One of Our Songs is Missing

As I've written before, this play is a musical, with the songs and musical accompaniment provided by the company and the increasingly watchable Osei.

The songs are used for all sorts of reasons: to underscore action and scene changes, as integral plot points, to change tone, to enhance tone - and much more importantly to create a piece of theatre which is genuinely in the Ghanaian tradition, though with a bit of an international edge.

Everyday we go through all the songs as part of the warm up to remind folks of where they are and what they're doing, and it's taken a good week for us to realise that rather than having two separate songs for parts of Act 1 and Act 4 that sound a bit the same, they were actually the same song! It also took 10 minutes of Fiona thinking she was going mad until the penny dropped.

As soon as it had though it took about 5 minutes before there was a perfectly polished song, ready to go - oh to be so talented.

Steve

Happy/ Sad

Hello hello, for all those hungry for the Wednesday edition of the blog, I'm afraid I held off on purpose so that I could write about Thursday at the same time. That's because Wednesday was quite unique in the process in as much as it ended rather badly.

As I wrote the other day this part of the rehearsal process can be both the most painful and the most joyful, and Wednesday was pretty painful. Having only been been physically through the play once everybody started to suffer from collective blocking amnesia, not only that but in many cases all the good work that had been done previously was completely forgotten as we got into act 4. As a result it was all rather frustrating and we finished early and non too happy.

Come Thursday, however it was almost back to normal, and though it did take a while to warm peoples memory's up, after a while we were flying through again.

In fact we did so well that we got to the end of the play in the middle of the afternoon. What that did enable us to do was go back through tricky parts of the play. One of these tricky parts is Osei. His confidence is such a major factor that when he's feeling self conscious he is completely unrecognisable as a performer to when he is in full flow. He's also become something of a project of mine as I try to find a way to get him relaxed and confident. And with a week to opening night - It'll be fine...

Steve

Our Poor Broken Building

The Africa Centre is remarkable. It's a 19th century auction house buried away in Covent Garden,where, apparently, slaves were sold. Which has fascinating resonances for what we're doing.

The problem is that a major refurbishment has just begun, which will no doubt make it look beautiful, but just now is quite a headache - literally. Now I know the roof needs to be fixed, no - one likes a leaking roof, but because of the shape of the auction house, we spent the morning feeling like we were rehearsing in a chiming bell.

In all fairness the builders are jolly nice and genial, it's just the hammers that make a lot of noise. Still, as this is the worst part of the rehearsal process we must be doing OK. The detailed work continues and is throwing up all sorts of interesting challenges and choices, don't want to say to much obviously, but it's looking pretty good.

Steve

Monday Monday ta ta ti ti

Hello to a new week.

We started this morning with a rip roarer of a warm up remembered from the snatches of bits from my work with Jamestown kids - so lots of early morning silliness ensued, and then we were off.

This is both the most difficult and potentially most joyful part of a rehearsal process; everything's been gone through once, it's up on it's feet and now it's time to start again. This is the point when we can see most clearly what the piece is going to be, whilst still having time to make major changes or just tinker. The work is detailed and enthralling.

Aunty A gave a bit of a star turn today when Michael told her that she could speak directly to the audience, and she suddenly transformed a stilted speech into a moment of flowing comedy brilliance. I was also rather fond of the moment when the chorus sang a passage as an exercise and found the rhythm and inflection of the piece.

Also I won two towns back from Aunty Ama, though I'm pretty sure she let me, I then lost one again but tomorrow's another day.

Steve

The Continuing Genius of Agnes

This lil blog is entirely dedicated to the genuine genius of Agnes Dapaah. If you are one of the several trillion greedily following every moment of this rehearsal process then you will know that Agnes can dance and that her dancing is a great digestion aid.

However, it turns out that she is much more than African rhythms' version of Gaviscon. Oh yes.
She is also an incredible performer. She's quite understated and generally funny and amenable and dry, but when she gets on stage she is magnetic. Not in a sycophantic - I'm working on the production and so have got to say that - kind of way, but genuinely. She's got a channel to her emotional core that bi-passes the need for psychology, or seemingly, even effort. She is also possessed of such incredible stage craft that she simply sets the bar for her profession higher.
She's ace.

On a slightly different note, I'm now involved in a game of Ultimate Oware with Aunty Ama, and she's thrashing me, but I haven't completely lost yet.

Steve

Sweet Soul Music

This play, it turns out, though it is a serious and seminal piece of Ghanaian literary theatre, is at heart a musical. Who'd have thought.

The folk tradition in Ghana is still so strong that songs, their harmonies, relevance and downright loveliness are producible on a rehearsal room whim. It obviously helps having some of the finest musical talent of the country knocking about too. It's my hope soon to be able to get some of the music recorded and put up on this blog and really go multimedia. There are now half a dozen beautiful songs in the piece and they've all come about through Michael asking for a song about food or marriage - gorgeous.

In other news we're absolutely storming along, having nearly got to the end of walking through the play - though as this is such a short rehearsal process, the more goes through the performers can get before opening night in Plymouth the more relaxed we will all be. Also Osei has again come on leaps and bounds again, after a bit of home tuition from the Ghanaian ladies and I'll not be surprised if Hollywood soon comes a calling.

Steve

Ode to Oware

Oware is almost definitely the greatest single game ever invented. For the uninitiated it goes a bit like this: on a board of twelve holes you have six and your opponent has six, these are your territories. Each hole starts with four pebbles in it and the aim of the game is to get four pebbles back in the holes, in order to gain your opponents territory - pretty straight forward. I, sadly, have been on the wrong end of so many Ghanaian thrashings that I could have become embittered. However, I saw the beauty of the game, haggled a seller down from two pounds to seventy pence and invested in my own set, and am now pitting my wits against hardened Ghanaian players. And though I'm not winning, I am at least taking longer to lose.

This may seem a rather erroneous blog, however we discovered a new and beautiful use for this great game today, and that was to enable Osai to perform like he's never performed before. Osei, as he keeps reminding us, has never acted before. He's an incredible musician, but is rather nervous of making his stage debut. Today though during an intimate scene between him and his stage nephew, the Oware came out and it was like he'd been training for years. The naturalness he found as soon as he was engaged in a familiar activity was astounding, not least because his timing was all of a sudden fantastic, bringing weight and humour to the scene which hadn't been there before.

And it's all thanks to Oware, all in all 70p well spent.

Steve

To Act or Not to Act

Sorry, bit of a pretentious title but I had to draw you in somehow.

When chomping down on fufu a couple of months ago Dzifa told me about the Abibigromma tradition, in which she and the National Theatre of Ghana Players, also known as Abibigromma, are trained. It all goes back to the times of village performances, when in the evenings people would gather round to tell and hear a story. At these events folks, having eaten a large evening meal, would start to doze off, so in order to keep them awake, the storytellers would introduce a song, which everyone would know and everyone would sing. Then dancing and musical accompaniment, until simple story telling being performance, with skilled versatile performers. I'm not sure she'd completely agree that the whole of the Ghanaian theatre tradition came about in order to stop well sated people from nodding off, but it's a good story.

Anyway, the point is that performers are trained in Ghana to be versatile and to perform. The difference between performing and acting is subtle but huge, and the effect on the audience can be the difference between being spoken to and overhearing someone else's conversation. In the UK actors are trained to act, to go through the six steps, and the Method and naval gaze their way through character development and performance - don't get me wrong I enjoy a good naval gaze as much as the next person, but there's a time and a place.

Great Children's theatre actors and Ghanaians perform and West End performers act - and I know which I prefer. So there.

Steve

Up and About

Today's the day it got on it's feet, and how lovely it was.

After the previous days of intricate text work, going through deciphering meaning and voice, this morning the performers seemed to shake off the memory of sitting still and found a fresh, vibrant energy in the space.

That is of course after we'd all turned up late - apart from Fiona the stage manager who is punctuation personified. A little bit of rain and it seems that London doesn't quite know what to do with itself. In Accra when it rains everybody becomes the sole of generosity, offering you shelter and lifts, in London everyone gets in their car and makes sure that they don't share their dryness with anyone - a cultural insight if ever there was one.

Anyway, once we were all there and the performers were up and about the action seemed to speed along. A really good thing is that we are able to rehearse in the space that we will be performing in for the majority of our time in London, so the performers are really able to get used to the space and respond to the atmosphere of the place. And the physical layout of course. Being an old auction house it's quite spacious and lends itself to being played with the audience on three sides and a large performance space in the middle. This will be slightly different when we tour, but here it creates a real intimacy with the audience and interestingly allows the performers more freedom because they do not have to be so conscious of being seen all the time, because as long as they don't stand with their noses up against the back wall, someone will always see their face.

I think my favourite part of the day was when we started looking at the action that will proceed the prologue, and seeing how hilarious the performers were without any words, particularly Auntie Ama - naturally.

Chasing the Monday Blues Away

Hello again dear reader, and we begin a new week as we ended the last - with a song.

I think a Sunday in grey London town might have got to the Ghanaians, who are obviously used to friendlier weather, and who led us all in a Northern Region dance in order to shake off all thoughts of the chill autumn days ahead.

We picked up the text from the start of Act 4 and worked our way through. It's such a full text it's incredible, and rather annoying, that Ama Ata Aidoo penned it as a 22 year old university student. There's a real emotional truth behind the text and the greater political intentions of the piece, it's no wonder it was an instant hit in Ghana. The only really surprising thing is that this is its first showing in the UK. Still, after forty two years it's incredibly fresh, and we are finding resonances everyday that makes the showing of it in 21st century Britain make perfect sense, from the clash of cultures, to miscommunication to the breakdown and forming of relationships.

Also, any days work that ends with banging drums and singing songs is alright by me.

Steve

The Kids are Alright

Day three and we're on a roll. We begin by holding rehearsals in a corridor - a surprisingly excellent way to start a productive day. After the builders turn up with the keys to the rehearsal room we find ourselves back in the chill of the space proper, requisite tea in hand and the read through in full flow.

We are still working our way through the text and after the lesson in exsquisite Ghanaian performance yesterday it was the turn of our younger cast to step up. The themes of the play are becoming more pertenent day by day as the difference of style and background between the Ghanaian performers and the UK trained cast members becomes evident. The real achievement of the casting is that this mix compliments the play so well - the real difference between Eulalie and Ato and his Ghanaian family and their values is acknowledged by the real cultural divide in the cast, but the playing of the piece is enhanced by the way the younger performers are holding their own, diving in and taking risks.

The songs are also starting to really work as Michael is able to ask for a lament, or somthing up beat and two minutes later a perfectly honed and harmonised piece of music fills the room.

So, rehearsals are going well - so well in fact that when Agnes and Aunty Ama were given the afternoon off they were back in the room an hour later, singing along with everyone else - apparently all that London has to offer pales in comparison to a bit of a Ghanaian boogie.

Back to School

Day two and my head is full. This project is an education and a half.

After yesterdays initial read through we began this morning by starting again. Slower. By the end of the day we'd got to the end of Act I, but it was incredible.

The text is full, naturally, of references to Ghanaian customs and culture and it really showed why Michael had worked so hard to get Ghanaian performers in the cast to play the older characters. The depth of understanding that they bring into the room, from discussions of matrilinear societies and the implications of a man marrying outside the tribe, to why the extended family invest so heavily in bright children, to the songs and jokes and spirit that they bring to the process, has added an astonishing amount of depth to the text already - and that's just Act I.

The best moment of the day prize is a close contest between the guy that got the heaters working and Aunty Ama, who delivered her big speech with such vigour and style and experience that it garnered a day 2 round of applause. I think Ama may have just pipped it!

AND WE'RE OFF!!

The actors have their visas, the rehearsal room coffee is fairtrade and the roof leaks - it's pretty much ideal.

By way of a tiny intro to this blog, it will be my pleasure and, well, job to take you, the indifaticable reader, through the highs, the lows, the smiles and the miles of Dilemma of a Ghost.

Considering the effort and energy that's gone into to making it to this point, what with airmiles, embassies and several kilo of fufu consumed, it's rather incredible that eleven people found themselves sat in a circle at ten in the morning observing that greatest of first day traditions - having a nice cup of tea.

And by lunch the Ghanaian's were dancing. It gives me great pleasure to be able to officially state that there is nothing better for the digestion than watching Agnes Dapaah dancing as High Life music pours from the magical fingers of Osei Korankye.

We even had a read through! And already the incredible talent in the room is obvious, it's very humbling to see people performing in a second language, particulaly when they do it better than most people do in their first. Aunty Ama is particulaly enigmatic - but then she did begin performing in Concert Parties in 1965 - so she's had plenty of practice.

One of the great things about this process is the challenges that have been taken on. From language barriers, to cultural differences to the sheer logistcal odyssey that has gotten us to the first day - and I hope that there are many more like it.

Rehearsal hand-over

We started rehearsals this morning. Already a fascinating and extraordinary day. And nothing like I expected!
We've always said that this blog was not personal but a blog of the company and its work, but we've not really put that into practice before. Now we will - for the rehearsals, the blog will be written by my assistant, Steve Collins. Enjoy what he has to say about the process!
Michael
x

They got the Visas

24 hours of hell. I phoned Moses at the British Council in Ghana. Moses went up the mountain and brought down the tablets. Elsie phoned the British High Commissioner. HE took a personal interest. I also phoned our MP, who is an immigration Minister, and was told that nothing could be done......

So - at 3.30 Dzifa finally called from Ghana to say Visas were in passports. Phew. They fly at 11.40 tonight. At last.

But the point remains.... that in the 21st century we are still dependent on people like Elsie and myself being able to phone personal contacts, and that is sadly evidence of an unjust system. Part of the point of this project is meant to be that in the year when we celebrate 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade and 50 years of Ghana's independence, we can now relate to West Africa in a different way. But this visa incident suggests that there is still a major problem of status for African people.

Nightmare in Accra

I am not paranoid. There IS a conspiracy. Or so I conclude when Dzifa phones this lunchtime to say the Visa requests have not been granted, and the High Commission is asking for further information about accommodation, finance etc. Further information?? When they fly TOMORROW?? And the applications were put in on the 13th of last month?? WITH VALID WORK PERMITS FOR WHICH WE'D ALREADY SHOWN ALL THE FINANCIAL AND ACCOMMODATION INFO???/

I try not to die, and phone the British Council in Ghana. They will phone the High Comm. I will fax through everything I have. Hopefully we can save this..... I can't believe this is happening the day before the flights are booked.

All other problems, including one or two about contracts which would normally make me lose sleep, become as minor irritants in the face of this colossal bureaucratic obstacle.

I try to think back to Saturday night, when I was at the QEH, with Peter Sellars and Tony Guilfoyle, watching Lemi Ponifasio's extraordinary Requiem. So many things drew me to this show - Peter having commissioned it, the fact that it's First Nations work from New Zealand, the LIFT involvement, the idea.... but nothing had prepared me for its truly staggering beauty. It is less a piece of theatre than a liturgy. An act of remembrance and contemplation, and a meditation on our futures. It's everything I talked about at the ORIGINS launch - theatre which brings the deep values of First Nations peoples emphatically and powerfully into the present century.

A very powerful contrast with the chaos of contemporary bureaucratic hell.

High tech, low tech

I went to see the new Complicite piece at the Barbican: A Disappearing Number. Simon McBurney is one of the three or four directors in the world whose work I am always fascinated and excited by - and I had a wonderful night.

Discussed the play over the weekend with my old friend from India, Prakash Belawadi, who is in the UK for a British Council conference on multi-culturalism ("reducing the problems of the world to bullet points", he says). Prakash was Caliban when I directed The Tempest in Bangalore all those years ago, so we have our own history of intercultural dialogue. And it's really interesting to talk to an Indian person about a play which deals with India, and which avoids the exotic trap. We're both excited by the genuine engagement in the piece. Where Prakash has his doubts about the piece is in the distancing of time, rather than of culture. The history of the two mathematicians isn't explored in the depth he would like - in fact, he knows another play which he feels works through the same subject in far more depth. I see what he means - and find myself adding the question as to whether the mathematics itself, which the play works very hard to relate to the characters, actually comes together with the human story in any meaningful way. Is death really the same as infinity? Isn't it more like "finity"? Would it not need a deeper exploration of Indian ideas to move death towards the infinite?

A Disappearing Number is a very high-tech show. It's designed by Michael Levine, who I know from our work with Atom Egoyan, and it bears many of the marks of his history with Robert Lepage. And nothing wrong with that! The emerging style of contemporary theatre, technology-driven and fragmented, is a pretty direct reflection of much contemporary experience. It's a form I like very much, and which resembles lots of our own work, most noticeably Orientations and Dis-Orientations. So it's very helpful for me (as I begin to think about the final Trilogy) to watch somebody else whom I admire having a go at something similar. In this show, as in ours, the emotional climaxes feel a bit "out of nowhere". Miscarriages and collapses, like break-ups and suicides, only really affect an audience if they proceed from characters and relationships we care about. It's a temptation to throw them in, pursuing the easy emotional tug. Must be careful of that.

I wonder whether some of these things don't happen because the style, the technology, takes up so much time and energy that some of the more basic stuff just gets squeezed out. No danger of that with Dilemma, anyway. This will be our most low-tech show ever. I didn't plan it like this - but the combination of touring with the Africa Centre (which is deeply deprived on the technology front - indeed on the electricity front) has led us towards a production which could be done in an open space in an African village (and hopefully will be). Probably this will do me a lot of good, especially in the current theatrical climate. It's important to go back to the beginning from time to time.

The Price of a Visa

Visas usually cost about £30, right? Not if you are an African person coming to work in the UK. We'd thought, having paid for Work Permits and couriered them to Ghana, that there would be no problem when our performers went to the High Commission to get their passports stamped. How wrong we were. It costs more than £200 for each individual to get a working visa. Compare this with the minimal costs to people from European countries and the like. So - there's another way in which we institutionalise racism in this country. And people wonder why there are still cases of human trafficking, why the Morecombe cockle pickers happened......

Kate and I dash around town trying to sort out a way of getting the funds to Ghana fast. In the end, I have to take cash from my personal account and send it as a MoneyGram. This never feels very safe, so I'm mightily relieved when Dzifa sends a text to say she's collected it. Meanwhile, we confirm Colman Getty as our PR agents for the show (another of Elsie's brilliant contacts), have a meeting with Graeme at the Africa Centre to finalise arrangements about keys and so on, and hire a wonderful stage manager called Fiona Shepherd, having advertised the position in Arts Jobs.

Passage of Music

I was invited to lunch at the House of Commons yesterday. After Australia House on Friday, it seems to be the season to be swanning through the corridors of power. Strange to pass through the security checks on September 11th, but once inside you can't help feeling rather proud of the place.

The lunch is a launch event for the Passage of Music season, which Dilemma is part of because of the involvement of Osei Korankye, the wonderful seprewa player we're bringing from Ghana. Passage of Music is a season of events around the slvery anniversary, which use music to evoke the past, to arouse an emotional response, and to promote reconciliation. Exactly the word used by the Australian Deputy High Commissioner about ORIGINS on Friday night - nice to see such a powerful theme emerging in our work. Meurig, our contact at Serious, who are producing the season, asks me whether Osie might be able to play at the unveiling of a statue of Ignacio Sancho at the Foreign Office. I've yet to ask him, but it sounds pretty exciting to me!

It's a beautiful day, and we have drinks on the terrace of the House of Commons. This being lunchtime, most people have orange juice or water. With a majority of black people (for once) and several of us in African dress, we probably confuse the passing tourists on boats, who are looking for lunching MPs. A woman from the Arts Council makes a very good speech about the role of art in public life. When she said she was going to Parliament to celebrate the Slavery anniversary, a friend had said "Yes, but why are you going?", as if the arts couldn't have anything to do with politics. She should read Julia Swindells' chapter in the Theatre and Slavery book when it comes out soon: it's really clear how theatre helped campaign against the slave trade two hundred years ago.

Origins 2007

An amazing and exhausting week. I seem to have spent about 90% of it running between Sidcup and heathrow airport: we've had David Milroy and Trevor Jamieson from Australia, Gordon Bronitsky and David Velarde from the USA, Harriet Nordlund from Sámiland (Norway and Sweden), plus some First Nations people living in the UK, like Roseanna Raymond (who is Samoan and was our New Zealand rep), and Benny Wenda from West Papua.

With a selection of people like that around, bringing together ideas for the ORIGINS Festival has been easy - the meeting itself is a fertile ground for ideas. Add to that the fact that we did several workshops for the Laboratory, plus a symposium at Australia House, and you'll see that we didn't just meet as a planning committee (though that happened), but also, and crucially, as artists learning from one another's practice.

What struck me most through the week was the way in which First Nations theatre is such a strong reflection of landscape - what Aboriginal people call "country". We begin to think about how we might reflect this in the festival. David Milroy says that he feels the "really epic story" is not so much the theatre itself, for all its value, as the way in which the festival can contextualise that theatre. His own workshop is a case in point: David showed us an amazing selection of slides, tracing the history of his family and country through the last 150 years, and relating this very specifically to why he writes as he does. Images like the old rusty bed in Windmill Baby are suddenly made real and vibrant. We talk about him doing a talk like this as a sort of performance within the Festival, and about the programme including lots of landscape photos from the areas represented.

Film is also going to be important. Even during this launch week, we've been able to show a number of really important films, including a couple of UK premieres. While these don't do what theatre does in terms of immediate, visceral communication, they certainly place the work in a physical context which makes sense of it. If I can make the dialogue between forms right, then that will give an artistic cohesion to the Festival. One of the films we showed this week was Sunset to Sunrise: Allan Collins' film about the Arrernte elder Max Stuart, which I first saw at the Dreaming. It's so beautifully simple: Max just talks, but talks in his own landscape, and the beauty of the cinematography gives weight to the words. The other UK premiere was a film called The Secret War, about the current situation in West Papua. A deeply shocking film, which both distressed and fired the audience. I'd known a bit about West Papua since reading Jay's book and meeting Benny; but this 15-minute film hits home.

On Friday, at Australia House, we are able to show some indigenous films from New Zealand, thanks to Ian Conrich, and to have some panel discussions around the themes of theatre, First Nations peoples and the contemporary world. It all leads up to a rather posh party, with the Deputy High Commissioner welcoming us, and David and Trevor putting on an Aboriginal Welcome to Country. Nice to be able to respond to that, especially on Australian territory, since it means I can acknowledge the Aboriginal people as the custodians of the land. A first little performance for ORIGINS, and a first little shift of meaning and relationship as a result.

Concert Party

Way back when I first started talking about Dilemma, Josip Rainer - contributor to our website, Paris-based dramaturg and regular reader of this blog - sent me a fabulous video about the Concert Party tradition in Ghana. I lent it to Elsie, largely to suggest something of the rough quality I'm looking for in the production, and she in turn showed it to her Mother, who seemed to know just about everybody in it. Now it's blossoming into a really exciting production idea. Elsie has been really struck by the way in which the Concert Parties used to arrive in a village, find the house with the biggest courtyard, and erect a stage there out of planks and blocks. In a way, a very similar approach to makeshift touring! She's suggesting that we do something similar with our stage, so that we have a little raised space in the middle of the room. I like this, since it allows me to divide the space without going anywhere naturalistic.

Talking to Elsie about space is fascinating. She's the architect of the new supreme court, so she's very involved in ideas about liberty and equality, and how they express themselves in terms of spacial relationships. There's a theatricality about all courts which she acknowledges - but she's also very interested in the way in which a new way of looking at it might help overturn received ideas about hierarchy and authority in a judicial process which is meant to be about equality but so rarely is.

Fired up with all this, I drove the family down to Devon to spend the weekend with Brian Woolland. On the way, we passed Stonehenge, silhouetted by the setting sun.

Celebrity culture

With two projects bubbling away towards the boil, Border Crossings has never been busier. It's exciting, but a bit mad! I find myself making silly mistakes, like leaving .html off the links to the Laboratory and Box Office pages in some email shots. Luckily at least some people are keen enough on what we're doing to email us and ask! If I didn't have Kate as Producer for Dilemma, I think I'd be totally out of control by now. She's been doing some of the really tough work, like the Work Permit application and buying air tickets. She only found out at the last moment that Osei is actually Osei Korankye's surname - he uses it first as his stage name. thatw as close to a serious border incident. Booking tickets on Ghana International Airlines is an interesting one too. You reserve online, then phone Ghana to sort out payment. They give you a mobile number of a Uk-based agent, who only takes cash deposited in their account before issuing tickets.... This didn't feel right! Eventually Kate managed to track down a real office and got some real paperwork for our real cheque.

Meanwhile, I've been talking to PR people. It's important we get a good profile for this show, especially with Ama coming. One man depresses me. He's never heard of Ama, which is fine - the job is to make sure people have heard of her. But his argument is that if somebody isn't a "celebrity", then you can't get them any press at all. I begin to wonder how anybody ever becomes a celebrity. I point out that she's won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Nelson Mandela prize and pretty much everything else going bar the Nobel. "Look", he says: "Athol Fugard can't get interviews. The only one the producers of Victory got was by flying a journalist to California at their expense to talk to him in person. We live in a celebrity culure." And Athol Fugard - that great writer and artist - is apparently not a celebrity. But Paris Hilton is.

Music talks

I was invited to the Chinese Embassy last Thursday, to meet the new Cultural Counsellor, Mr Wu Xun, and a delegation of artists they've brought over. It's a shame that Ke Yasha's not here any more - I'd developed quite a relationship with him over the last couple of years. Still, Wu Xun seems to have style - he got the visiting singers to do a bit of karaoke, and a wonderful pipa player, Wu Yuxia, played for us.

The pipa is like a vertical lute, but has the ability to sound like a rock guitar if needed. I'd not heard it much before a couple of weeks ago, when I saw Wu Man perform with the Kronos quartet - and suddenly here it was again, and again being played by an astonishing performer. As happens with musicians, a Scottish flautist who was there, called Eddie, got excited and offered a reel or two in return. And this led to them playing together. I'm never quite sure how musicians do this - least of all ones who have no language in common at all (though I guess we managed something similar with Zhang Ruihong). Eddie and Yuxia sat opposite one another, watching each other intently - there was almost an erotic charge between them, rooted in rhythm. And, just because of the instruments and their approach to playing, every moment glistened with cultural melding. Eddie told me it was possible because Scottish folk, like Chinese music, uses a pentatonic scale.

The next night, I was at the Barbican for Peter's production of John Adams' new opera, The Flowering Tree. It's another cultural melding through music - an Indian folk tale re-told in contemporary mode, with American singers, Indonesian dancers, and the best Chorus I have ever heard - the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela. I get to meet John afterwards, and to congratulate him on another incredible achievement. But all he can think about is the fact that his glasses flew off while he was conducting the final bar, causing the opera to end rather abruptly. "What would have happened if they'd gone earlier?" he keeps saying.

Another World is Possible

I spent much of the weekend at the Barbican, for Peter's New Crowned Hope Festival. On Saturday night, this was a concert of world music by the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, with Tariq Ali giving political comments on the various regions from which the music came. It sounds a bit odd, but it was actually quite wonderful; with the music creating a contemplative space to work through some of the ideas in the politics. And, as in the Adams operas and (I hope) in some of our own work, the music took the politics into the arena of the emotions, where the statistics of (say) Middle Eastern deaths move beyond mere statistics and into the reality of mourning. The theme of the weekend was Another World is Possible. In the concert, Tariq Ali's talk suggested the opposite - but the music took us towards a place where transformation through empathy seemed a reality.

Moving ahead on the production: contracts, publicity designs, work permits, accommodation. All made a bit more tricky this time by its coinciding with organising the launch of the Origins Festival in September. At least I can book the accommodation in the same places.

I spent yesterday morning with Elsie and her mother, who is a fount of wisdom on Ghanaian society. I'd passed on the video about Concert Party for them to watch: Elsie's Mum knew many of the performers personally. She fills me in on some of the rituals in the play, and on songs and dances. Like most Ghanaians, she likes to laugh. "Oh yes" she says, when I mention this. "We laugh at everything. Even when people were very hungry, at the start of the Rawlings government, and their throats went flappy because they were so thin, we used to call it 'Rawlings chin'!"

The Africa Centre

I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the Africa Centre with Elsie, Kate, Nick Moran (our newly recruited lighting designer) and Graeme from Business Culture, who are running the building until it gets re-opened in spanking new form, round about 2010. The previous evening, Graeme and I had both been at the architects, Ash Sakula, looking at the plans. This was a serious gathering of movers and shakers around African activities in the UK, where I was very excited to meet Biyi Bandele. He and I had overlapped at Central in 2006, but never got to chat before. He kept me entertained with anecdotes about the Nigerian film industry. "Nollywood" is apparently conquering the entire continent.

The architects have made an amazing job of the Centre. Given that it has the only original Georgian frontage in Covent Garden, which leads into a very narrow, long space, they have found ways of cramming in a vast number of surprisingly large spaces. The real debates during the evening are more to do with management and usage. One thing which stands out very clearly is the centrality to any work in the space of the old auction hall, which sits very powerfully in the centre, and is retained in the new design (not least because it's listed). Gottfreid, a visual artist, talks about how it is like the square in an African village - the open space used for markets, for culture, performance and politics.

That's exactly what we want to do with it too. Elsie and I get excited about the ways in which we can configure the room to make a really interesting actor-audience relationship, and Nick comes up with some really exciting ideas about how to light it in a very unconventional way, which says something different about what the performance is. The direct relationship with the audience which is so basic to African theatre will be at the heart of this show. Part of this, of course, is the welcome we can give them into the building, so we're delighted when Graeme suggests opening the basement area as a bar / restaurant / exhibition space during the run. This is very exciting - a way of extending the experience beyond the auditorium into the social ritual of theatre, in the way I've always loved at the Cartoucherie. I need to think more about it, but we're moving forwards!

Thomas Keneally shipwrecked

Tom was on Desert Island Discs this morning. I got used to his voice through a saga of phone-calls in the build-up to getting Bullie's House on: nice to hear him again. By a funny coincidence, today I also finished reading his novel A Family Madness, which is a journey into deeply disturbing material across two parallel narratives - one in contemporary Australia, the other around the Belorussian involvement in World War Two. This is characteristic of Tom, and one of the things which drew me to his work in the first place: he's very much aware of the interdependence of seemingly discreet spheres of operation - the way in which global history affects each and every life, however parochial it may seem to others, and indeed to itself. Bullie's House was set on a remote mission station - and was about the great spiritual and political questions of our time. At one point in the BBC interview, Tom says: "The best stories happen on the fault lines between races and cultures". That could be the motto of Border Crossings.

Full steam ahead

The last few weeks have been packed with admin - all of which is moving very much in the right direction. The really good news is that Dilemma has now been funded by the Arts Council, the Commonwealth Foundation, Passage of Music and the Gibbs Trust. Which means we're on. Kate (who runs Bilimankwe, and is going to be producer on this project) and I carve up the admin jobs - which are legion. The most immediate tasks are around bringing people from Ghana, where the news of the go-ahead has been greeted with much rejoicing! We need a work permit, which means getting passport details. I suspect at least one of the people we're inviting may not have a passport - and that there may also be no record of her date of birth, which will make everything a bit more complex than it really needs to be. Of course, I may be wrong, and I hope I am. By a fortunate coincidence, Steve Collins, a young director who we're intending to take on as an intern on this, is currently in Accra with Theatre for a Change, so he can help smooth the way and sort some of the cultural bridges. I doubt he'll still be there by the time the cast need to apply for visas, so we may have to get British Council help there.

Phone Ama Ata Aidoo. She's very excited, and sure that she will be able to come for at least a week, possibly more. This is a big boost to the marketing - which is probably the biggest job of the lot. Plus it will be wonderful to have such an eminent figure around our work.

Meanwhile, the Origins Festival is also moving on. We've got funds from the US Embassy and from Arts WA for the Advisory Board's meetings and the launch in September. I meet up with Ian Connich, the Director of the new Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, and he offers to show some Maori short films for the launch. This will be great - it's a way of involving some element of presentation even at this early stage. I phone Allan Collins (Aboriginal film maker) in Alice Springs, to see if we can also show his amazing film Sunset to Sunrise. He seems very open to the idea, and tells me amazing things about the background to the piece. In order to allow the elder Max to tell his story, they spent six weeks consulting other elders about protocols, and then went to the specific place in the bush where Max's father was born, and sat under a specific tree to tell the story. None of this is overt in the film, but it goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary resonance it has.

Ophelia Huang emails from Shanghai to say we've got a CTC grant for me to go to China and meet Director You again, with a view to moving the Trilogy forward. Hopefully I can get this to happen in December, once Dilemma is done - I'd like to be in the country till then if I can. But there are also pressures to try and get the work seen in the first half of 2008 - not least the China Now Festival. I met their Programme Manager, Fenella Barber, who would like the project to be part of the Festival. Worry that suddenly everything is happening at once..... which is great, of course......

Zero Culture

For the last few months, we've been sharing the Wood Green office with Bilimankwe Arts and Zero Culture. The idea is that the three companies collaborate in a Consortium, which is proving very fruitful as Kate from Bilimankwe takes on the producer's role for Dilemma. Last night we went to see Zero Culture's show Find Me Amongst the Black at the Purcell Room on the South Bank: and started to see some real points of contact there too.

Zero Culture is run by Hardial S. Rai, who I've known ever since we took Bravely Fought the Queen to Watermans in the very early days of the company. He was running the Asian programme there at the time, and was very helpful in my first ventures into Asian casting. One of his recommendations, Harmage Singh Kalarai, who played Jiten, is there for the show. So are Suman Bhuchar and Shobana Jeyasingh, plus Manoj from Collage Arts, who it turns out formed London's first Asian theatre company with Hardial and Harmage, way back in the 70s before even Tara. But the evening is no nostalgic reunion: it feels very contemporary. Hardial has brought together a text by Parv Bancil, based on the background to the 2005 Birmingham riots, with choreography by Darshan Singh Bhuller and some really fantastic video work by KMA. It's very edgy, very current, and manages to bring traditional forms into the present moment without being at all self-conscious about the fact. It feels right to be in a consortium with this company.

Back from the Dreaming

Back in England to hear the latest news from Australia: John Howard has decided to ban sales of alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory. By all means have some sort of prohibition if it's going to solve a problem - particularly if it's related to child pornography and child abuse - but don't racialise that prohibition! What makes him think Aboriginal people are more likely to be corrupted by malign influences than white people? Racism, that's what.

Interestingly, through my four days at the Dreaming Festival, I had precisely one half of lager. The atmosphere, although it was celebratory, and at times wild, just didn't seem to need alcoholic fuelling. The culture alone was enough.

I'm intending to write quite extensively about this Festival elsewhere, so here's just a few cultural highlights and recommendations:

Ngapartji Ngapartji: somewhere between a lesson in indigenous language, a sing-along and a tragic re-telling of Aboriginal history, this is an amazing project which has been developed between a Scott Rankin's activist company Big hArt, the actor Trevor Jamieson (another of Bev Webb's boys) and the Pitjantjatjara people from around Alice Springs. A rare example of community work of the most valuable kind which really does turn into the highest quality theatre. And there's a language website too.

Sunset to Sunrise: a beautiful and simple film by Allan Collins, in which an elder spends a night in the bush with his two sons, and talks about the changes he's seen during his lifetime, and the decline of the old culture.

Bigotbri Ladies: every prejudice caricatured. I saw a great set they did about the food at the Festival - which was intercultural and so not to their liking....

Indigie Femme: two women, one Navajo, one Polynesian, who have beautiful voices and sing about a better world.

A Sister's Love: a really amazing film by the festival's director Rhoda Roberts, which deals with the murder of her sister Lois. Aside of the personal tragedy, which is very intense, it's also an extraordinary indictment of the ongoing racism in Australian society - a society which assumes that when an Aboriginal person disappears, they have just "gone walkabout".

This year's Festival fell on the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum: the moment when the Aboriginal people were admitted as citizens of Australia. Prior to that, they were categorised as "flora and fauna". They may be acknowledged as human now - but there is still a very long way to go.

Broome and Perth

A tropical evening in Broome, and Uncle Baamba rolls up at the Mangrove Hotel to take me out. My one night here happens to coincide with the opening of an exhibition commemorating 100 years of the presence in the Kimberley of the Sisters of St. John of God. In 1907, a handful of Irish nuns, with no knowledge of Aboriginal people, appeared in the north of Western Australia, fuelled by nothing but missionary zeal and charity. Although they now wear simple modern clothes, and for some time wore white cotton habits, the first nuns were clad in heavy black wool from head to toe, with a train for good measure. Given that it’s 35C today, and this is the winter, they must have been stifled. “No wonder they were a bit grumpy”, says Baamba.

When we were doing Bullie’s House, it was very apparent that Baamba knew a lot about mission stations, priests and anthropologists. Now it’s clear why – he went to school on one. He shows me pictures of his mother as a novice nun (who never took her final vows!), himself as a boy in the dilapidated school-house; he introduces me to his numerous cousins, nephews and nieces, and his “favourite teacher”, who is an ageing nun. I’m always wary of evangelism in any form – but there is something very touching about this community and its place in this region. Not least the fact that, if indigenous people had not come here, they would have been massacred in the bush. Michelle tells me that Aboriginal people were being hunted for sport as recently as the 1970s; and that there was a conspiracy of silence to protect the perpetrators.

It takes us a while to find a restaurant which is still open at the late hour of 8.30pm, but finally get a Chow Mein in the local Chinese. It’s BYO (bring your own), so we drink water with it. There are lots of Chinese people here, as well as Malay and Japanese. Broome was exempt from the white Australia policy, as a step to encourage Asian people here to man the pearl luggers. Hence the incredible mix of races. Dalisa is part Aboriginal and part Malay. Jimmy Chi, the playwright and musician, is Aboriginal, Japanese, Chinese and Scottish – one quarter to each grandparent. Baamba had a Japanese step-father, and used to be allowed into the pubs when other Aboriginals were not, because the Japanese were regarded as closer to white. “Besides”, he chortles, “they had to let me in, ‘cos nobody else could play ‘em any music”.

We trundle across the road to the Roebuck Tavern, made famous by Jimmy Chi in Bran Nue Dae – the Aboriginal musical with its roots in Broome, in which Baamba played Uncle Tadpole; a character I suspect was modelled rather closely on himself. Sadly, the cliché of the alcoholic Aboriginal is much in evidence here. As we sit on the veranda, waiting for a taxi, they lurch and stagger around us. It doesn’t feel dangerous or threatening – just rather pathetic. And horribly understandable. There are people in this state whose first contact with the wider world was only a few decades ago. Now, even in this incredibly remote little town (two and a half hours’ flight from Perth, which is itself the world’s most remote big city), there are numerous cars, internet cafés, cinemas, tourists, and flashing corporate logos. And alcohol. It’s hardly surprising that people should have such a deep sense of displacement.

And yet, there is so much here that is positive in the community’s development and efforts towards sustainability. Baamba’s own work at Goolarri and in education (he’s one of the founders of Notre Dame University here) is extraordinary. Michelle takes me to Magabala Books – an independent Indigenous publisher. We browse through galleries of traditional art, wondering at the throbbing, shimmering vitality of these Dreaming-inspired paintings. And, of course, there was Bran Nue Dae. At the airport, I spot a CD of the music, which I have never heard – and snap it up.

Back in Perth for one evening, which I spend with Heath Bergersen, who played Bullie himself, and Bev Webb, his adopted mother, agent, and our Australian Associate Producer on the project. Both Heath and Baamba have the most incredible memories, and remind me of things which happened during that 2004 tour which I’d long since consigned to my internal recycle bin. There’s much laughter, and a little sadness over the death of Kevin Costello. It does us good to talk about him. I’d been a bit wary, because I know some indigenous Australians resist talking about the dead – but both Baamba and Heath initiate the subject with the generosity born from a shared loss.

Up early, and dash round to the Post Office, to collect a parcel of material from Bain Stewart, who is Leah Purcell’s partner and manager at Bungabura Productions. And now here I am on yet another plane, this time to Brisbane. I should be meeting Leah and Bain on Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m off to the Festival of the Dreaming.

Perth and Broome

Australia Day 1 begins with the most intense alarm clock experience I can ever remember, piercing through the jetlag. It’s 7.30 Perth time, which means that it’s just after midnight in London. Worth remembering that, according to my body clock, these days are nocturnal.
Michelle Broun from Art WA turns up at 8.50 with David Milroy. David is a writer, director and serious activist. It never ceases to amaze me how people from cultures other than our own are capable of such multi-faceted lives, while we specialise ourselves into oblivion. David tells me about his work with his ancestral community over Native Title issues, and the battles with the mining companies over land rights, sacred sites, ancient rock paintings and the like. The picture which emerges is very grim: people are bribed, conned, bullied and cajoled into giving up their traditional ownership. How are they supposed to resist the juggernaut of international capital? But David is remarkable in his approach: he talks about it as a performance, with himself as a comic trickster, doing all he can to outwit the lawyers and anthropologists who are drafted in to overcome the Aboriginal communities.

He has written a play called Windmill Baby, which has won just about every award going. He’s also, just in case I didn’t think he was enough of a polymath, written the music for it. And directed it. For Yirra-Yakkin, which – although Sam now runs it – was founded by David. It’s 10am on the first morning and already I feel totally humbled.

Over to the Yirra-Yaakin offices for a conference about repertoire and touring practicalities with Derek Nannup and Paul MacPhail. Then lunch with all three of them plus Bev from Jiriki, Michelle, and some of her Arts WA colleagues. Over the traditional Aboriginal curry (!) I tell them about some of the ideas behind the Festival, about the way audiences responded to Bullie’s House, and how that made me realise the intense need that Western countries are feeling for other ways of looking at and living in the world – for an ecologically appropriate culture, and a culture which allows many voices to be heard, while respecting tradition and wisdom. They especially like the point that the Festival needs to evolve out of a gathering of First Nations people later this year, in a creative environment. As Paul says: "We’d all been wondering why these wetjalas were doing this?" I think he got his answer.

Back to the hotel, where I talk to Duncan Ord, the Director of the Aboriginal Economic Development office. This is a man with a big budget – but it’s only big because it’s about commerce rather than art. Still, he’s very much in tune with our ideas, not least because he used to be a theatre administrator with Black Swan. There’s a serious case to make that an international festival will do a vast amount to develop the culture and the careers of the people and companies involved.

David re-appears, and drives me out to Edith Cowan University, where a young man called Maitland is showing a piece of performance art he’s created. It’s about the experience of being mixed race – and it’s incredibly experimental. Heiner Muller meets the didgeridoo.
A packed day…. Particularly since I also have to do a revised budget and schedule for Dilemma to email through to Nick at the Arts Council. During Maitland’s performance I have a sudden panic that I’ve got one of the figures wrong. Find out I haven’t. Decide I’d better do some serious sleeping.

Day 2 sees me on yet another plane, this time on an internal flight with Michelle to Broome. This little town in the Northern part of WA is a bit of a legend among Aboriginal people (and Australians generally). It’s also where my old chum Baamba lives – and as we pull in to Goolarri Media Enterprises, there he is to greet me. Baamba told me so much about Broome while we were doing Bullie’s House, and it’s great to meet him again on home territory. He’s had a leg amputated as a result of diabetes – but he’s walking well on the new one, and actually looks younger, leaner and healthier than he did in London. Over lunch we talk about some ideas for the Festival. Baamba is an elder, so it would be great to involve him, since he could also take a leading role in any ceremonial events we include. As I expected, he seems game for anything.

Dalisa Pigram turns up with a DVD of the new show she’s been working on with Stalker and its indigenous offshoot, Marrugeku. I saw Dalisa in a previous Stalker show, Incognita, at the Perth Festival in 2003, and was blown away. The director, Rachael Swain, uses dance, circus skills and wild music to create work which is distinctly Australian, and which also de-constructs being Australian. In the new piece, Burning Daylight, she’s collaborated more closely with Dalisa as an indigenous choreographer, with the Yarroo people and the rest of Broome’s extraordinary multicultural community, and with a choreographer from Burkina Faso for good measure. The work seems really incredible. I may have to move mountains to get it into the Festival (it’s a big, expensive piece) – but I guess that’s my job.

Dalisa says a lot of it comes from a sense that young people in Broome are losing touch with their background. I understand that. In spite of all the apparent political progress, there remains a deep sense of the prejudice against the traditional ways. This morning, as the plane was landing, Michelle was telling me about the many small indigenous communities in the area. The white man on the other side of me, who had said nothing through the whole flight, leaned in and hissed: "We call them mining sites".

Stepping towards the Indigenous

I'm writing this in a hotel room in Perth, WA. Another hotel room! This time I'm in Australia as the guest of the Australia Council, with a view to programming indigenous work into the Origins Festival. Great to know these ideas are being taken so seriously.

This sort of work has been an emerging theme over the last few weeks. First we has Sam Cook's workshop at the Laboratory, and then last Thursday I drove up to Cambridge to see Miria George's play and what remains.... as part of the Pasifika Styles Festival. Miria is a Maori, who runs a Wellington-based company called Tawata Productions with a writer and director called Hone Kouka. It's an incredibly provocative piece of work - based on the idea of the last Maori leaving New Zealand a few years into a dystopian future. If it sounds far-fetched, Miria points out that she wrote it in response to legislation in 2005 which forbade Maori ownership of seashore land. Which sounds very like ongoing colonialism in the 21st century.

What was really striking about the play was the way in which Hone had given "voice" to the almost silent Maori character of Mary through her use of traditional gestural language. There's a great moment when she opens her suitcase, and we see it's full of earth. She gets in, and dances in the earth: a dance of eloquent despair. Hone and Miria came to the Laboratory on Saturday, and did a workshop for us around this way of working. As often in the past, I'm struck by the pervasive nature of performative activity in First Nations cultures. We find ourselves strutting like birds, singing laments, performing hakkas, and all with a theatrical meaning and intention behind them. It's very much helped by the fact that half the people attending are themselves Maori - there's a clear and deep loyalty to the home culture among Maori people living in England.

On the plane coming here - it's a very long flight - I saw a new film called Ten Canoes, with an entirely Aboriginal cast. Again, there's an amazing sense of culture and performance as being the heart of everything. There's a wonderful sequence of a Makarrata ritual, with two members of a tribe that has given offence facing the spears of the offended, dancing magically as they dodge them. And, when one, Ridjimiraril, has been hit and mortally wounded, he performs a long and agonizing dance of death; like the one David Gulpilil (who narrates this film) does in Walkabout. It's a very beautiful film - and has filled me with excitement about the next few days.

Tessa Jowell - and the Dreaming

Now here's a clever way into the ears of the mighty. Roisin Rae, who played Linda in Orientations for its second outing, and who runs a company called Crescent Theatre, also lives in Tessa Jowell's constituency. Which means she can get an MP's surgery with her. I, of course, am a mentor and advisor to Crescent - so on Friday morning I found myself sitting opposite the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Roisin had written in, expressing concern about the recent cut to the GFA fund, so Tessa already knew why we were there. "I can quite see why you're so concerned about this...." she began, "... but I have to tell you it's been blown up out of all proportion". And then we got the usual party line about how much the arts budget had increased under Labour (it had to!), how this cut was really very small and how what really mattered was the Comprehensive Spending Review in October, and how somebody known as "Gordon" had given a "categorical undertaking" that no further Lottery funds would be re-directed towards the Olympics.

There seems to be a pretty serious conflict between the Arts Council and the DCMS / Secretary of State. I asked why it was that the cut had only hit the smaller-scale, experimental companies - those of us who are project-funded. Because that was where the Arts Council spent its Lottery funds. And whose decision was it that this sector should be Lottery-funded, while funding for national institutions and rep companies came from the taxpayer? The Arts Council. Not DCMS. Not Tessa Jowell. And, in any case - "The level of fuss is disproportionate." Not where we're sitting. Why do we sense a cultural shift in the Arts Council over the last couple of months, from an organisation wanting to say "Yes" to one looking for excuses to say "No"? That, she says, is "ridiculous". She seems to feel that the Arts Council was looking for a fight - and now has found one. But, if all this spin is true, then why would the Arts Council want the fight at all? "Look", says the Secretary of State: "if your project is something they want to fund, they will fund it." So - I suppose that means the Arts Council has been funding an extra 35% of projects they didn't want to fund. Just for the sheer hell of it.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. The language of the whole conversation felt so alien to what culture is really about - we could have been talking about any publicly funded sector of the economy. Transport, health, culture.... these things are not the same as one another, and they cannot all be treated the same. We need to find new ways of assessing value, which are not just about money, but which allow the nation to make sense of investing its money.

After this, plus a week of endless admin, it's a relief to go into the Laboratory at the weekend. Sam Cook from Yirra Yaakin does a workshop called Enter the Dreaming. In many ways, it's about clearing the creative space inside us, and shutting out the chaos which gets in the way of the dream. A journey away from modern living, which shows us what indigenous cultures can really offer by way of an alternative. Sam's technique is actually very simple: it's a bit like certain sorts of voice training, or yoga. By breathing, and concentrating on the breath in the abdomen, she puts us in touch with our Liyan – pronounced Lee-anne. For Aboriginal people the centre of our personal world is in our stomach. Certainly this works for us in practical terms: through this meditational process, everybody in the room starts to make contact with their creativity, and often in ways which they're not used to. I did a painting..... And of course, on the most basic level, Sam is expressing a very simple and profound truth: that our dreams do not happen in our heads, but in our bodies. So when we shut out the rational, we have a much more direct route to our personal Dreaming - to the place beyond the rational.

If only Tessa Jowell would come into our Laboratory, lie down on the floor and breath a bit. This is my public offer of a complimentary place on any workshop you choose, Tessa. And feel free to bring Gordon.

Africa looming large

Lots of African events in the last few days. We've been talking to the Africa Centre, where we did Toufann, as a possible central London venue for Dilemma. Graeme Jennings, who is running it on a temporary basis as it recovers from deficits, is rebuilt etc, invites me to its Arts and Culture Advisory Panel meeting, and I end up as part of the panel. There are some fascinating other people on it: Tessa from Africa Beyond, Netsayi Chigwendere, Zina Sar-Wiwa, and Adrian Berry, who programmed some of our work into the Bull at Barnet years ago. Adrian has done a draft programme for how the venue might function once it's re-built: in the meantime, we're talking about performing in its decaying shell. I like this idea for this play - it's a piece which demands the roughness and immediacy of traditional African performance, and where the sense of a decaying history, of ghosts, will be very helpful indeed.

Last night Kate Stafford and I drove up to Birmingham to see the Drum, where Dilemma will perform in Birmingham, and to attend the launch of UK Arts' Africa Consortium. It's a great idea - and displays the huge interest which the UK has in African work now. I find myself wondering what's at the root of this: post-colonial guilt, or a real sense that a continent which lives more closely with nature and at a saner pace might be able to teach us something? John Kani, who is the Consortium's Patron, suggests the latter in his speech. "When you come to Africa, come with an empty suitcase.... we are teachers as well".

The launch coincides with the press night of his play Nothing but the Truth at the Rep. In the programme, Zakes Mda (who knows a thing or two about this) says that the play is a milestone in South African theatre, and that it shows that Kani really is a fine writer - overturning the myth that it was really Fugard who wrote The Island and Sizwe Banzi is Dead. I'm quite sure that John Kani and Winston Ntshona fed a hige amount into those plays - they were genuine devised collaborations, like lots of what we do - but that doesn't make them great playwrights on their own, and to my mind this play showed it. I couldn't see how the family tiff was supposed to connect to the politics. I found the Ibsenite naturalism, unearthing past secrets, creaky and obvious. And so Western - box set and all. Kani is a wonderful actor and a great ambassador for African theatre, but this play shows him receiving Western models wholesale and then sending them back, long out of fashion and looking a bit bedraggled. I suppose it may be part of a malaise that I've been told has gripped many South African theatre-makers in the years since apartheid ended: the sense that there is no focus any more. One thing which did feel very resonant in the play was the way Kani's own character felt washed up and abandoined in the new South Africa - still, in his early 60s, unable to rise to the post of Chief Librarian. As if the generation that did all the suffering and all the campaigning has just been left behind.

It makes it poignant to compare this with the revival of Sizwe Banzi at the Barbican, with Peter Brook's company. Two young African actors perform this with virtuoso brilliance - particularly Habib Dembele in the John Kani role. The opening monologue (which is well known as Kani's own work - based on his experiences at Ford and developed through the stand-up like experience of performing the play in the townships) feels very alive, very current and incredibly funny. Because it is so concrete - because the politics and the human experience are the same thing - this play continues to resonate right now.

Favela education

The Barbican sent me an invitation to a seminar called "Can Culture be Our Weapon?". The title is surprisingly literal - this session was about cultural work with young people in the inner cities (notably Hackney), responding to gun crime and knife crime. There was a Commander from the Met on the panel, Jeremy Weller from Grassmarket project, and the remarkable Camila Batmanghelidjh, who runs something called Kids Company, which combines art and therapy for young people. She comes up with some fascinating ideas - for example that "brain research" (does she mean neurology or psychoanalytical theory?) is showing that violence is often the result of poor attachment or of trauma. Art / performance, she argues, allows the processing of unresolved emotional material, and so is therapeutic and a force against violence. If this is true then science proves Aristotle and catharsis theory....

I email Paul, my favourite neurologist. Here's what he says: "Attachment theory is a psychological theory (after Bowlby) and is about social relationships. Neuroscience is really at its limits with social relationships. The first journals in this area came out only last year. I was at Westminster today addressing (with Susan Greenfield no less) some all party group about neuromyths - and how Hilary Clinton helped start the myth that brain research tells us how people are going to turn out. This is baloney. Biology is not destiny."

So - catharsis is still theory.

The impetus for the seminar, however, is very real - a group called Afro-Reggae from Brazil, who grew up in response to the 1993 police-led massacre in the favela Vigario Geral, and have done an enormous amount to empower youth through music and performance, to turn people against the drug war, and to suggest a different way of living. It's almost evangelical - you "join" Afro-Reggae - but that is what it needs. Now, in the person of their distinctly street-cred lead percussionist and insightful thinker Altair Martins, they are in London, starting a project with Hackney youth, which the Barbican is backing for five years, no less. "The longest we've ever backed any project" Louise Jeffreys tells me. "God - they were some I backed for three and regretted it." This one is called Favela to the World, and I suspect she won't regret one second of it.

Answer to Phelim

Dear Phelim

You've written me a very interesting and helpful comment - I appreciate it. Your tone indicates that you know I'm coming at this from the position of somebody who shares the idealism behind what you have been (so bravely) attempting in Satyagraha. I grapple with the sort of challenges which are present in this work all the time: as much as anything because of the nature of Border Crossings as an intercultural company, and the fact that I sit in the comparatively privileged position of a white director who manages to make a living out of this. I chose to write as I did in the blog after thinking very hard about the production for some days - because I was genuinely discomforted and I wanted to discover why. This may be as much a discomfort about aspects of my own work, which I need to question constantly, as it is about yours. As I said in my last post, so much of your production reminded me of things I've done myself. Given that I was already pre-disposed towards the idea of the opera, I thought I would come out with feelings different from the ones I in fact experienced. Now, that is probably a good thing - what's theatre for if it doesn't disrupt an audience's expectations? - but it also requires some careful probing.

I realised that the gesture of the projected Chorus was an echo of the Satyagraha oath - but it does have the same feeling as a gesture of blessing, and in the context of the scene, where Gandhi and King are both being constructed as sacrificial figures, it seemed to me to have the effect of softening that sacrifice, and making it easier for the audience to deal with. I suspect this is partly because of the medium of projection, and the choice of white, which gave them the aura of a film-like heavenly chorus (and we do easily read Glass as filmic music) - which I can quite see was not what you intended. What you say about the relationship with Arjuna in the Gita suggests that you read sacrifice in a much more powerful and disturbing way. If we are to meditate on the assassinations of Gandhi and King - these iconic figures who perform the rare feat of bridging the gaping void between the spiritual and the political - then it is essential that we root this in a physical form which allows us to locate them politically - in the real world which requires social and economic, rather than merely ideological alteration. This is something which theatre is very well equipped to do, and music theatre (by virtue of the spiritual strength of the human voice, produced with such physical effort), supremely so. Gandhi's spirituality, like all Hinduism, is rooted in the physical and the elemental: that is what defines him, and makes the paradoxical concept of "maya" so powerful at the heart of his philosophy. Much of your production emphatically did this - but for me it pulled back into an easier, more Western numinosity in certain key moments. I felt a lot of the time that the physicality of the production was deliberately distanced from the singers, and that as a result we saw a Western spirit-body duality, and not the holistic ideas of Indian religion. Singer as spirit, actor as body - in the Indian theatre these specialisms do not exist.... So maybe it's the form, yes.

Your closing comments are acute, and I think they strike at the heart of my response. I used to love the Coliseum, in all its broken-down shabby functionality. I loved the fact that it embodied the destruction of empire within its decaying shell. I loved the sense of the secular cathedral with fraying seats. And now - it disturbs me. It feels imperial, fascistic and triumphalist. It glows like a Hygena kitchen. It has no theatrical roughness. Now - we live in an age of dislocation, and sometimes the placing of contemporary work in a relic of past theatrical glory can be incredibly telling. But for me, the dislocation on this particular night was beyond this, and was compounded by the fact that virtually everybody on the stage was white (you're right), and that I was sitting with a friend from Tagore's University in Bengal who had never been to an opera before.....

This is strange territory - because I had just come back from reviving Nixon in China in Athens, and I did the same piece in the Coliseum last year. Minimalist music again - white people playing Asians, modern political icons on stage, multi-layered realities, a sense of Asian spirituality...... So I really am talking about my own work as much as yours, and I do thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that. Your production has opened my mind and set me thinking. And I can absolutely see why it was the hottest ticket in town.

Thank you for engaging in the dialogue.

warmest regards
Michael

Some successes, some setbacks, Satyagraha

I plough on with arranging the tour for Dilemma. Lots of positive noises on the financial front, though nothing totally solid as yet. I'm hoping to get some hard cash behind it soon, so that we can wave it at the Arts Council and avoid the problem of the last application! Although the application is in, the discussions with venues are ongoing, and not always easy. One venue emails to say there have been internal confusions, and the key person didn't actually know our show had been booked - which is a nice way of saying it isn't booked any more. On the phone - trying to plug a gap in the tour.

We announce the next set of Laboratory workshops, with Sam Cook, Hone Kouka and Miria George, and Denise and Michael from A Fleur de Peau. The response is very encouraging - lots of bookings straight away. What's really nice about this programme is the way in which the first two workshops should lay some foundations for the Origins Festival. I've carried on touting this around the Embassies these last few days - meeting Cultural representatives at New Zealand House (the best view of London I've ever seen is from its penthouse) and Canada House. There's the usual litany of "We have no money", but at least these people are good at pointing us towards those who do. The Australia Council emails this morning with the offer of funds to take me to the Festival of the Dreaming next month. The perfect place to talent scout indigenous artists.

I went last week to see Satyagraha at ENO. A strange night for me. I really ought to have liked it, and I expected to. There was so much in it which felt very like my own work. Minimalist music - Philip Glass isn't John Adams, but his way of setting voices really reminds me of Paul Howard-Jones's scores for several of our productions, especially since Paul loves to work with made-up language, and this was in Sanskrit (which isn't made-up, but sounds it). A corrugated iron wall with flying panels - just like our Mauritian Macbeth. Projections of proverbial texts, and projection used to frame figures in little rooms - like the Magic Flute I did with Will Hargreaves and Mark Doubleday in Stowe years ago. And above all the sense that this was a piece which was taking the audience into a meditational space: that holy quality in the theatre which we strive for in our productions.

So - why did I find myself disliking this production? After a week, I'm beginning to feel it was because it was all too easy. The text comes from the Gita, and the opening is clearly intended to suggest a parallel between Gandhi and Arjuna - but that correspondence is not justified or pursued within the piece. The Gita works because Arjuna is in crisis, and his crisis is over (wait for it) the fact that he is going to use violence. Whereas Gandhi's campaigns are about non-violence. And there is no sense in the piece that he, or anybody else, is in any sort of crisis about anything. Be good, don't fight, peace, love.... Until at the end the Chorus is projected on a cloud raising hands in blessing. Yes really - a heavenly chorus. It's too easy - too sure of itself - too smug. And, as a piece about de-colonisation sitting in the newly renovated triumphalist auditorium of that Edwardian theatre, it really cannot afford to be smug. Sorry.

The First Cut

Talk about coming down with a bump. I got back to England, fired up from my travels, the excitement of Nixon, of all I learnt in Greece, of the seeds planted in Hong Kong - and there was a letter from the Arts Council saying that they'd turned down our application to fund the development workshop for Re-Orientations. I make the dutiful phone call to check why - and get the response I pretty much expected. There's nothing wrong with the project or the application (though if other people were putting money in, they would be more likely to!!) - it's just that they have far less money to go round.

So - the cut has already bitten. In some ways, I'm not very surprised that it should hit us here; and I remain hopeful that they will fund Dilemma later in the year. But the development workshop would have been a closed, private period of experiment and exploration. No visible "outcomes", no boxes they can easily tick. Not many "art experiences" to put on record. Given that the Arts Council is under attack from both government and artists at the moment, it needs to APPEAR to be as active as it can, which means that work of this kind, which is not immediately visible, and has long-term rather than immediate results, will be the first to feel the pinch. Sadly, this also means that the development of really exciting, cutting-edge work, which needs this sort of time and space, will be cut short. And we'll end up with yet more of that blanding out which characterises our times.

The Arts Council has very kindly linked its website to this blog, and clearly likes to encourage the sort of discussions which are going on here - as much as anything because I'm certainly saying they should not have taken the cut they did. However, the internal decisions they are making are as disastrous as the ones imposed by the DCMS. If Grants for the Arts is so important to them, why do they fund it solely from the Lottery, which is subject to fluctuation, and was (remember this?) only ever intended to be a "top-up"? Why not spread the Lottery money AND the core funding through the Council, so that all sectors of the Arts economy are hit by Lottery fluctuations equally? OR - why not just redistribute a few funds internally, like cutting one huge gas-guzzling company, which could offset the entire cut to the small to middle-scale sector? Well - we know why, of course. Because a ritual sacrifice like that would cause such a big outcry - and they don't have the courage to take that on. So, instead, the entire experimental side of the arts world is subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. It will not do. Without experiment and vision, there is no inheritance.

And we need to find another way to make Re-Orientations happen. Which we will.

Interview with Aphrodite

The Greek National Opera’s Publicist is called Aphrodite – isn’t that fabulous? In the last hours before I leave Athens, she sits me down in front of a video camera and subjects me to the sort of interview I’ve been doing with lots of other people over the last few years (book pending – watch this space). The interview is a substitute for the pre-show talk Stefanos Lazaridis wanted me to do, but which somehow never materialised. With this version, he says, we’ll have something in the bag when he brings out a book on the company.

As we talk, I realise just how very fulfilling this experience has been. Although the opera is a piece I know incredibly well, it yields new fruit each time, and the particular context always gives it added resonance and meaning. By linking another exploration of this piece to the discovery of this country I’d never visited before, I’ve been able to articulate so many of my hunches about what we’re trying to do with this thing called theatre: its relationship to the political space, to democracy, to feminism, to spirituality, to healing. At one point, I find myself in the surreal situation of quoting Tomson Highway’s comment that the 21st century may turn out to be the age of the returning goddess, and realise that I am talking to Aphrodite!

The first show was on Friday. It was committed, urgent and a bit tense. The audience, I thought, felt unsure – especially after the Cultural Revolution scene. They seemed to be asking whether this was really opera. The second show (I’m glad I stayed for it), was more secure, and the audience was very different. Younger, a bit less “distinguished”, and far more receptive. Around me I could feel the reality of communication. Something stirring in this home of theatre. And so, today, I can go home with a sense that it was worthwhile coming here for two months.

And what a two months. Here are a few sample stories against myself……

The lead dancer, Emilia, tells me that before I did my first session with the dancers, they were warned by the Chorus that “He will talk for hours”…..

Outside the theatre one day, one of the male dancers came running up to me. “I love the way you are so passionate about your work”, he said. “A lot of people make fun of it, but I think it is great”.

On the first night, the same young man took one look at my Chinese silk shirt from Hong Kong and remarked "If you go to the reception wearing that, the Grecian men will mock you".

Adrian Thompson gave me a very nice bottle of wine as a “Thank you”. I was stupid enough to put it in my hand luggage, and somehow forgot about it at the check in. Moron. At the scanner, they ceremoniously put it in the bin. Another little sacrifice to the lunacy of the “war on terror”.

Epidauros

One of the funny things about opera is that, as the performance approaches, you rehearse less, rather than more. It's because of resting voices, and orchestral timetables. So we had a rehearsal on Saturday night, and now we don't get one till Tuesday night. Adrian Thompson was away on Saturday - so I played Chairman Mao. I don't think it's gone to my head.

I took advantage of the break to get on the bus to the Peloponnese for a couple of days. I based myself in Nafplio, and took trips to Ancient Mycenae (you can see the very postern gate through which Orestes escaped, with the Furies in fast pursuit...) and to Epidauros. I'd been very aware of this incredible theatre for a long time - it's required study for anybody interested in theatre space. Peter Hall and Denis Lasdun maintain that the Olivier is based on this space - but the two are so different in spirit it isn't true. The Olivier is basically a very big end stage with a curve to its front and to the auditorium. Epidauros is a vast auditorium, enveloping a circular orkestra by 270 degrees. The skene gets even less of a look-in than at the Theatre of Dionysus: it's so obvious that the open space of the orkestra was the key to Greek performances. The scale is everything people say, and the acoustic is truly incredible. Sitting at the back, which feels about a mile from the stage, I could hear people dropping coins onto the orkestra floor.

But what I had not realised before was the social context in which this theatre was built. It is part of the Sanctuary of Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a god associated with medicine. In other words, this vast theatre, seating some 14,000, is a space of healing. The sanctuary, known as the "cradle of medicine", was a place where people came to be cured, through medicine, and also through mystic processes associated with dreaming. They would sleep in the sanctuary, where they would dream of the god and find their cure.

What more perfect ideal is there for what theatre ought to be? A dreaming space and a healing space. Right at the end of Nixon in China, Zhou En-lai begs "Come, heal this wound". On one level, this is a personal thing, to do with his cancer. But it is also about the profound wounds suffered by China in the 20th century, and the wounds which the world continues to suffer today. As the opera ends, he hears the birds sing, and a new dawn coming, and decides to carry on with his work. So we send the audience out with a sense of the darkest things in our world; but also with a hope of healing, and the balm of music.

At least, I hope so.

The Theatre of Dionysus

After several weeks in Athens, I finally get to make the great pilgrimage which every theatre-maker who comes here has to make. I climb the hill of the Acropolis, I walk through ancient Agora, and, carved into the southern slopes, I experience the space where this strange and obsessive art took birth: the Theatre of Dionysus.

Approaching the space from the southern entrance of the Acropolis site, you stumble on it almost unawares, entering through the stage right parados, like an ancient character coming from the city. Like so much else, this convention makes sense when you see the space in its reality. Stage right was the city because that was where the city was: stage left was the sea because, as you look over the theatre and the landscape, you can glimpse the shoreline in the stage left distance. This tells us something essential about this foundation of theatres: that it was absolutely engaged in the reality of its context. For all its mythological and apparently esoteric subject matter, the theatre of the Greeks was about the present moment, asserting and claiming its space at the heart of this mother of democracies. And that’s why it has to be an open space: because it is visibly in the heart of the city, and it is about open-ness in the public discourse. That’s why the dodgy events in Greek drama – the murders, the suicides, the self-mutilations – all happen offstage, in the closed private space of the skene, while in the open space of the orkestra, the chorus, and the audience they represent, debate these events and attempt to find a moral sense in them.

Everything about this form and its huge potential as a force for democracy makes sense in this space. Greek theatre was a compulsory attendance for the citizens of Athens, in preparation for legislation and jury service; and the auditorium is vast. But an auditorium, a listening place, is what it is. The acoustic is amazing – indeed, the space actually resembles nothing so much as a vast ear carved out of the hillside.