s something he should embrace as a theme, or whether he should draw a line. I know what I think, but I?m biased. So?.. he?s reading the script.

Meanwhile, Deborah and I meet the local MP. Since the registered office is now in Enfield, this is Joan Ryan. I had thought, as a Labour newcomer in 1997, she would be quite Blairite, but the office, in the heart of Ponder?s End, feels quite "Old Labour". Joan is brutally honest that she doesn?t know much about the arts - prompting Deborah to remark that any Conservative MP would have said "Oh I love the arts" at the start of the meeting. I guess the honesty is refreshing, and it means that I have to talk about the company in directly political (though not party political) terms, which it?s good for me to do occasionally! Joan warms up when we talk about Africa (she?s a trustee of a charity which makes motorbikes for nurses, midwives and other essential workers), work permits (she sits on immigration committees) and Europe (ditto). By the end of the meeting she?s talking about linking us with some quite useful names in her address book, though I strongly suspect timing will be the key, and they?re probably the sort of people who will be able to do one thing, so we need to make sure it?s the right thing?..

With all this, my head is filled with politics as Subodh Pattanik and Sujata Proyambaia from the Natya Chetana Company in Orissa, India, arrive for this weekend?s Laboratory workshop. Natya Chetana is a company which lives and breathes its politics on a daily basis. They live in a "theatre village" (memories of Ninasam), which on closer investigation turns out to be a communist community (small "c" on "communist"). The money comes in to the community, and people receive money from the central fund according to their needs, rather than according to their level of responsibility or their perceived skills. Because the village is set apart from the urban centres, even of this poorest of Indian states, and because the accommodation is owned by the community, they have very few daily financial needs: only food, really. They don?t use beds, chairs or tables, in response to the de-forestation by the furniture companies. They don?t drink tea or coffee, because of the policies of the multinationals whose tea and coffee plantations have dispossessed so many Orissan farmers. They really do practice an alternative way of living, of which theatre-making is at the centre. And this way of living, unlike ours, is sustainable.

Subodh takes his company to villages for three-week residencies (which they offer to the village community in return for food and shelter). In that time, they research the lives of the people, their concerns, their stories, their cultural forms, and the issues with which they are faced. The company then returns to its base to devise a play which deals with these materials, and (crucially) uses the local performance forms as the medium for storytelling. They then tour the play across the rural areas by bicycle; in a form they call "Cyco Theatre". Subodh tells us about times when performances have led to direct action and to change, and the sense of an ongoing building of awareness and consciousness among the rural communities. He also tells me that companies have on occasion hired gangsters to attack them, forcing them to cycle through elephant-populated areas at night.

"Natya Chetana" means "Theatre for Awareness": but, unlike so many Theatre for Development groups, this one has not lost the theatre in the political agenda. The workshop is based around theatre games, many of which are quite familiar, and folk dances of Orissa. The real revelation comes when Sujata performs solo versions of two of their plays. The blending of folk art, Brechtian epic and the immediacy of personal experience is thrilling. It?s an astonishing performance. Politics made flesh.

Teaching Acting

I've been thinking more about this since the last post - partly because of Neil's fascinating comment, and partly because, with one thing and another, I'm doing more of it. The Laboratory moves forward: the next workshop is on Saturday, and we've put in a funding bid to make it a major feature of next year's work.

We presented the students' work at Rose Bruford last week. They did amazingly well - very intense and committed performances. So had I taught them anything? Or - had they learnt anything? I guess what I meant last time was that I don't feel you can teach talent, the performing instinct, the Zen leap into the other world of the stage. But you CAN teach technique, and you can teach genre. Watching them in action, I could see what they had taken on board was the different discipline of political performance; that Brecht-meets-China idea that we mustn't confuse the character and the actor. Teaching this, I've become more consciously aware of it: but I think it's present somewhere in most of what we do. Our productions tend to use naturalism as only one of a number of theatre styles, and it's the only one where the dividing lines are not totally clear.

Can you teach acting?

For the last couple of months (since the last week of Dis-Orientations, actually), I've been trying to answer this question. In spite of lots of teaching in drama schools, including directing several shows, I've never actually been hired as an acting teacher before. I've been working with second year actor-musicians at Rose Bruford on something called "Beyond Naturalism", which I guess I should be fairly well-placed to talk about. In practice, it's meant doing classes around Brecht and other political writers, as well as people like Pinter. We're now heading towards a short presentation of work around themes to do with the War on Terror, some of which is taken from existing text, and some of which they've created themselves.

But I'm not sure how much I've been able to teach them. When I direct, I tend to assume that the actor's performance is their own responsibility - that I'm there to deal with the strategy, rather than the tactics of a production. I suppose that's one reason why I like to work with people who bring with them a specific cultural tradition, who are able to draw off a vocabulary of performance that already exists - so that I can work with it, rather than feeling I have to become some sort of innovative guru. So when a student asks me "What should I do when I'm not in rehearsal?" and all I can answer is "Learn the text, work on its meaning, research the background", it feels rather inadequate. I suspect the tutors who led them through Naturalism gave them lots of Stanislavski-style atextual work to do on "character": stuff that would have made them feel scientific and busy. In the end, I tend to believe that only one thing matters in the theatre, and that is belief: the performer's belief in the validity of the work, which communicates itself as the audience's belief in the performance. Three sessions a week hasn't really been enough to arrive at this point, although I do feel there's a real commitment in the room. But these time constraints have meant I'm directing less well than usual - saying "Do this" far too often because if I open it up for democratic discussion (as I surely should in this situation even more than in others), then we just won't have a showing by Friday. The one consolation is that they do understand when I tell them this, which is a learning process in its own way.

I went to see Caroline or Change at the National on Saturday. It's odd to see a piece with such "mainstream", Broadway-style production values - it's been a long time. Nice, of course, that Tony Kushner can make use of mainstream forms to deal with issues of racism and economic divisions, even the legacy of slavery (I'm seeing it everywhere these days!). It's very well acted, and even better sung - but in the end it feels a bit slight, a bit too easy for the scale of the underlying subject. Angels in America it ain't.

Saturday's Independent has an article on the 50 leading figures in contemporary African culture. Ama Ata is in there, as she should be. I email the link to all our prospective venues, in the hope it will make a few people sit up and take interest. It seems to be working.....

Blair's Statement

There's an article in yesterday's Observer which reports a statement Tony Blair is going to make this week..... Under this government, all reporting seems to be of things that people are going to say. Maybe so that, if the response is negative, they can pull out and claim that they never actually said it. Sometimes I wonder whether they ever do say it, or whether it's just the reporting that matters. Anyway - this statement, billed as "historic", is on the subject of the slave trade. While it isn't an apology as such, it comes very much into the realm of apology culture.

What the Prime Minister will (at some point) say is this: "Personally I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and" (wait for it) "to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today."

Isn't this just apology culture at its worst? At its most glib, its most smug, its most self-satisfied? When Blair actually has done something stupid or wrong (like invading Iraq), he tends to say "I accept full responsibility", and then do nothing at all, when resignation would seem the obvious next step. In this case, he can't really be blamed for something that happened in history - and that makes the apology even more pointless. It simply has the effect of letting the present off the hook at the expense of the past. And the reality is that the present is well and truly on this particular hook. According to Anti-Slavery International there are more slaves in the world today than there have ever been before. About 27 million. And those are just the old-fashioned kind: the ones who are paid for. Never mind the children forced into being child soldiers; the victims of sex trafficking; the bonded labourers whose work keeps our food prices artificially low; the workers in sweat-shops who earn less than a dollar a day. "Different and better times"? I don't think so. Just times in which it's less easy for the West to see the appalling inequalities which it permits, encourages and perpetuates.

If the bi-centenary (of which our next project is very much a part) is to have any meaning at all, then it has to be about re-visiting the reality of modern slavery, and the legacy of the triangular trade period, in the contemporary world. It is true that the legal battle was won 200 years ago - so it is all the more terrifying that a practice on which a global moral consensus has been reached should remain so prevalent and should underpin so much of our global economy.

Thinking about Slavery

I've been thinking around the slavery issue, mainly because of the Dilemma project, but also because of some work I'm doing at Rose Bruford on political theatre. Dzifa sends me a rather disconcerting email from Accra, saying that there are rumours of another production. I'm not too worried - we have the writer behind us, and it's her text!

Juwon invites me to a show at the Lyric Studio, called Moj of the Antarctic. It's a solo piece, performed by a black woman called Mojisola Adebayo. Incredibly relevant to everything we're doing at the moment: the main story is about slavery, and also looks at gender! In a very playful way, Moj looks at the story of a slave in the Southern US, called Ellen Craft, who escaped in 1848 by disguising herself as a white man..... Talk to her afterwards, and plan a longer chat!

As the project grows, I'm looking at the different activities we can initiate around the theme of Theatre and Slavery. Talk to some of my favourite dramaturgical contacts around the globe. Rustom Bharucha emails from (interestingly enough) Brazil, with his usual incisiveness: "One has to be careful about essentializing slavery as the dominant reality of African peoples living in different parts of the world. Also, slavery coexists with different forms of servitude, particularly in the Indian context, which doesn't mean that slavery doesn't exist. Indeed, it does, in increasingly virulent, if invisible ways." Spot on.

I've been reading Robert J.C. Young's brilliant book: Postcolonialism - A Very Short Introduction. This book manages to deal with all the issues around the marginalisation of most of the world (of which modern slavery / global capitalism is, of course, a key part), without plunging into the dreaded "theory" with its willfully obscure language and apparent lack of relevance to anything but itself. Indeed, this book is startling in how directly relevant it makes its theme to the specifics of particular situations in the present moment. For one thing, it has the best discussion of the veil I've read anywhere, written long before Jack Straw started the current fever.

But the section that struck me most, I suppose in relation to the slavery issue, was to do with the term "Third World". I had always thought this a rather derogatory term, putting "the rest of the world" after Europe and America in terms of when it was "discovered", or third-class in economic (and by implication, other) terms. But it seems not. Young explains that the term is in fact derived from the "Third Estate" of the French Revolution, and was coined at the 1955 Bandung Conference, as a label for newly independent countries in Africa and Asia who wished not to be aligned with the capitalist or communist worlds then emerging as the super-powers, but instead to give a "third world" perspective on political, economic and cultural priorities for the globe. A very different idea, and a very positive one. I much prefer this concept to "the developing world"!

Zerbombt

I'd never seen a Sarah Kane play until Tuesday, when I went to the Barbican to see Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin production of Blasted. It's felt like a serious sin of omission, given the amount of discourse about her work on the university circuit, and the haste with which all the critics who condemned her so roundly when these plays were first shown have been rushing to canonise her since her suicide..... At the same time, there's a real trepidation attached to seeing this work. The writer's death colours it - you can't think of the violence as dark humour, as you do when you see similar things in (for example) Calixto's work . This feels like her sincere vision of the world, and the depth of the depression demands attention. I remember when a drama school took on her last play, 4:48 Psychosis, with students a few years ago, there was a real problem, and several of the cast needed counseling. So I went prepared for pain.

I'm not sure pain was what I got, though. Yes, the play was bleak and violent, with only the tiniest hints of hope for humanity - but it was also so cold in its extremity (and this may have been the production rather than the writing) that I found myself being impressed rather than moved, provoked rather than nauseous. Even when Ian eats the baby's corpse, the production's efficiency made it like reportage rather than viscerally revolting. There was a truly extraordinary coup de theatre when the hotel room set was completely zerbombt - and I guess this does serve as a symbol of our 21st century terror that our world may be blown apart at any moment. But the destruction was so blazingly well handled by director and designer, with the stage revolving backwards and forwards and a wall of white light using contemporary technology to look at the fragility of the contemporary, that we secretly felt that everything was actually under control. The violence remained safe - as, in the theatre, it probably should. The performance worked through this classical director controlling the romantic tendencies of the writer.

I found myself provoked by a programme quotation from Kane, where she says that "the seeds of full-scale war can always be found in peacetime civilization". In other words, the play's private first half, dealing with the violence inherent in an erotic relationship, is the seed for the tree of the second half, when the soldier arrives and total horror breaks out in the room and outside it. I can't agree. Surely it's the other way round? Surely it's because the social structures within which we exist are so un-natural that our private relationships can become so abusive, so like warfare? Isn't the irrational violence that our species, alone amongst animals, shows to its own kind, the result of the disjunction between the bio-sphere for which we evolved and the techno-sphere within which we now live?

Quartet?

I spent yesterday afternoon with Alaknanda. She's on great form, having spent some time with Bollywood glitterati, and is full of stories about the new dolls which Mohammed Al-Fayed is launching in Harrods, based on Indian film stars. Apparently he flew them over, with entourage, and put them up at the Ritz with the aim of driving them through the streets in a horse-drawn carriage for the launch..... Meanwhile, UK-based Asian actors are all being auditioned for TV plays about Saddam Hussein, and are being penciled in "for if he gets executed". Judicial murder is big news, clearly. No point making a bio-pic about somebody who just gets life imprisonment.

Alak wants to do Heiner Muller's play Quartet. We've been toying with this for a while, but this time it gets very serious. I think she's really committed to the idea of our working together now she's seen Dis-Orientations. We talk around the piece, and what we could do with it. I don't honestly feel I can commit the company's time to it for a while - we have to get through the next two major projects. On the other hand, this is a two-hander.... Alak is rightly clear that there's no point doing it on the cheap, though - it's a show which needs an amazing design. Also, we need to make it an event - a two-hander by a German playwright perceived as "difficult" won't make any waves here unless we can do something remarkable. Perhaps site-specific. But I do want to do this - it feels so much of the present moment. The aristocrats carrying on with the game, even though they know the apocalypse is just around the corner. Muller said that the play was about terrorism... and that was long before 9/11. "Well, we'll do it 2009" says Alak. Maybe, yes.

The evening at Canning House for Stone Crabs' Origens/ Origins project: Kwong Loke has directed a rehearsed reading of Plinio Marcos' Razor in the Flesh. Very interesting, given my recent thoughts about Brazil. This play was part of the Theatre of Resistance movement in the late 60s: and feels like a precursor to Quentin Tarantino or Calixto, with a bit of Sartre thrown in to remind you it's a 60s piece. Sex, drugs, violence and aging - all between three characters trapped in a room. Sadly, it hits the cliches in its characterisations, and indeed in its portrayal of Brazil - but it's inspiring to know that there's a real tradition of hard-edged theatre there.

We've just set up a new workshop for December 16th. Check the Laboratory blog: http://bordercrossingslaboratory.lastminuteliving.com/

Inquests and Embassies

They weren't really inquests: there hasn't been a death. We lost quite a bit of money - but nothing like we'd feared, and the board meeting last week was in many ways quite upbeat. We had a sense of being able to look forward, with some very exciting projects on the cards.

The same was true of my meeting with Nick Williams at the Arts Council yesterday. Nick is now emerging as our ongoing contact point in the organisation, which is a relief, after we've been moved from officer to officer in the last few years. He's well placed to work with us, since he knows our sector of theatre very well, and is happy to contribute ideas in the light of having seen Dis-Orientations. Unusually for an Arts Council meeting, I find myself talking in artistic terms more than management-speak. He asks about how Re-Orientations might develop, and what the creative ideas are. I'm surprised what comes out - I tell him that I'm thinking in terms of new paradigms emerging in the re-structuring of relationships between the Western, Indian and Chinese characters from the first two plays (and some new ones), so that we avoid giving the sense that every relationship has to be dysfunctional. So far it's all been about what's breaking down - but alongside this there are always new things building up. Not least the intercultural dialogue itself.

I made another trip to the Hampstead mansion to talk to Ke Yasha about future developments for Dis-Orientations. I'm wondering about a tour next year, or going into 2008 and making it part of the Trilogy. The latter probably makes more sense. As on the press night, Mr. Ke's very positive about the possibility of this work touring to China with "minor adjustments" (like not showing the gay sex, just implying it; and not saying that Jiang Ching became Mme. Mao - although the Chinese audience will of course know that anyway). He feels there's more chance to get the work seen in Shanghai, partly because of Ruihong and SYT; and partly because in Shanghai "the sky is high and the Emperor is far away", while in Beijing people are more wary of the nearby central government censors. Guangzhou and Hong Kong are also strong possibilities. He thinks we should send an "explanation" that the piece is about the changes in China, the increase in freedom and so on - so that people see we have good intentions even if we've not made quite the piece they might like.... Apparently Chinese audiences and bureaucrats like to be told what the artist meant: not always easy with work of this kind.

We talk about the play - as with Nick, it's nice to move beyond the bureaucratic in an admin-focused meeting. "My impression about the whole show is very positive", he says. He especially liked the value we placed on traditional Chinese culture. At the beginning of the Open Door, he tells me, everybody wanted Western values and a fast-paced existence. But now, slowly, that is beginning to be balanced by a return to the traditional culture, to the meditational, the contemplative, the peaceful. I remember on my trip to Shanghai seeing people standing in front of trees in the city parks, communing quietly with nature, or performing Tai Chi while the traffic whirled around them.

Starting to move ahead with The Dilemma of a Ghost too. I met Ivor Agyeman-Duah at the Ghana High Commission yesterday. There's a clear contrast with China: here there is very little bureaucracy, and very little money - though there is a real enthusiasm to promote Ghanaian artists. He promises to broker some meetings...... More meetings. I really need to get some administrative help with this company........ I spoke to Nick about it, and he was quite helpful on ideas for core funding, though there won't be any sign of even a tendering opportunity from ACE for at least a year, and then it's all likely to be reduced funds (as I predicted in this blog, the Olympics are already making a big dent). One positive development on the admin side is that the Consortium (The Theatre Consortium, as it is now known) has constituted itself, got a bank account, and is making funding applications for rent, admin and training. Hardial Rai of Zero Culture really seems to know the funding system very well.... a great guy to have as an ally!

Artist Links

I spent Tuesday at the Barbican: a British Council - Arts Council joint event celebrating the Artist Links China programme (complete with a bi-lingual book all about it) and launching the new Artist Links Brazil programme. As with lots of these sort of events, the networking over coffee, lunch and glasses of wine is probably the most important bit: in one day I manage to catch up with Valerie Synmoie, Shobana Jeyasingh, Sita Ramamurthy, Joseph Alford from Theatre O and Franko Figueiredo from stonecrabs, as well as encountering several people for the first time, many of whom I'd wanted to meet for a while. Louise Jeffreys, the Barbican's Head of Theatre, with whom I chat about Fred's Amrita group from Cambodia. Sarah Hickson, who I've spoken to on the phone and emailed a lot through ENO and British Council connections, but never actually met before: she's going to be Executive Producer at the South Bank from January, and she's very inspiring to talk to. Sally Cowling, the British Council's Director of Drama and Dance - she knows all about our recent project, which it turns out was the very first production in the Connections Through Culture programme (I didn't know that).

Much of the morning is spent looking at work created through Artist Links China. The programme has shown a strong inclination towards visual arts: I remember that when I first approached them about Dis-Orientations, I was told that they didn't feel theatre was really suitable for Sino-British work because of language barriers - how wrong we've proved them! If anything, the language barriers and cultural barriers seem to me to be more problematic in this work than they were in ours: there's not much that seems directly to engage in real dialogue - some of the visual responses to the travel strike Shobana, Sarah and myself as variations on "what I did on my holidays". It's exciting to watch Rose English's collaboration with Chinese acrobats - but the book reveals that the acrobats are doing exactly what they do in traditional circus - all Rose has added are the costumes, set and music. Is that collaboration? Or is it more like Merce Cunningham's approach: things are co-inciding in the same space, but without any necessary connection? So I'm heartened to hear Simon Kirby, the Artist Links China Project Manager, point out to his successors in Brazil that the programme should develop to take on board more collaboration and more work from forms other than visual art. To my mind, the two issues are related, and are probably the result of the programme looking at individual artists rather than organisations (even for our oblique involvement, the book cites my name, not that of the company). Theatre, music, dance, film - all of these are collaborative forms, which need some sort of organisation (and hence the use of language!) to get them going. But, of course, it's cheaper to fund an individual, and I do wonder whether this isn't one reason for these programmes. There's far less British Council touring than there was even a few years ago. They say it's to do with "shifts of policy", but it may also be to do with less money. Working with individual visual artists lets them be seen to be doing a lot of projects. It's "good value".

It's political considerations that have led to the choice of Brazil as their next target country, of course. China is the big booming economy, but the Foreign Office also pays very careful attention to India and Brazil when it comes to Trade, Industry and commercial decisions. These three are now the work-horses of the world. I must confess, I'd not really been attracted to the idea of working with Brazil. Unlike with China and India, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable tradition of theatre into which we could tap, unless you count carnival, which is already very present in the UK. But, as I listen to Adriana Rouanet from the Brazilian Embassy talking about Brazilian culture, my mind begins to change. She gives a brilliant and inspiring overview of the nation and its art, with lots of emphasis on the diversity of the place, and no governmental gloss on the problems. It's very refreshing, and I find the imagination beginning to tick. One idea from her talk especially sticks in the mind: the useful anonymity of the Brazilian passport. Since the country is so ethnically diverse ("anybody could be Brazilian", she says), and the passport comparatively easy to forge, it is one of the most popular passports for people on the run. Like Ronnie Biggs, I suppose. Another idea I like is the way in which Brazilian artists in the 20th century defined themselves in terms of "anthropophagism" - the country's indigenous inhabitants had been labelled cannibals, and so its artists came to celebrate their own cannibalistic tendencies, devouring what they found tasty in the culture of other nations, and spitting out the bones.....

After Adriana's talk, I chat with Paul Heritage, who teaches at QMC and has done lots of theatre work in Brazil over the years, including in favelas and prisons, running People's Palace Projects. He's very inspiring. Brazilian theatre, he tells me, is at its most vibrant in the poorest communities, among companies who would never get funded in the UK, because they wouldn't be able to fill in the forms, and they don't have established artists. "Here, it's all top down, " he says; "there, it's bottom up". There's a real hunger for culture in the favelas: a need for theatre which gives voice, worth and definition to people on the margins. And the work which they create is world class. Back home, I re-read Paul's essay on the favela-based company Nós do morro in Theatre Matters (great book). You don't want to be funder-led, but........ at least I can start thinking. Valerie asked me if we were interested in Brazil, and then suggested we have lunch again.....

The Response

I'd been meaning to record some of the responses we had to the show for a while. This is from Angharad Wyn-Jones, the director of LIFT: "Dis-Orientations is a revealing insight into the complexities of intercultural and same gender relationships in contemporary China. It is a richly complex production, with great performances from two singers from the Shanghai Yue Opera. I feel privileged to have seen it."

This is from Xinran: "I have learned a lot from Zhang Ruihong...she is the real soul of Chinese Opera... Thank you for letting me learn from you all..."

These are from our audience research questionnaires:
"First play I have seen. It was a fantastic experience" (from an 18-year old)
"Great. Engaging and moving. Beautiful and poetic."
"Fantastic! Can't understand why it's not sold out!"
"Thank you. It was beautiful, considered, touching, imaginative, refreshing and brave. I see a lot of theatre and that's the first cross-artform / cultural piece that has worked I have seen for a long time."
"Flawlessly brilliant"

There was also one which said the piece was "selfish"..... I guess because this person found it hard to follow. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

There were lots of good things dotted around the web - I'll just put in two. This is what Yein Chin wrote on Whatsonstage.com:
"Of all the plays I've seen so far this year, this was by far the best. The story was thought provoking. In the light of sexual awakening, individuals rediscovered love and lost love in the fusion of West met East, Ballet and Chinese Yue Opera. Some visual experiences were so hauntingly beautiful that they left me a sense of nostalgia and melancholia. Superb performance from all actors. I was deeply moved."

But my personal favourite, on the same site and on thisislondon.co.uk, is from somebody called "jonocambs", and says:
"Of all the multicultural art events I have seen over the last few years, this theatre production is probably the one that has had the most profound effect on me. It is the kind of theatre that bombards you with a hundred and one ideas and possibilities, leaving you so shell-shocked that its full effect won't sink in until a couple of days later. The relationship between the traditional Chinese yue opera and the stunning naturalistic performances of all the cast was sublime. The yue opera itself was totally unlike anything I've seen before... a real eye-opener and a gust of pleasant, fresh air. The story was a bit confusing in places, but I didn't mind when I was so submerged in the sheer beauty and musicality of the production as a whole. Moments of silence, awkward mis-understandings between cultures and people, are combined with vibrant yue singing, graceful movement sequences and thumping techno. The design is fabulous - it doesn't impede on the action at all, and yet forms a superior foundation for the questions asked in this piece that asks so many. I really loved the video segments, which is strange because I never usually like video in theatre. It added a new dimension to the piece. The acting was really superb, especially the guy playing the gay Chinese man and Madame Mao - he had so much energy. I've not seen two very different cultures and a world as diverse as Shanghai presented on stage in such a convincing and deceivingly powerful way as this production did for me. It is the best show I've seen all year. There is something for everybody. And it was really good to see such a mixed audience as well, about half the audience were Chinese or Asian. Is this the future for theatre? I really recommend it!"

Now, we may not have done that well financially - but I reckon this makes it all worthwhile!

Inquests

I spent this morning back at Riverside Studios, talking to Louise and Alex about the show. It's not all doom and gloom - quite a lot of the discussion is about the show's beauty and the incredibly positive response it's got from everybody who saw it. We all know where the problems were (see previous blog posting!), and it seems the low attendances haven't put them off the company. Louise says she wants to keep the relationship, and that, of all the "slavery shows" landing on her desk for 2007, ours is by far the most exciting. That's been the response from lots of other people too - so I think the future looks much rosier than one might expect.

Very interesting conversation with David Zoob at Rose Bruford: he thinks that if we'd done a similar show with a similarly high-profile visiting performer from the Middle East, we'd have been everywhere. He's probably right: it's all a matter of which war the press have decided we're fighting at any given moment. A bit ironic given that all the news programmes last night were suddenly being broadcast from Tiananmen Square: thanks to the antics of North Korea with their nuclear tests.

Dis-Orientations isn't over. This morning, as I sat on the train to Hammersmith, I found myself re-writing a scene. I'd felt for a while that the rhythm of the play was wrong in the section around the lovers' quarrel, that it all happened too fast and didn't really explain what happens to Alex. Today I realised it had been staring me in the face since Nancy did her response to the interview with the Chinese "lesbian" (I put the word in inverted commas because the woman herself rejected the label) back in the first week of rehearsals. The scene has to be about Song's identity - the fact that sexuality alone is not sufficient to constitute an identity in China. It's under the surface anyway (this is surely why she moves the focus to her mother), but it needs to be put into words. So - there we are - we have to do the play again!

It's infuriating that I probably would have got to this after a couple of performances, and been able to rehearse it in, except that the moment press night was over, all my attention and energy went to selling the show. Hum...........

Fallout

Dis-Orientations did its last performance on Sunday. A bit unsatisfying, like all last shows. Everybody striving to make the perfect performance: but of course, there is no such thing. Like all the rest, it will be remembered by those who saw it as what it was - a passing, ephemeral moment in time. We had a group photo taken before we went our separate ways, then Al and Roshni piled the set and costumes into a van, and I drove it up to the Wood Green office, where it's all now back in storage until there's the possibility of revival, or the third part of this trilogy.

On Monday morning, I took Ruihong to the airport. For the first time since a brief "chat" in rehearsals, there is nobody there to interpret. Lots of smiling, nodding and sign language, then a big hug and she's off back to Shanghai - with nothing but a suitcase of costumes we need to return and a hefty make-up bill to show for her having been here. And yet what an impact she made on everybody who saw her perform. Xinran, William and I took her for lunch in China-town last Friday, and I tried to explain to her how very deeply the audience responded to the spiritual truth in her work. But I'm not sure she really got it, through these layers of linguistic fog.

Xinran tells us that she once met Mme. Mao: and that, unlike in Ieng Un's performance, she was actually very "feminine". I remember reading how she had wanted to wear a dress on the night she took the Nixons to see The Red Detachment of Women, but realised that it was impossible in the atmosphere of her own Cultural Revolution. Maybe, Xinran says, our character should revert to femininity in the build-up to her suicide. An interesting idea for next time......

And so many people are keen on a next time. Xinran and William Ong are sure they can find a huge Chinese audience and a huge media buzz for a revival, and Ke Yasha is talking about a tour of China. Those who have seen this work respond so incredibly to it.

BUT - and it's a very big BUT - not that many people have seen it. I've been leaving this out of the blog, because I wanted to generate a bit of marketing spin, and what I'm about to say isn't positive and upbeat. The fact is that our audiences have been small, sometimes embarassingly so. It got better as the run went on and word of mouth got out: the last few shows were far fuller. But that isn't enough - and as a company we are now looking at quite serious financial problems. I don't yet know exactly how serious - but the board are worried. They've been brilliant through the run - Owen and Deborah have thrown themselves into emergency marketing and press work, with a very real effect, but we've just not generated the sort of buzz we had with Bullie's House, although the ingredients (Riverside Studios, visiting star, fascinating culture) are very similar. Why?

• The weather. The hottest September since Oliver Cromwell was alive. Not great for anybody making theatre, which is an indoor, spring and autumn industry. The moment Ruihong got on the plane, autumn descended, a month too late. We had hoped for an October run, but in the venue market you take what you can get.
• Not enough press. We had no pre-press at all, and very few reviews. Some of the ones we did get (especially in the Chinese and gay press) came too late to have the real impact. And the one key one for the mainstream, Time Out, while it was good was not quite good enough. I don't think that's a reflection on our work - it's just the taste of the individual writer, as all the web comments disagreeing with her prove.
• Maybe the marketing wasn't in quite the right places. This is hard to tell: I usually think marketing only works as a support to the press coverage - it creates awareness and then the press / word of mouth says that something you know about is something you should see.
• Blinkers. This is an ongoing issue with our work, but this show has made me feel it particularly acutely. So much so that, when Xinran and I were giving our post-show talk, I said that I felt ashamed of my culture. I do. Zhang Ruihong is one of the world's great actors - she is a Class A national performer in China, and China is one fifth of humanity. But our society is so inward-looking, so incapable of seeing beyond its own nose, that our work gets dismissed as "some Chinese thing at Riverside". Less significant than another revival of Ben Jonson or David Hare. I think this is particularly the case since our reviewers are brought up in a literary tradition of criticism and like to write about writing - which there wasn't much of in this piece. This is why Bullie was safer ground for us: they'd all heard of Tom and could write as if it was "his play". They want to write about the achievement of an individual, not a collective - totally the opposite approach to Chinese culture.

I don't want any of this to sound like sour grapes - it isn't. This production was a great success: the most beautiful, moving and profound thing the company has produced in its eleven year history. A necessary and a real engagement with another culture, setting up and using real dialogues between people, languages, ideas, histories and forms. And that ground-breaking quality, that newness, is exactly why it didn't sell. What sells is the easily categorised. The familiar. What people think they want (until, of course, they see what they really want - which is the unexpected).

I talk to Peter on the phone from Vienna. He reminds me that London's response to his Peony Pavilion was just the same. A flash-back to 1st August, and my first meeting with Nancy Crane. We talked about that production, and how we both felt that it was one of the most important theatrical experiences of our lives. What we'd both forgotten, until Peter reminds me, is that the Barbican theatre was virtually empty.

Xinran

Last night, there were suddenly lots of important Chinese people at the show. A journalist from Dim-Sum, who interviewed Ruihong and myself; the publisher William Ong, who also runs the Pearl Awards (to which I've now been invited, tomorrow night), and Xinran, the author of The Good Women of China (a book which has been a huge inspiration to us), and of our web article and programme note.

After the show, Xinran and I faced the audience for another post-show discussion. No ordinary audience either: there were people from Yellow Earth, including the wonderful Veronica Needa who worked with us in Mappa Mundi; there were professors of Chinese from Imperial College; there were former cast members from CSSD - and Nick Williams, our Arts Council officer! So the warmth of Xinran's response was incredibly touching and important for us. She has just got back from a two-month research trip to China, where she has been interviewing older people for her next book, and our themes about the power and weight of Chinese history, about tensions between the generations (especially among women) and the essential role of "truth and reconciliation" in the development of new social orders for the 21st century, all seem incredibly immediate and potent to her. She tells us about shocking poverty she has seen in rural areas, about a family of seven sharing one pair of trousers, about people living on 2p a day; and she says that the "comic" moment when Ruihong in the wheelchair tells Tony's archetypal Westerner "I'm thirsty and hungry" made her weep with its simple truth.

This morning she sends an email, which I'll quote: "Last night I was invited to see and discuss Dis-Orientations, a production about culture crossing in modern Shanghai. It soaked my mind, which was struggling with how to come back to my family and MBL work in West, into an emotional Chinese daughter's, thirsty and hungry I have brought back from CW trip, again,again until NOW.

Go, to see it, with your family, if you are interested in Chinese culture, you have been China, you have Chinese friends in your life, or you are going to touch my historical country.

Dis-Orientations is a green field for your Brain Storm on Young China, it won't push you on a high way to a certain direction which normally other shows do - to guide you, understand what they want you to get: you will feel it and get the different story by your own background and your knowledge of China."

See also the Motherbridge website.

Yue workshop

On Saturday afternoon, Ruihong gave a workshop on Yue opera. There was a small select band of enthusiasts in Riverside Studio 3, and beforehand she wasn't at all sure what she was going to do. We sorted out a DVD player so she could show some extracts, and hung the costumes on a rail so they could be examined. None of which proved necessary.

For an astonishing two hours, Ruihong simply talked through William and Haili's translation, revealing and sharing her deep love for the form which she has made her life. She would stand and move through the space, demonstrating different movement styles which might be appropriate to different character types. She sang for us in a whole range of yue styles (there are 13, apparently), even giving us old-fashioned and more modern versions of the same melody - the newer ones have acquired more vibrato, as a result of the influence of western opera. She sang as female and male characters - the female voice is in the nose, the male in the throat. And so on. We sat spellbound. How often in your life do you get such a privilege?

Phyllida Lloyd came to see the play yesterday, and was full of praise afterwards (like most people, actually!). Tonight, Ruihong and Haili are going to see Mamma Mia! Fair exchange....

There's more press, including a nice article in Sing Tao daily (Chinese community paper), with a nice quote from Ke Yasha: "Through his facilitation in the last two years, this China-UK collaboration has resulted in this innovative production. Michael Walling's unique perspective on the Chinese psyche, changes in attitudes and morality, and the ongoing changes in cosmopolitan Shanghai highlights how Westerners perceive China. This China-UK co-production has further developed cross art form and intercultural collaboration. It enables mutual learning and understanding; and promotes dialogue between China and the West."

Everybody's Talking

Owen sends me a link to the Time Out website, where it seems we're the main object of discussion on the Theatre pages. The bulk of the comments are about how three stars aren't really enough for this work - which is very nice to hear! There's also a lot of positive discussion on Dimsum and What's on Stage. All very gratifying!

Alaknanda phones this morning to talk about the production, which she thinks is very beautiful, and a huge step forward in terms of our approach to making intercultural work. Her endorsement means so much to me - one of the world's great theatre professionals. And, of course, she's talking about another - Zhang Ruihong. Several of the messages on those websites are actually from Shanghai, where her fans are crying out to see what's she's achieved in this new way of working. I find that very humbling.

The Stage review appears tonight. At last somebody gives her credit for her amazing work. "The most glorious musical sounds ever heard at Riverside." That says it all.

Post-show discussions

We talked to the audience on Tuesday night. It was a very young, rather studenty group. Lots of questions about "themes". It's interesting to talk about this work with people who come from a literary perspective - it makes me realise for far we are from that approach to theatre, how very much we find our truths (if truths they are) through practical exploration of space, voice and the body, through the clash of different people, cultures and ways of making theatre in the anarchic open space of the rehearsal room. We're not making theatre which has decided what it wants to say before we say it: the meaning is only something that emerges at the end. I think this is actually something which empowers the audience - they become active in making the meaning too.

One of the people at the discussion was a journalist from Pink News, who has published his article today. It's written from a very clear, very specific perspective - and that's just fine. The one point he stretches is Shanbo's death: he doesn't die of grief because Yingtai turns out to be a woman - it's because she has to marry somebody else. I think the gender anarchy of Butterfly Lovers is actually MORE interesting if you look at the lovers' constant swapping of gender, both within the story and as performers. Like a Chinese As You Like It.

I get a lovely email from Angharad Wynn-Jones, the new director of LIFT. Here's what she says: "Dis-orientations is a revealing insight into the complexities of intercultural and same gender relationships in contemporary China. It is a richly complex production, with great performances from two singers from the Shanghai Yue Opera. I feel privileged to have seen it."

Pressing On

The Press (sorry about the awful pun) is the key now. We know the show is good - everybody says so. The key thing is to tell people! It's one thing to market the work, which we've been doing for ages - but that only creates awareness. What gets the audience there is the knowledge that they'll see something really inspiring.

The press and marketing teams, the board, the venue, William and I have all been flat out doing PR these last few days. Already there are some reviews. There's one in Time Out today -

"brilliantly executed........ the cast is splendid too....... a culture shock worth experiencing"

There's also an online review in Rogues and Vagabonds.

You can read audience responses (and add your own!) at http://www.dimsum.co.uk/culture/dis-orientations.html and http://www.whatsonstage.com/dl/page.php?page=user_serv&pg=view&id=L1007931524

All very positive - fingers are crossed that this moves the tickets! Meantime we've also set up a second blog, dedicated to the production: it's different from this one, so check it out: http://disorientations.lastminuteliving.com/disorientations/

There's even a video clip! Enjoy!

Waiting for the Press

This bit is agony. We've done all we can - now we just have to wait. I can't imagine that anybody would write a bad review of this production: we've had such glowing responses from the audience and from our colleagues. But you never know. And, even if the reviews are good, will there be enough of them and will they be prominent enough? It was getting into Time Out's Critics Choice that really made Bullie's House: we're crossing fingers for the same thing again.

Angharad Wynn-Jones was in from LIFT on Saturday. Very excited by the work, by its intensity and its beauty. I feel so privileged to have made this piece with performers who have such incredible delicacy and truth to them. I just hope the ticket sales live up to their astonishing work.

First signs are promising, anyway. There are online reviews which glow very warm.....

That nice photo shows Haili and Tori, and was taken by Kathy Leung. There are more on the Dis-Orientations dedicated blog: http://disorientations.lastminuteliving.com/disorientations/

Up and Running

Dis-Orientations finally opened last night. The climax of two years' hard graft, one month's mind-boggling creativity, and four days of technical hell. That's not an insult to my wonderful technical team - it's just the nature of the beast. This is a very complex show in technical terms, and we were only able to start fitting it up on Monday morning. That meant we were faced with a technical rehearsal starting Tuesday lunchtime, with Mark plotting the lighting as we went along. I never really understand how Mark is able to extract such fluid beauty out of mayhem - but I guess that's been the nature of the whole process.

Stuff that happened:

• we tried to re-lay the floor, but found ourselves using a thin silver material, which didn't glue properly, and ended up ripping and sliding around through Tuesday night. Inverted the floor and re-patched the original. Now it looks fine.
• we discovered that Yueju is amplified. I hadn't realised (they must have brilliant sound technicians in Shanghai). Did the dress rehearsal and preview with Ruihong and Haili singing acoustically, which was pretty but not present enough. After phoning everybody I could think of, I was finally able to track down two radio mikes in time for the opening.......
• we did the preview on Wednesday night as the third session of a day spent with press photo-calls, finishing the tech and doing a dress rehearsal. Very little time between dress and preview, so my notes had to be given by William running round the dressing rooms. Yesterday afternoon we had some real time, at last. We got to work the mikes, and to experiment with the vocal qualities of the space. I love sessions where I can work with the actors in the auditorium - giving them the sense of owning the whole theatre, rather than simply the stage.

First night was very exciting. A big house, with lots of guests in. Not enough critics, though the key one (Time Out) was there. Hopefully others will come on the back of it. Ruihong and I hosted a party afterwards, on behalf of the two companies. Ke Yasha was there from the Chinese Embassy, and was incredibly positive about the work. It looks as if going to China with this piece may be back on the cards.....

And now we must watch the reviews space!

The Importance of Costume

I read the Guardian yesterday. In the main paper, there was a double-page photo spread on the thirtieth anniversary of Mao's death: http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1868373,00.html
and a full-page interview with a Chinese film director who's made a love story around Tiananmen Square http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1868415,00.html. All of which suggests that this work is very, very current indeed. I just hope the papers notice that we are also working with one of China's greatest artists, and that we are dealing with all those huge changes that have come over the country since the death of Mao, exactly thirty years ago. We're not courting controversy (as Lou Ye does): if anything our work will surprise people in its positive view of China - but we are very emphatically engaged with these issues, and (unlike any other company in the UK which has taken this on) we are working directly with people who are living through it on a daily basis. Which I think is worth a few more column inches than we've achieved so far. Press Night is this Thursday - Chloe's been working hard to get us a good crowd of critics. And I'm nervous again.

There's a huge amount of work to be done before that. We get in to the theatre tomorrow, and start the tech on Tuesday: it all has to be ready by the preview on Wednesday night. I decided to make use of Friday afternoon to deal with some of the technical issues around costume and make-up which we could sort out before we go to Riverside. Time well spent......

In the Asian theatre traditions, costume, wigs and make-up are far more important than they are in the West. They do much of the work that we expect of sets and lighting - and they are also a crucial part of the performer's journey towards the holy status s/he acquires on stage. The physical, visual transformation of the self into something beautiful and transcendent allows these performers the sense of embodying the mythic. Using Yueju within the play, we are also asking Ruihong and Haili to acquire this status within our piece - but we don't allow them the usual time and space to do it. The changes have to happen quickly to faciliate the doubling of the characters and the energy of the whole. We work together to try and make it possible - and it is not at all easy. But, with patience, we do get there. In a way, this tension between forms and expectations is itself part of the play's meaning: Chinese culture is traditionally, gloriously, about the long view. Today, it is plunged into the madly short-termist, ever changing world of global capitalism. I want this play to make a case for the contemplative, the holy, the spiritual in the midst of the mayhem - so it's incumbent on me to make space for it in our own process as well.

First Run

Woke up with the butterflies again - and I don't mean Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo. There's always that crux moment in rehearsal when you just have to run the play for the first time. Usually it's forced on me by the Lighting Designer needing to see it before the plan gets done. So - Mark was there today, as were Kath, Simon, and several people from Riverside. Try as we might to pretend this isn't an audience (and it isn't really - because they are all working on the show and have to be there), it adds something to the trepidation.

So - it's a delight when things start to go rather well. Hiccups from time to time, of course - like suddenly realising we've only rehearsed the language tape scene once, and that without our new sountrack - so there are bits where the whole thing looks like grinding to a halt. But the afternoon is spent sorting all that out. And, at last, we see the shape of what we've got.

It's emerging from its chrysalis - our butterfly. Beautiful and fragile. Maybe too beautiful and fragile - we're a bit scared that if we do anything rough we might break it. But that's the next stage, I think - to give it a recognisable contemporary edginess: an undercurrent of sexiness and violence that constantly threatens the delicacy. That's what this shifting relationship between the West and China has always been: an amalgam of erotic fascination and intense confrontation. In our little rehearsal room, which is a microcosm of these clashing worlds, we're finding a space which allows us to find ways of expressing that together.

In with a chance, I think.

Just a bit behind

With the lost morning, and the fact that there was a Bank Holiday last week, I feel we're just a little bit behind where we should be at this stage of rehearsals. Usually I like to run the lay most days during the final week of Studio rehearsals. But Monday is going to be devoted to recording voice-overs, and on Tuesday I'll still be putting together the overall staging. So there won't be a run till Wednesday morning: the last possible time for us to show the piece to Mark Doubleday and give him time to get his plan done ready for the get-in on the 11th.

Still, the play is now emerging in something like a performable shape. The styles seem to be melding, and the character lines are making sense. Several huge shifts from the first version, all of them positive. There are still swathes of it which make no sense to the cast - and won't until the technical things are in place. Ieng Un asks me how the audience will know that he is playing Mme. Mao in the Peace Hotel scene. He's quite right to ask, of course - how's he to know that there's a projected text? These are the areas where I have to rely on my imagination to envision it as a whole.

Some positive developments in admin too. William Wong, my assistant director, has managed to bring the International Herald Tribune on board as a media partner: which is an in-kind equivalent of about £20K worth of advertising. On the other hand, I feel we need it: there's not been much in the press yet. Guy points out that all the arts journalists and critics are still in Edinburgh, which is true..... I just hope they don't all decide to take a holiday before they come back. We've got so far - now we need this to be seen.

The Frustrating Morning

A rare thing during rehearsals - time to do the blog. I'm in the Rose Bruford library, upstairs from our rehearsal room. This morning had originally been down as a full call - but then it transpired that Ruihong had to report to the police (which seems to be a government scam to get yet more money out of people with work permits), and Ieng Un volunteered to take her. So I'd thought I would work with Haili and Tori on the central relationship of Part 2 - only for Tori to phone in and say she's got food poisoning. So - nothing to do this morning apart from catch up on production things. Props, costumes, videos, programmes and marketing. And the incredibly complex sound plot. Maybe it's just as well given that this is Al's first day with us as Production Manager - but it still feels frustrating, especially since yesterday was a Bank Holiday. I'd already made use of that time to catch up on admin.

It's emerging now, this play. Very different from the way it was in February. More allusive and elusive, more dreamlike and intangible. This feels appropriate to the material. As people often say about China: the more you know, the more you realise how little you know. So if we try to give clear answers, we'll only end up selling the story short. It's far better to hint at possibilities, and to empower the audience into thinking for themselves. So the scene which used to be a sort of history lesson on the Cultural Revolution is transmogrifying into a dream-like mixture of the death of Shanbo and a child's view of those years. Much more truthful to our sources (which are our performers), and so to the reality of how we experience the world.

Zhang Ruihong

Haili and I collected Zhang Ruihong from Heathrow on Sunday afternoon. To be honest, until she finally stepped out of the Arrivals door, I'd still had a nagging doubt as to whether we'd finally manage it. But we did. And now we're doing something that nobody's ever done before.

Ruihong is smaller than I remember her from Shanghai, and looks even younger than she did then. I know from doing the work permit application that we were born in the same year, but she looks about 25. We communicate through translation - William and Ieng Un both speak Mandarin, and Haili can translate simultaneously, which is incredible though sometimes a bit daunting. Once or twice I've had to stop her, so that I can think as I speak, or so that I can watch Ruihong's face and gestures as she speaks, and only get the rationality of language after the emotion in her response.

Emotional response is the key to her work. From the very first day she brings a new theatrical language onto the stage. It's not just Yueju, though of course this is her rich tradition, and she's very proficient in it. It's also an ability to work through the vocabulary of the form in a dialogue with other artists. We are able to create through the coincidence of Yue music or movement with English words, or projected images, or other music, or even naturalism - and each of these forms becomes richer and newer through the dialogue. Because Ruihong is such a sensitive artist, and her tradition is so mythic and so "unreal" (or real in a Platonic sense), it gives a holiness to the work - even to scenes which would otherwise seem squalid. Like Yeats: "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement".

The other enriching thing is the experience of Chinese history which Ruihong and the others bring to us. Today we were working on the Cultural Revolution (and making the play far less of a history lesson, far more of an emotional journey). Ruihong told us her childhood memory of hiding under a table while the beatings were going on. She remembers the people with placards round their necks, and visiting her father (himself a theatre director) in a labour camp. It suddenly makes us all feel more responsible to this work, to these stories. Because these things happened. To someone in the room.

The First Week

Friday night, and the first week of rehearsals is over. It's flown by. Slightly odd not having Zhang Ruihong with us yet (she's performing tonight in Hangzhou), but in a way it helps that we acquire a way of working amongst the English speakers and people used to devising before we throw in somebody who is neither. Already the process feels very rich. We've avoided simply using the script of the first version - almost every scene is being re-made through improvisation, and so is becoming very real for this group of actors. And we're finding new scenes too - bridges which take us over the yawning chasms which existed in the piece at its work-in-progress stage.

Wednesday was really amazing: a day spent pooling background research and knowledge. Amanda's parents turn out to have met in Shanghai in the 30s, where her mother was a famous writer and glorious decadent. As before, Haili is full of insights into Chinese culture which constantly dis-orient the rest of us (in a productive way). We were talking about the Beijing spring, and she told us that her mother had told her she should not join the students, because it felt like the start of the Cultural Revolution again - and that meant the government had no choice but to stop it, so that the tragedy was not replayed. I'd never heard that idea before - but it has the ring of terrible truth to it. Nothing is ever so simple as it seems - and this process is about the search for true complexity.

Doing admin each evening - annoying things like signing cheques and sorting out bank letters, dealing with the Revenue's Foreign Entertainers' Unit, checking the venue contract. Drafting the programme. It feels like there's more than ever this time - maybe the show is just bigger. In a way it's lucky the family have been away this week - hopefully I'll be more able to do the balancing act once they're back with me tomorrow.

Jelly night

It's the evening before rehearsals start: and I'm nervous. I don't think I'll ever get used to this - the trepidation before plunging into a process. I always feel under-prepared, unsure of what we're actually going to do to make the thing happen, and convinced that I'll be "found out" as an incompetent charlatan. All of this will, of course, disappear the minute we start properly, and won't come back till opening night. But knowing this doesn't stop it.

I've gathered together loads of my books, videos, CDs and so on in research material, sorted out cheques to pay everybody, and realised that somehow a crucial CD from Shanghai has got lost and will have to be replaced. The leaflets and posters have arrived, looking stunning. It all feels ready to go.

Most crucially of all, Haili and Ieng Un are now in England. Haili got back on Thursday (no mean feat in itself, given the airport closures - lucky she lives in Manchester), after what sound to have been incredible picaresque adventures in the land of her birth. She was arrested by the Chinese police as a suspected spy...... somehow the British Embassy helped her get out of custody, but she still had a night journey on foot and slept in a stable..... I can't wait to hear more. At the moment she's driving down from Manchester to join Ieng Un in the Sidcup flat. He arrived on Friday. I'd spent the day driving a transit van, taking the set and props from the office to the rehearsal room. I then drove out to Heathrow, and took part in the disruption. It took two hours from his flight landing to the moment when I saw his face coming through. Finally got home at 11.30 - starving.

As Peter Sellars says on the phone from New York - it all goes to prove that this is the time when we should be doing intercultural theatre. So - here we go.

Cast at Last

One of the two actors I was waiting for came through - on Friday, after waiting for nearly two weeks. A lot of the delay was down to logistics. The other one didn't work out (wanting to put theatre on hold so as to get more TV - said the agent....), but I'm more than happy with the replacement. So - at least I have my cast and they are brilliant.

Amanda Boxer will be Marie. I worked with her in a reading years ago, and have kept my eyes on her ever since - a really brilliant actor. PK (if we end up calling her that - William says it means something rude in Cantonese) will be Nancy Crane, who was the Angel in Angels in America at the NT. At our meeting, I broke the ice by saying she'd done the most spectacular entrance in the history of the theatre.... and she returned the compliment for the arrival of ther plane in Nixon. So - we like the same sorts of shows. Both Nancy and Tony have been emailing me about research - it feels like we're rearing to go.

Thursday was the week's mad day. The morning began at Riverside for a production meeting with Babs, their Technical Manager. Standing in the space, the dimensions feel quite wonderful for the work. It's such an honest space - just a big room divided in two. Like the Cartoucherie. Bad news is that the venue's video projector won't be available to us - I start asking around and manage to borrow one form Wise Thoughts, who have the office next to us in Chocolate Factory 2. Straight from the Production Meeting into marketing and contract discussions with Alex, Louise's assistant. Somehow the proof of the venue brochure has the wrong copy on it- dash over to Simon's office and come up with new versions. Then to the National for a design meeting with Seema and Mark. He's on good form - also working on Love's Labours Lost in an American "summer of love" production, which looks totally mad and is going in to the RSC's Complete Works Festival.

Tickets are now on sale, and Simon has put up the beginnings of our micro-site: www.bordercrossings.org.uk/disorientations/index.html
The Index bit of that address might go once it's fully ready. I hope so - it isn't on the print.

Bad news on audience development - we didn't get an A4E award (again). This time because the accounts we sent in didn't have an original signature.... Valerie Chang is still doing the exhibition alongside the run, so something has come of it - but it means there will be fewer Chinese faces in the audience, which is a shame. The other interesting issue is the bank. I've been trying to get a meeting to discuss the fact that we're likely to go overdrawn during this project (since we don't get the Box Office or the last bit of the ACE grant till it's over). Several phone calls, but still no meeting. But we do have one ominous warning that Charity's accounts tend not to be granted overdrafts because they "don't know who we can hold responsible". Not sure what to do if we can't borrow anything..... Cross that bridge when we come to it.