Festival Finale

Origins came to an end last Sunday, and I'm only now emerging into the daylight to acknowledge the fact! It was an amazing couple of weeks. Of course, some things worked better than others, and some things drew bigger crowds than others - but that's to be expected, especially with the first Festival. Two standing ovations: one for the last performance of Almighty Voice and His Wife, and one for Alanis Obomsawin's incredibly moving Lecture.

At the Closing Ceremony on Sunday, Robert Greygrass and Jean Bruce-Scott presented me with a beautiful blanket, which is a great honour amongst the Native Americans. Considering that their show had (for some reason) drawn the smallest crowds, it was especially moving. I got a very powerful sense that everybody involved was seeing the bigger picture, and looking to future Festivals and wider possibilities.

I had dinner with David Milroy that evening. Great to talk to him at length, two years after we first discussed bringing over Windmill Baby. We go to the Festival hotel, and find the bar full of First Nations people. Patrick is playing his guitar, and Ant his flute. They are surrounded by Elders, performers, crew, and by the ever-increasing crowd of Origins fans we have assembled. An image of community.

Alanis Obomsawin

I spent most of yesterday in the company of Alanis, who is probably our most distinguished guest at Origins. I picked her up from her hotel at 12, and we went together to the very plush residence of Canada's Deputy High Commissioner, for a lunch to celebrate the 70th birthday of the National Film Board. Tom Perlmutter, the head of the NFB, was there with his wife - and there were other filmmakers and Festival directors, plus Simon from Canada House. In the thick of all the Festival mayhem, it was very nice to pause for a couple of hours and lap up some praise for what we've done!

I squeezed in an afternoon at the office before the screening of Alanis's film Kanehsatake at the British Museum. This is THE film I've wanted to show at the Festival, ever since I first saw it in Montreal in September. Fantastic to be able to do it with Alanis present. Or rather, present for the beginning and the end.... during the screening she whizzed off to Canada House in a taxi to yet another drinks reception, and then whizzed back again to us to do a Q&A with her usual incisiveness.

After that, she took us all for a drink, and was still partying away when I left at 10.30. I find it hard to believe that this woman is 76....

Alanis is giving The Origins Lecture at Riverside Studios tonight at 6.30. Promises to be amazing.

Windmill Baby

The last of our opening nights. Windmill Baby is an exquisitely crafted, stunningly performed piece of Aboriginal Australian drama, by one of the key figures in the making of the Festival, David Milroy. It's a full two years since he and I sat in Perth, talking about the idea of bringing it to London - and last night there it was, moving its audience to gales of laughter and floods of tears. Fantastic.

The play is very much in the storytelling tradition of the Aboriginal people. One actor, Rohanna Angus, tells the story directly to the audience and plays all the characters. It's an amazing acting achievement - she gives each one a subtly different vocal and physical characterisation. It was hard to believe that she'd been to the doctor with a bad throat in the morning - she was performing such feats of vocal dexterity. There's one glorious moment when an audience member is brought on stage to listen to "the potato story". Last night, it was a particularly shy person, which made it very funny indeed. It's one of those brilliant pieces of theatrical writing that is hilarious whatever the unpredictable element does - like the way Shakespeare uses the dog in Two Gents.

Before the show, I did a conversation with Frank Davey about the role of the Elders in Aboriginal society. It's incredibly important that they brought Uncle Frank with them to the Festival - it gives them security, and it gives us authenticity and validation.

The show is at Riverside Studios till Sunday, and the number is 020 8237 1111.

Salvage

Salvage had its press night at Riverside Studios yesterday. A bit of a misnomer, since the press didn't actually come.... having decided that their (admittedly rather good) coverage of Strange Resting Places was enough for Origins. Still, there was a very good house, with some really exciting guests - not least Alanis Obomsawin, who had just arrived from Canada in the morning. We're really excited that she's going to be involved for the rest of the Festival.

Alanis loved Salvage. It's a very poetic, mystical play - which in itself is strange, given that it's set in a contemporary reservation, and deals with the aftermath of a car crash. Diane Glancy, the writer, gves a powerful sense of contemporary realities in Native life (and pulls no punches about the social problems), but at the same time she allows room for the spirituality of the culture, and the sense of living in a continuum with the past. The main vehicle for this is the character of the father, Wolfert, who is played with amazing sensitivity by the Lakota actor and storyteller Robert Greygrass. I talk to him over drinks afterwards, and he tells me that this character is very familiar to him. A lot of older men don't exactly live by the old ways, but they feel very close to them. The scenes where he talks to his dead wife in the cemetery are really powerful.

So - now I can't wait for Windmill Baby tonight! It previewed yesterday, and I finally got to see David Milroy and welcome him and the team to London. To think it's two years since he and I first talked about doing this - and now they are finally here!

Salvage

The incredible Festival

We're now half way through the Origins Festival. I can't really believe it was only last Monday that we did the Opening Ceremony - it feels like months, so much has happened. Strange Resting Places was a sell-out hit at Soho Theatre, and Almighty Voice and His Wife got standing ovations at Riverside Studios.

This week, both the shows are at Riverside. Salvage has its Press Night tonight, while Windmill Baby is pre-viewing, before a Press Night tomorrow. I've known Windmill Baby for a long time, in the text and on video, and I've known the writer, David Milroy, since we met in Perth back in June 2007 (crawl back through this blog to find the first impressions!!). It's really exciting finally to have the play in London, knowing how it's been received all over Australia and India - what an incredible, powerful piece of work it is.

Salvage I first read last summer, while I was in Tahoe, and I loved it from the start. I'd known about the writer, Diane Glancy, for some time - but this was a new play, which Native Voices were just about to put into production. So the time was ripe to add in the idea of Origins. When we spoke, Diane was under the impression the production would be in a simple black box with three chairs.... it actually has fences, cars, snow... and an amazing sound design. How things change in the process. It's just as well I put it in the larger Riverside space.

Last night, at the British Library, Diane was incredibly eloquent and poetic in her discussion of her work and of what makes Native Theatre generally. It made me even more excited finally to see her play tonight.

There are still tickets available - book now on 020 8237 1111 or www.riversidestudios.co.uk !!

Great press for Origins

Five days into the Origins Festival, and the press is buzzing with the excitement of this extraordinary programme.

In today's Guardian, Lyn Gardner reviews Strange Resting Places at Soho Theatre:
"The feast plays a central part in Maori culture, and it does too in this charming three-hander which tells the stories of the 28th Maori Battalion who fought in Italy during the second world war. It was clearly an army that marched on its stomach even more than most..... A little show with a big heart. It introduces personal tales into the weave of history and makes connections across thousands of miles and many generations.... Strange Resting Places takes the lost stories of small people caught up in war, and magnifies their tragedies with respect and a smile."

In The Times, Sam Marlowe says of the same production:
"It exerts considerable charm... Leo Gene Peters's production has a cartoonish vivacity... some lovely lucid moments of emotional connection, conveyed in dialogue, zany clowning and music that embraces Italian folk tunes and the sung traditional Maori waiata, as well as hints of big band jazz in on the wings of American fighter pilots."

And Jay Griffiths has written a Comment piece in today's Guardian about the importance of the Festival as a whole:
"Opening with the crazy thunder of Maori performers, parts of the festival are wryly amusing, including the satirical docucomedy Qallunaat – Why White People Are Funny, an Inuit reversal of the anthropological gaze..... In its very programming, it reveals what art itself can mean for indigenous people as something inextricably tied to healing, ecological balance and spirituality."

Exciting times....

Origins Opens

Origins opened on Monday, with a wonderful ceremony at the Scoop by City Hall. It started with Gloria Thomas, who is Catto, chanting by the Thames, and collecting fruit offerings for the river - blessing the Festival. Then Ngati Ranana, the London Maori group, welcomed the visiting artists. Since the Taki Rua company are also Maori, they were very au fait with the protocol, and the language too! The Native Earth group went with the flow.... There's a video online - click here!

As part of the welcome, Pete Postlethwaite spoke in the role of an Elder of British Theatre. You can listen to what he had to say if you Click here.

Last night, Strange Resting Places opened at Soho. One of the most joyous nights in the theatre I can remember or many years. A truly, truly wonderful play. Tonight, it's Almighty Voice and His Wife at the Riverside Studios. Watch this space.....

The madness of running Festivals

How about this for a day (this is yesterday)?

6.30am. Check email and send a few. Run for the train.
8am. Meet Nancy, Terry and Owen to discuss marketing and PR strategies in the last week before the Festival. An hour's discussion over intense coffee.
9am. Back up to the Wood Green office. Lots of emails and phone calls. Includes important stuff on Press coverage etc.
11am. Hardial Rai pops in for an hour to discuss the funding application he's doing for us. It's due in Brussels on Friday. I contact several people for information on it!
12 noon. Buy lunch ot east on the tube.
2pm. Arrive at Heathrow. Been texting for much of the journey (whenever the train's above ground!). Run out of credit on my phone. Discover Terminal 1 has no banks.
2.30pm. Cup of tea. The plane is late. I work a bit on my speech for the Opening Event.
3pm. James Ashcroft, of Taki Rua, appears. I ask him if he feels jet-lagged, New Zealand being quite a way. He says he's been working so hard that it just feels normal. I say that sounds familiar.
4pm. Leave James at the hotel. Very relieved that it's so close to the tube, and seems very comfortable.
5pm. Run into the BFI to check email en route to next appointment. It includes proofs of press ads and posters. Dash my comments back. There's also a very interesting email from the Australian High Commission about some Elders who are coming to repatriate some remains. Talk to Nancy about the relationship between this and Dark Science.... while running for the train.
6pm. At Resonance FM to be interviewed for their On the Fringe programme.
7pm. Another quick glance at email. The press ads need to be signed off before the end of the day. There are still a couple of things wrong.
7.30pm. Spot Time Out on the way home. Nice stuff on the Festival.
8.30pm. Back home. More bloody email..... Collapse.
And now it's the next day...

Pete Postlethwaite

We've found an Elder of the British Theatre to welcome the artists to London at the start of Origins: Pete Postlethwaite. He's an ideal choice, really - very clearly indigenous to England, and very much in the mould of the Aboriginal "uncle". In fact, he tells me when I phone him to talk it through, Pete was given the title "uncle" when he did something similar to welcome some Australian Aboriginal performers to LIFT last summer. Great that he's already got some sense of what this task is. That's probably why he said "yes" so quickly to what is, after all, rather a strange request!

First Nations people set a very high store by ceremony and protocol. That's probably why their performances are so wonderful - they are used to performing their lives on a daily basis. They would find it very odd not to be given a ritualised greeting on their arrival here; just as Chinese people believe in taking you to restaurants, and Indian people invite you into their homes. For the First Nations, the key thing is that an Elder shows you their hospitality.

It's reassuring that Pete - who is, after all, not THAT old - has no objections to being regarded as "an Elder", but embraces the idea very warmly. "Uncle", he tells me, "is not a title that they bestow lightly". And I can hear him glowing slightly with a tinge of pride.

The Olympic Inspire Mark

After months of negotiation, we've finally heard today that Origins is now part of the Cultural Olympiad. Just in time to get the mark on the brochures before we send them out. We're still trying to find out if we can use the mark on the programme, given that we will sell those... and a few things like that - but it's a very useful move forward, and an endorsement of the whole idea.

Only three weeks to go....

Bain Stewart and Leah Purcell

A very productive hour with Bain Stewart. I last saw him in Brisbane in 2007, when I went to the Dreaming. Now he's in London, because his partner, Leah Purcell, is rehearsing When the Rain Stops Falling at the Almeida. Apparently the idea had been to do this Australian play with an English cast, until Michael Attenborough saw Leah performing, and decided she had to come. Given that it's not a case of finding an indigenous Australian to play an indigenous role (Leah plays a white character), that's quite a compliment. And well deserved - she's an amazing performer.

She is also the director of Black Chicks Talking, which we are screening at Origins. Sadly, the screening clashes with a matinee for her, so she can't be there - but Bain, who produced the film, will come and introduce it. And it looks like Leah can be part of our panel on identity - which is a key theme in her film. Bain tells me that the film got really interesting reactions in the US, where there was a very diverse audience. He points out how the questions it raises about ethnic and cultural identity have become some acute in America that people have specific quotas of blood which allow them to claim a native identity. But, he says, that's imposed by the white government - it's not how native people feel. This is one of the central concerns of Mohawk Girls, which I've programmed to screen straight after Black Chicks Talking. He's going to stay on and watch it!

Ghosted

I spent the afternoon at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, watching a German-Taiwanese co-production called Ghosted. The publicity had given me the sense that this might have overlaps with some of what we’re doing with The Trilogy - I wasn’t wrong!

Ghosted is about a lesbian affair between a German video artist and a young Taiwanese woman. There’s a lot of exploration of cultural difference - particularly around the importance of family in Chinese culture. Ai-Ling is in Germany to try and discover whether her uncle is really her father. Sophie feels that "where you come from" is less important than "where you are right now". When Ai-Ling’s mother phones her every day, Sophie is very dismissive. She rarely speaks to her parents because "we haven’t got much to talk about." "And you think that’s a good thing?" asks Ai-Ling.

There’s a death too - and the film even ends with a Chinese mourning ritual… Where Ghosted is very different from the Trilogy, however, is in its treatment of the ghosts themselves. In this film, the dead character is manifested as another "real" person, tracking the survivor. I guess this is to do with the physical literalism of film as a form - you can’t make ghosts manifest with the same poetic truth that theatre allows.

I’m not bothered by the similarities. It’s just interesting to know that these things are in the air.

www.originsfestival.com

In case you hadn't guessed from the title, I'd like you to look at the website for the Festival, which the amazing Sam from Phuture Design has created (he's also re-designing our whole site as I type this). The site lists everything which is happening during those two weeks in early May, and very exciting it is too! Four plays, twenty-four films, a workshop, lots of panels, a lecture from Alanis Obomsawin and a whole programme of learning and participation. Plus there's going to be a wonderful opening ceremony on May 4th at the Scoop at More London - with Ngati Ranana performing a traditional Maori welcoming, and others responding in their own traditional ways.

If you think all this takes a lot of organising, you're right. I've hardly stopped since I got back from China, to be frank. Just finished the contracts - and realised I'd forgotten the Appendices. Also writing to the tax people to request reductions in line with the overseas performers' allowances, editing the programme, checking the venue brochures.... you name it. Luckily there's a great team working on this with me - Terry Adams on the marketing, Nancy Poole PR and Jon Hare as Production Manager. Plus huge thanks to Paul Glen at Canada House who designed the branding for us. They are all earning their keep! Yesterday I sent out the e-flyer to our mailing list - so it's all up and live now. Exciting times....

Dr. Atomic

Alaknanda, Iona and I went to see the ENO production of John Adams' new opera the other night. Dr. Atomic - about Oppenheimer. When I say new, it actually isn't that new... Peter Sellars was working on the libretto, and John on the music, when we were working together on Nixon in China at ENO several years back. I remember talking to Peter about the research he was doing, and the political context in which the atom bomb was created. The thing which has stuck in my memory from those conversations was the degree to which the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were unrelated to the war against Japan, which was essentially won anyway, and were in fact motivated by Truman's need to demonstrate US supremacy to Stalin. There are hints of this in the opera - we keep hearing about the imminence of Potsdam as Oppenheimer tests the bomb - but it isn't highlighted, and I rather wished it was. The opera is very much about torment and moral angst - but I didn't really get the sense of what the moral dilemma really was: things were so weighted towards the horror of the bomb that you were left wondering why anybody would want to make it in the first place. A stronger sense of the political imperative would have made the drama more powerful.

Which said, it's an incredible piece. The libretto moves between reportage and poetry, with lengthy quotations from Donne, Baudelaire and the Gita. And the music similarly moves between the lyrical and the rhythmical, with an astonishing climactic orchestral passage as the bomb is finally tested.

I don't understand why they didn't get Peter to direct it - which I had thought had been the plan. The production feels very lame to me - there's very little sense of how to use stage space. The director's background is TV, and, while she did a very good TV version of The Death of Klinghoffer, this lacked focus. But the music was so fantastic that I didn't really mind!

In praise of Oliver Fryer

After no less than 14 years on the board of the company, Oliver Fryer finally resigned at our board meeting on Thursday night. It will take a few days to sort out the formalities - but it feels a bit like the end of an era! Now only Peter Scott and I are left from those original meetings, all that time ago!

Still, it feels like he's leaving on a high - and it's not for any negative reason. In fact, it really is to spend more time with his wife and family. Yes, honestly, it is.

The board of a charitable company is a strange thing. Officially it has all the power. In practice, as unpaid trustees, its members are involved with the company as volunteers, and so don't do much of the hands-on work. But this group of people is really valuable, as much as anything for expertise and advice. Oliver's been our legal presence - and he's said that he'll carry on giving us legal thoughts, so in many ways we aren't losing him. But it's good to have the chance to say how great he's been over a very long time!

Origins and Eonnagata

Madly busy ever since I got back - almost entirely with the logistics of Origins. We now have a programme, and the core items of it are on the website: www.originsfestival.com. At the moment it's a temporary version, pending the beautiful new site designed by Sam, but at least the word is out! It's a huge undertaking - but today the burden was eased a bit by taking on a really exciting new Production Manager, called Jon Hare. I think he's going to be a god-send.

China already seems a long time ago. Penny and I started following up with the Chinese companies today: Penny's carefully building the next stages of the project.

On Friday, I went to Sadler's Wells to see the new Lepage piece, Eonnagata, made in collaboration with Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant. I must admit, I was a bit scared when I heard Robert was making a piece which drew off an Asian tradition of cross-gender performance, and which involved dancers.... I was worried that I'd have nothing left to do! Luckily, the two shows could not be more different. Eonnagata is much more a dance piece than The Orientations Trilogy: in fact, the story is limited to a few bare facts about the life of the Chevalier d'Eon - little more than you get from the one-page programme note. The real joy of the show is purely visual, with an incredible lighting design by Michael Hulls. When I tell her about it, Nisha says that Robert seems less and less of a theatre-maker these days, more of an installation artist. I think she has a point.

Creativity in China

Friday was the last day of the workshop, and we gave a presentation of work-in-progress for the SDAC management, the Festival, and other interested parties like the Swedish cultural representative in Shanghai. I found it all a bit nerve-wracking and strange: the whole point of this time had been to avoid the pressure of performance, and suddenly here we were, not only performing, but knowing that our work was very much being assessed as a result. I tried to be as clear as I could about the state of the work – explaining that there was no script yet, that the actors were still improvising and experimenting, that the movement work was about ideas rather than finish, that there were holes all over the stories, that was they were seeing was only one version of what might happen. I was also very aware that this whole way of working was very new, even to this most avant-garde of Chinese theatres, and that the audience may just not get what I was trying to say.

So – it was a huge relief when the first sequence we showed (Denise and Micha’s choreography about the tsunami) earned a round of applause from the little crowd, and when Qi and Mia’s comedy of misunderstanding started to draw laughter. Hui and Jue also started getting laughs – and not just for lines in Chinese. And, at the end, Nick Yu stood up and said how moving a lot of the presentation had been. He then handed over to the Artistic Director of SDAC: Lu Liang. I’d been wondering for some time who really was in charge. Nick has always seemed to make the artistic decisions when I’ve been around, but I knew he didn’t have total power. For a while, I had thought that a woman director who had sat in on a number of our sessions, and given some very useful suggestions, might be the artistic director (she said she was “an artistic director here”). But no – Lu Liang is a charismatic, middle-aged man, who (I’m now told) is very famous as both an actor and director in China. He says a few apparently non-committal words about new work processes, and disappears. Otherwise the feedback is very good: Forrinna Chen from the Festival is full of enthusiasm, and the editor of a Chinese theatre magazine asks for articles about the work from both the choreographers and myself.

In the evening, Director Lu reappears next to me at dinner. Another banquet, this time hosted by SDAC for everybody who has worked with us these last three weeks. This time, he is much more forthcoming: he says that he and Nick have talked, and that, subject to “the approval of the arts board” (whatever that may be) they are keen to present the production. A huge relief to me. I “gam bei” with him in rice wine, and (via Ling) we discuss devising processes, the state of Chinese theatre, and the interesting writers at work today. It feels like the sort of event where I should make a speech of thanks, so I stand up and say some rather formal things about the value of cultural exchanges and the importance of art in envisioning the future of the planet. Director Lu’s answer is jokey and fun: he says that I clearly know what the Communist Party would expect me to say. He’s quite right that this is the sub-text of the speech (although I also believe it!) – but it’s very striking that he should say so. We also joke about calling one another “comrades”: in contemporary China, the word for “comrade” – tongzhi – has been appropriated by the emerging gay movement. It’s all very unexpected, and very liberating.

Saturday sees me on the train to Ningbo, to make another visit to the strange outpost of Nottingham University there, and my old friend Roshni Mooneeram. Roshni has advertised a workshop with me around the campus. We’d expected we might get about twenty people who were interested to explore creativity… in fact, about 150 students show up on a wet, cold Saturday afternoon. I have to get them to push their desks back to the walls, and get them moving around. To begin with, it’s incredibly difficult: the level of inhibition is quite formidable. But slowly, through little play-making exercises, we start to find some real emotional truth. Scenes emerge about students chatting up or dumping one another, about tourists looking at China, about businessmen re-developing rural areas, about decadent Western behaviour – there’s even a scene about a pick-up in a gay bar. The students, who were silent at the start of the workshop, are laughing and clapping wildly by the end, full of joy at the creativity of their contemporaries. It’s fascinating and remarkable – they are clearly totally unused to seeing their lives re-created accurately like this, particularly by people who they know.

At the end of the session, as Roshni is telling me that she’s seeing many of her students in a totally new light, one of them shyly sidles up to us. She’s been one of the most enthusiastic participants – but now she seems to have reverted to an earnest girl in glasses. “Excuse me”, she says. “I have a question. What is the point of this?”

Jin Xing

Jin Xing, the famous dancer, came to visit our workshop today. I'd wanted to set up a link between her and this project ever since I met her in Hong Kong a couple of years ago, and read her book last year. In England, the book is called Shanghai Tango - which is not a very good title, and is not her own. Jin Xing wanted to call the book Halfdream - which is also the name of one of her pieces, and comes far closer to echoing her life. But the publishers and the marketing men won the day.

Apart from being China's greatest contemporary dancer, and the founder of the only private dance company and the only private festival in the country, Jin Xing is also famous for having changed sex. Born in a male body, she rose to the rank of colonel in the Chinese army (admittedly in the dance troupe), and was astonishingly tenacious in her campaign for gender reassignment surgery. As you'd expect of so determined a person, she is outspoken and enjoyably forthright in her views on Chinese and Western cultures; theatre, dance and politics; gender and sexuality. Her presence alone is a huge help to the actors who will be playing gender-ambiguous characters - it's wonderful to watch Qi as he studies her way of moving, the way she holds her body, her energy.

In Jin Xing's opinion (and mine), Chinese culture has traditionally been very open in its view of human sexuality. It is only since Western influences arrived that anyone has disapproved of sexual practices outside the mainstream. She says that there were often lesbian couples in China who lived together and loved one another, but who did not necessarily express their love in a sexual way. This idea develops further some of what Hui was suggesting in the workshop as a possible development of the Song-Alex relationship: we could think about the tendency of the West to sexualise emotions and to make the relationship with the lover primary - as opposed to the Chinese privileging of emotion over sexuality and family / community above personal fulfilment. Not quite sure how to do this in performance, but it's an exciting way forward.

Meanwhile, we develop the play's cacophony of voices. There are some very beautiful sequences, especially in visual terms. The text is still a long way off, but that's to be expected. With work of this kind, the writing comes at the end.

Many Cultural Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

Zhang Ruihong

Ruihong came in to the workshop today. She was around for the last part of the afternoon, when we were sharing the results of the day's work. Some interesting material from the Indian storylines in particular, with a bond being found between Marie and the fisherman. We've also been looking at night journeys in the Chinese story - but that remains bogged down in the representational. I need to find ways of breaking out of this. It's constantly proving tricky to get people to perform the dream world of the play. In Dis-Orientations, this was easier, because Ruihong and the Yueju provided an alternative reality - we did not have to invent one. I feel the key this time may be the Nack and Swedish folk myth - but I've not yet made the links work in practice.

Ruihong has said that we will go for dinner - what I didn't realise was that "we" would mean the entire company, in the VIP suite of one of Shanghai's most exclusive restaurants, and that she would pre-order the meal with incredible care and pay for the entire party. She is quite unbelievably generous and very charming. My already huge admiration for her grows again....

Bullfrog, Tortoise, Jellyfish and Snails

Those are just four of the things I've eaten since being in China. Most of them down to a banquet-like event last night with Zhao Zhigang, the Vice-President of the Yue Opera Company, and, that rare phenomenon, a male Yueju performer. I remember him coming to London a few years back, as part of the In Gesture and Glance season at the Place, when I was just beginning to research this Trilogy. He tells me that it felt a bit odd that he, a man, was being asked to represent the traditionally all-female form, and that he needed to do it as if he were a female xiaosheng performer. All very confusing! The reason for meeting him is to talk through our relationship with the Yue company - Haili has suggested I have a talk with him before meeting the really senior people, since he is very frank. It's helpful to have his advice on strategies and his cautions.

Meanwhile, the workshop moves on very creatively. We had a bit of a dip in the middle of the day, when the room got insanely cold, and we were working on more textual ideas. But there is some terrific stuff emerging. Of our Chinese actors, Qi Bai Xue is beginning to develop the character of Sammy from Dis-Orientations in really endearing and inspiring new directions; and Song Ru Hui is (appropriately enough) taking on Song, and allowing her to become more mature, as she should in her grief and loss. Wang Jue is making a new character, Sammy's sister, and is finding a really strong story around her husband deciding they have to abandon their baby. The husband is being played by Wen Xiao Wei, who is a very physical performer. Today, he and Huang Chen found a wonderful way into a scene of ritualised mourning - beginning as two young lads in a bar telling Julian about rituals, laughing and joking at it perceived old-fashioned absurdity, they slowly began to be taken over by the power of the thing. It's amazingly moving. The scene grows to take in other people - as have most of the really strong pieces in the play so far. It's the simultaneous telling of multiple stories that will make this work really well.

Great to be surrounded by a larger directorial team: Mahesh, Denise, Micha and Ling are all invaluable to me. I wonder how I ever managed devised pieces on my own. Well - maybe I didn't!

And by the way - tortoise is cooked in the shell, which is then smashed. It tastes a bit like runny lamb. Not unpleasant once you get used to it.

Too many words

A fascinating day's devising. I feel I have to find strategies to limit the actors' recourse to words. Even though we are working across languages, it's still very easy to slip into chit-chat in the course of improvisation, rather than initiating actions. I've got a few thoughts about how to do this tomorrow.

I was very struck by the fact that probably the strongest scene today - perhaps the strongest so far - was one with very few words indeed. It's on a plane, with lots of slightly strange characters surrounding PK as she travels from China to India. I built it up slowly, using individual innovations from the cast, and then putting them together. The kind of specifics which work like this places on the improvisation seem to induce much more creativity than vague "a scene about this" direction. I have to learn to trust madness more.

A very strong discussion with the Chinese actors about aspects of the play's potential content. I'm made very aware that it's unusual for them to see both sides of an issue presented in theatre. Here, theatre often makes a very clear moral case, rather than exploring a conflict. We discuss the fact that Chinese culture, since ancient times, has had a concept of collective guilt - so if one Chinese person appears to be bad (in whatever way) on stage, the rest may feel this by implication. Mahesh also points out that we're in danger of conforming to the old paradigm of the Western world looking at Asia, and Asia presenting itself for view. We try to challenge both of these things - but it proves quite difficult to do. The stereotypes seem to be very ingrained in our subconscious minds - we have to jolt them into new perspectives.

Chinese viewpoints

One aspect of play 3 which has really interested me as it develops is the focus on children. I suppose it's because Alex - Julian and Marie's daughter - dies in play 2, so there's an inevitable concern with parent-child relationships. And perhaps it all reflects on my own subconscious too - the fact that my children are greater and greater presences in my life and my mind as they grow up and acquire personality. It seems strange for a sequence of plays which so far has placed so much emphasis on same-sex relationships to talk so much about parenting - but the third play is spinning off from the other two with a centrifugal force that makes it wider in its focus. For one thing, it is now set in both China and India - and it may also take in England and Sweden too. I'm resisting all temptations to lead it towards closure, and particularly trying to avoid any neat coincidences.

Thinking about children made us wonder about the single-child policy here in China. I asked the two Chinese female actors, Song Ru Hui and Wang Jue, to improvise a scene in which a young mother gives up her child for adoption, and they dutifully did so. It was rather good - cold and bureaucratic. Then Hui said, through our interpreter Ling, that this was not a realistic scene for China. Why not? Because in China, you cannot give up a child to be adopted - the only adopted children are orphans. But that can't be true - I argued - because there are so many children from China adopted into western families, and they are all girls. That, it turns out, is because these are children who have been abandoned. I ask Jue to improvise a solo scene of a young mother leaving her baby girl by the road-side. She does - it's incredibly distressing.

Tony Guilfoyle and I ask Ling to make it clear to the Chinese actors that this is not a case of us having a go at their culture - we are genuinely curious about their world, and we want to know how it works and how we can relate to it. We ask whether we will be able to show a scene like this in China. "Of course!" comes the reply. According to these actors, there is a genuine desire here for theatre which tackles cultural and social questions head-on: in marked contrast to our western view of a heavily censored state. They become, not for the first time this week, very animated and inspired - telling us about different social initiatives around orphans, gender questions, HIV prevention.... In just a few days, they have really taken on board the extent to which, as actors devising this work, they have an authorial power and responsibility within it.

Exciting times!

The day off is Saturday - because it's Valentine's Day and our room is in use for a bash. Funny how the fate of an obscure Roman saint now dominates global romantic partying. We take advantage of it, and hit town on a Friday night, combining research and relaxation. Nancy, Tori, Mia and I find a horribly deserted girlie bar on Julu Lu, with perky young women trying way too hard to interest the few sultry men. Not exactly the image of the Whore of the Orient which Shanghai used to have - although I'm assured by the Chinese male actors that there are lap-dancing joints and strip-clubs all over the city, if you know where to look. We move on to a heaving, slightly posh joint, where there are loads of well-heeled ex-pats and glum-looking Chinese women in glamorous frocks. There are one or two transvestites too.....

Into rhythm

Day 4 of the workshop has ended, and we've established a working rhythm. Each day begins with movement work, led by Denise and Micha. Some of this is experiment and training, some of it is more focused towards potential use in the production(s). Then I will either lead an improvisation exercise for all of us, or (more often) divide the group up to work on distinct areas. Having several directorial types in the workshop makes this a lot simpler. While I work on one section of the piece, Mahesh applies his dramaturgical and directorial skills to another. Today, Denise and Micha were working with a third group. Yesterday, the split was a bit different - some actors worked alone, while Denise was with Mahesh and Micha with me. It seems important to keep rotating who works with whom, although I suspect that Mahesh may naturally acquire more responsibility for Indian storylines, while I work more specifically on Shanghai-based stories. This task has been made a lot easier by the arrival of Huang Ling from Guangzhou. Ling trained as a director in Beijing, and was more recently at Goldsmith's in London, where she met Penny. She's been interested in the project all along - so now it's great to have her in the room, where she can translate and assist to great effect.

Day 2

A more fruitful and exciting day. It's proving very valuable to begin the day with Denise and Micha's work - anchoring the performers in the physical, the musical and the rhythmic, and avoiding language barriers. After that, I worked with them on the idea of re-orientation, getting everybody to relate personal stories about life-changes, and then using these as the basis for improvisation and creativity. Some extraordinary things emerge: the story of a Chinese baby girl born with a deformed foot, whose father rejected both her and her mother - how could she give birth to a child who was both female and disabled? The story of a young man who came out to his parents, and then had to explain to them that he had fallen in love with a woman. The story of an actor suddenly walking offstage in performance - just realising he couldn't do it any more. This last becomes the basis for a really strong scene with the Swedish actors - a performance of Miss Julie which goes very wrong!

We watch the second play on DVD in the afternoon. Dis-Orientations is a much stronger piece than the first play. I think I'd always known this, but not realised quite to what degree. We are all in agreement that play 1 needs re-working substantially, with the confidence and boldness of play 2. Play 2 also has its problems, but they are more readily solved, especially with the Chinese performers in the room. It's still tricky to understand what they are saying, but they have become far more engaged and active. And - very pleasingly - they are arguing between themselves and finding new ideas. I think I need to exploit this, and find ways of building a more authentically Chinese voice into the piece.

The one undoubtedly Chinese voice there so far - Zhang Ruihong - is sadly missed. I just hope we'll be able to contact her soon. Ling / Elaine has now arrived in Shanghai, and will start assisting me from tomorrow. So I should be able to get some phone calls made soon.

The workshop begins

First day workshopping. As usual, I'm terribly nervous before we start, and feel fine once we get underway. We have five Chinese actors in the room: a lady in her forties called Song Ru Hui, a young girl called Wang Jue, and three young men: Wen Xiao Wei, Huang Chen and Qi Bai Xue. Only Xiao Wei has any real fluency in English, which means that they have a tough time watching Orientations on video - but we have to go through this just so we know the basic resources for the work we are doing. Faced with the image of homosexuality on stage in the play, they are more disturbed than they were by simply talking about it being present in the work at the audition. I find myself protesting over-loudly when one of them says that it simply isn't present in traditional Chinese culture. There's clearly a lot of discussion we have to have here.... On the other hand, Ru Hui has worked with Jin Xing, and does a very interesting improvisation around her sex change. Micha and Denise are brilliant in the morning session - finding ways of getting everybody to move like dancers, and at the same time bringing out the cultural differences really clearly. This is why I wanted them on the project - they are incredibly good at facilitating people's movement, in the same way I am trying to facilitate their creativity and acting.

Dinner with Mahesh - like old times. He is, as so often, a veritable litmus paper. Hold him up to something and watch the colour change - he can always tell you what works and what doesn't. He points out several key areas where the first play can grow and develop - either internally or into the third play. He's interested in Linda's relationship with A before the play begins: of course - if we don't see that then we don't know why she would go to such lengths to find him (her). And this will also make more sense of her developing sense of her own orientation. Tori, drawing off her Indian experiences, is also making some mileage here. Mahesh wonders if play 3 should not be set in London - but I rather resist that. I don't want it to feel as if people "come home". It's more intriguing if we set it in lots of places - if this last piece is about opening up the breadth of potential contemporary experience.

I'm glad to say, he goes with me on that one.

Arrival in China

A very exciting time for the company. After many, many months of planning, we are gathering in Shanghai to start work Re-Orientations, the third, and most ambitious, part of The Orientations Trilogy. I arrived yesterday, and have spent most of today working with actors from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, looking for the last few people to complete the devising company. It's quite a complex job: I'd forgotten just how difficult it is to work through a translator. Metaphor and energy - the stock-in-trade of direction, become diffuse and elusive. Many of the Chinese actors I saw today were very young: I wondered whether they really had the level of experience needed to devise. Towards the end of the day, a more mature, very intelligent and very charming lady came in to the room. She has performed in lots of modern work, including Pinter's The Lover, which is the right sort of territory, but I think she may have been scared by the idea of devising, and definitely (no surprise here) by the idea of playing somebody in a lesbian relationship. The central tension of this whole project has always been and will always be that these Asian cultures, that are so rich in their responses to the complexity of human sexuality, are also the ones which are most prudish today. Still - this is the theatre where Nick Yu planned to stage Angels in America, so we can't be on completely impossible ground!

Today, the rest of the company assembled from around the world! Nancy, Tony and Tori - all old hands from Dis-Orientations - arrived from England, along with Sarah Swingler, who is new to the project. Radhakrishna, who started all of this with me in 2003 (!) on Orientations arrives from Bangalore, and Mahesh Dattani, my mentor and guru in Asia and gender and author of Bravely Fought the Queen, from Mumbai. Mia and Mikhael are here from Teater Eksem in Gothenborg, and so are Denise and Micha from a fleur de peau in Paris. We all go out to dinner in the restaurant next to the Yue Opera, where Ruihong took me a year or so ago. Sadly, Ruihong has been in hospital, and so is not well enough to join us. I'm hoping I can get in touch with her soon, and see if she might be able to come in and work with us a bit. It did feel very much as if she was our missing centre tonight. But still - what an incredible group of people to have gathered around the Border Crossings table.

And, I have to say, Penny Mayes has done an incredible job of organising this!

Snowed Under

I'm sitting at the PC and able to write this because it's proved impossible to get to Sidcup today for the Dress Rehearsal of The Good Soul of Szechuan. In fact, nobody could get there - the snow lay so heavily across London (and still does). They've postponed till tomorrow - but I rather suspect the same thing may happen again. If so, then the poor students will be several days away from having run the play, and minus their director - since I'm due to fly out to Shanghai in a couple of days. The idea had been that this would be after the opening - now maybe it won't be. The positive way of looking at this is that it's a great opportunity for the student assistant directors - the negative way is that my schedule will be letting them all down rather badly. I know it's daft to feel guilty about the unavoidable, but I suspect it's a human characteristic.

For example - I feel very guilty that we've had to remove Ngapartji Ngapartji from the Origins programme. It's not my fault at all - we just didn't get the support we needed from the private sector. But I know how many people were disappointed by a decision I had to make. Still, we are managing to get a lot to happen - with Soho coming back into the picture, and various venues for films. I seem to spend every second when I'm not in rehearsals doing this Festival - no doubt the same thing will go on when I'm in China. I'm a bit worried by this - the workshop for the Trilogy is so important creatively, and I have to give it 100% attention. Still - it's a different bit of the brain. I've noticed while doing the Brecht that I've been tired from all the admin - but not tired at all when in rehearsals. And focused.

It's actually been a very helpful process in terms of preparing me for the workshop. Partly because the piece is set in China, and deals with economic inequalities. But deeper resonances were set off at the Barbican on Saturday by Complicite's new piece Shun-kin. It's Japanese, of course, rather than Chinese or Indian. But, like our work, it deals with complex sexual identities in an Asian context. In the programme, Simon McBurney speculates that "Such 'perversions' do not carry the same stigma in Japan. 'Kinky' relationships are allowed to unfold, at least in Tanizaki's texts, with none of the same anxious guilt we in the West might have about such things." I'm not sure whether this is true of contemporary China or India - although historically the cultures were very tolerant. But I do find the play's approach to narrative, distancing and ambiguity extremely useful. Simon uses Asian theatricality as a way of implying a shifting, unreliable narrative. That could be very helpful for us - I think Part 3 of the Trilogy has to resist the desire to resolve everything. In relationships, there are no final resolutions.

Manic Michael meets Bertolt Brecht

Maybe it's just that it's January and it feels this way - but I don't think I've ever been busier. Much of it is good stuff, I'm please to say - not least the news that the Arts Council has agreed to fund the Origins festival. For which, watch the web... we're also getting our website re-designed, with the Festival as the first micro-site in the new form.

Origins is going to be an exciting new departure for us, hosting a selection of companies, performances and films from First Nations. Of course - just which companies remains balanced on a knife-edge: only this week I've been constantly on the phone to Australia at 8.30 every morning, trying to see if we can count on sponsorship for a particular group (who at this stage had better be nameless). And, over the weekend, a theatre which I had thought was out of the picture has come back in again... so the negotiations go on and on. It's Sunday, and I've already done three different festival budgets today. Bananas.

Meanwhile, with the help of Rosanna Raymond, I also make contact with the wonderful Maori community organisation here, Ngati Ranana. On Wednesday night, I was at their monthly meeting in New Zealand House. I was welcomed in the traditional way, with calls, songs, dances, speeches in Maori, and food. By the end of it, I felt very welcome indeed! I told them this, and said that we would like to be able to welcome the artists in the same way - they seem very keen to take on our Opening Ceremony.

All of this mania is partly to do with knowing that I'm off to Shanghai in a couple of weeks to start developing the final part of the Trilogy. Very excited about this! The dream cast is assembled - including none other than Mahesh Dattani, who in many ways was the inspiration for the whole thing in the first place. The only concern is that Zhang Ruihong has been ill - in hospital, actually - and so won't be able to take the active part we'd wanted. But she says she'll come in and chat at the least. I exchange emails with Jin Xing, who has agreed to come in and see us for an afternoon and a dinner. Fantastic....

Meanwhile - because it's January and it was offered - I'm also directing a show at Rose Bruford. It opens two days before I fly. Mad or what? These days Nisha has the car for the school run, so I use trains to get from Enfield to Sidcup. It means I use the phone and the laptop like a lunatic from 8.30 to 10 and from 7 to 8.30.....

The show is my first stab at Brecht: "The Good Soul of Szechuan". A Chinese setting - of sorts! I'm finding it fascinating to work on, as well as vast and difficult. Much enjoying the opportunity to work extensively with masks, and to mix up a variety of theatre styles as I experiment with the students. As usual, they are teaching me a vast amount. In the second week, we did a morning of research presentations around themes to do with poverty, the credit crunch, drugs, and modern China. What was fascinating and exhilarating was the deep sense of injustice in the room. As the process has gone on, the student actors have been talking more and more about this play causing them to re-assess their own lives and career choices: what being a performer means, what it is for, what social and moral responsibilities it carries. We decide to use the Epilogue, and work to find a way in which it can shock the audience to political action. Even in a drama school.

Digital developments

This blog has been immortalised....

Or, to put it more simply, the entries I did on my research trip to Ghana in 2006 have now been edited and published in African Theatre 7: Companies. James, who has done the editing, has also put in a few extra notes about the Dilemma production, and some photos. He's also talked in his Introduction about Dzifa staying on, her Arts Council fellowship, and the background in Ghana. The great thing about this is that it means our work is reaching a wider audience than those who come to the shows. Of course, the blog and the website are part of this - and this book will get a wide academic distribution, particularly in Africa, where much theatre is based within university campuses.

Owen and I meet up to talk about ways of developing the company in this respect. We've been feeling for a while that the website is looking a bit out of date. It's interesting that James references the blog several times in the book, but not the site. We need to make it more interactive, and more current in its use of blogs, networking and videos. What we really need to do is to open up the digital presence of the company, so that the people who are following what we are doing can begin to link up with each other, and to create their own online community.

So - watch this space.

The Old School

Over the New Year break, I read Peter Gill's new book Apprenticeship. I knew it was about the rehearsals for Bill Gaskill's famous production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and since I start rehearsals for another Brecht - The Good Soul of Szechuan - tomorrow (yipe...) at Rose Bruford, I thought it might be a good "way in". I'd read about the production before - in fact, it was reading about Gaskill's rehearsals that first got me interested in Brechtian theatre, way back in my teens. But I hadn't realised that even then the production was some way distant historically - it was as long ago as 1962.

I rather liked reading Gill's account in the knowledge that he was looking back across a time-span longer than I've been alive. For one thing, it allows the book to avoid the Equity factor which is always a problem when actors and directors write about their work. Gill is at the end of his career, and doesn't have to worry about who he offends. As a result, he gives a very lucid account of what Gaskill tried to do, what he in fact did, and how the institutional and cultural apparatus all around him proved so very tricky. As somebody who has worked in large institutions, I appreciated the last point! The great joy of Border Crossings is that there is no juggernaut of a theatre machine dictating how things should and should not be done. Of course, this is also its biggest problem - so much has to be done by so few people - but we would never have one director coming in to "sort out" another's production.... and that was what happened to Bill Gaskill.

So - tomorrow I start my first ever Brecht production.....

And a Happy New Year....

Just before Christmas, Penny, Seema and I drove up to Manchester for lunch with Chris Honer and his General Manager Adrian at the Library Theatre. It's a lovely, very comforting space, in the basement of the magnificent City Library. Chris has been very excited by the DVDs of the Trilogy so far, and wants to co-produce the whole thing in early 2010. This means that the trajectory of 2009 is mapped out in terms of preparing it: we workshop in Shanghai in February, followed by a period of dramaturgy with Brian; then we do the first version of Re-Orientations as a work-in-progress presentation at Goldsmiths in the summer, prior to getting the whole thing ready for 2010. I think that's a good way to time it - we can think a lot and not panic too much.

Christmas took me all over the place, including to Aberystwyth, where I managed to squeeze in a swift and fascinating meeting with Jeremy Turner, who runs Arad Goch there. With all my work on First Nations theatre and languages, it's as well to remember there are people doing indigenous theatre right here in Britain, and fighting the corner for minority languages. Jeremy will be in rehearsals when Origins happens in May - but is keen to come down for the middle weekend, and to talk on a panel about theatre and the survival of minority / indigenous languages and cultures.

The Guardian was nice enough to print my books of the year on Saturday, so I won't repeat them here! But it's been an exciting year for watching theatre and film too, especially at the wonderful Barbican, where I saw the amazingly contemporary German Hedda, the justly famous Black Watch, and Yael Farber's brilliant South African re-working of the Oresteia in the light of the truth and Reconciliation Commission, Molora. Elsewhere, I loved Yours Abundantly from Zimbabwe at the Oval House for its directness and its honesty, and That Night Follows Day at the Gothenborg Festival, for the same reasons. In film, I've had a great year watching First Nations films which we'll be screening in Origins in a few months: especially Tkaronto, The Waimate Conspiracy and Kanehsatake – 270 years of Resistance. Elsewhere, I loved Garin Nugruho's Under the Tree - which was also very valuable for the Trilogy!

See you in 2009.

Hamlet without the Prince

Some time ago, Nisha booked for us to see the RSC Hamlet in the West End, knowing it starred David Tennant, who manages to be a very fine actor as well as being a star. In case anybody doesn't know, he's put his back out, and Edward Bennet, who was playing Laertes, has moved up to the title role. It does seem a bit odd to see a comparative unknown playing the title role in what is clearly a star vehicle - Patrick Stewart, Penny Downie, Oliver Ford Davies..... but it's also rather nice to see an actor playing the part who is not at all showy and doesn't have a known persona to fill or undermine. In fact, he's very good.

During the first half, we were sitting miles away. The production seemed to be about the mirrored set, the sound system and Penny Downie's enormous dress. In the second half, because lots of Dr. Who fans hadn't bothered to turn up, we moved down to the stalls, from where it was a different play. The tourist theatre element vanished - and it became almost entirely about psychology, and was very beautifully acted. I'm not sure I like Gregory Doran's direction much: he's concentrated on the family play, and lost any sense of a radical edge in the process, so it feels very safe. Fortinbras is reduced to a token entrance - all his lines in the final scene are cut. And the "court" simply stand around and watch as the protagonists interact. But that's true of much RSC work these days - it's lost any social dimension.

Speaking in the House

Thanks to the help of the Quebec government and a friendly MP called Philip Davies, we were able to give a lunch in the House of Commons on Thursday, to bring together the various cultural diplomats and others involved with Origins. It was pretty exciting to be able to talk about this in the corridors of power! I made a speech... I tend to talk without many notes, so what's below is a rough approximation rather than the real thing - but I wanted some idea of what was said to be available on the blog, so other people involved in Origins, and especially the artists, can have a look at what we talked about.

"At the end of Shane Belcourt’s extraordinary film Tkaronto, which will be receiving its UK première at the Origins Festival in May, the central character, a First Nations Canadian, refers to a prophecy made in 1885 by the Métis leader Louis Riel: “Riel said our people would be asleep for a hundred years. Well, guess what? Time’s up. I’m done being asleep.”

With the wit characteristic of First Nations people across the globe, these lines are symptomatic of a phenomenon I’ve encountered constantly during my research and programming of the Origins Festival over the last couple of years - an assertion of the present moment as a time when the voices of these profound, rich and ancient cultures need to be heard loudly and clearly in the global space. In part, of course, this is to do with a need to overcome the colonial past and to negotiate ways of jointly inhabiting the lands to which these nations are indigenous, and, more broadly, jointly inhabiting the global space. The 21st century has already seen some incredibly important steps along this path of Truth and Reconciliation - not least Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s ground-breaking apology to the Aboriginal people of Australia for the crime of the Stolen Generation. These steps have been greeted with an extraordinary generosity of spirit: when Prime Minister Rudd made that historic apology earlier this year, the crowd of indigenous people who were watching on huge screens outside the Parliament building in Canberra broke into spontaneous cheering. On one level, the Origins Festival of First Nations Theatre and Culture is about that same desire to heal wounds from the past - and that’s why it’s important that it should happen in this city, which was the centre of colonization, and why it’s so inspiring that today’s event should be held in the Houses of Parliament, demonstrating support for this crucial work right at the heart of the British democracy - so many thanks to you Philip for hosting us today. As you would expect, when I told them we were doing this, the First Nations artists we are working with, and who will be coming to London in May, responded with the online equivalent of that spontaneous cheering.

As you will all be aware, there remains much healing work to be done around the legacy of the past. There remain problems of poverty and deprivation in social, economic and educational terms. There remain issues around drug dependency and alcohol abuse. But by showing respect for these cultures, by validating them as equals in our own space, we can join with them to work together towards their empowerment.

For the sense that the time is ripe to listen to the voices of First Nations people is not only to do with the past; it is also very much about the present and the future. Because First Nations cultures are not museum cultures or anthropological curiosities. They are living, vibrant cultures of the present moment: indeed, in some ways they are more aware of the present, its meaning, its potential, than Western cultures; because they have a deep awareness of standing in an historical continuum, of having occupied a particular space in a particular way with an unbroken heritage spanning some two thousand generations - fifty thousand years. How many of us can claim so powerful a sense of presence, of relationship to space, of identity? And from such a knowledge - which reaches far back, mythologically, spiritually and culturally - comes an ability to look far forward with a sense of the longer term, to imagine and envision the future, to offer new possibilities for this chaotic, globalised world.

If we are honest, which we so rarely are – then surely we must acknowledge that we have not got everything sorted out. The crisis in the world economy hardly suggests a global system that is functioning perfectly. The increasingly frequent environmental disasters, the unrest and crime in our cities, the disaffection of our youth, the disintegration of our families – all of this suggests that perhaps we should be listening to people who think differently about these things. The Hopi nation have a word for our way of living – “Koyanisquatsi” – it means “life out of balance”. They have a word for it, and we don’t. That’s because they have thought about it, and we haven’t.

And so we should have the modesty and the courtesy to listen to the alternatives. There is so much that we can learn from these cultures, if we will only listen to what is being offered. They can teach us about our Elders - because in First Nations societies, the Elders are respected and cherished as the guardians of knowledge, not dismissed as "past it" or removed from the community. In First Nations cultures, people look forward to growing old - in marked contrast to our rather feeble attempts to deny the one thing about our lives which is inevitable. In Ngapartji Ngapartji, elders from the Northern Territory, many of whom have rarely travelled even within Australia, will bring their authority, their wisdom and their dignity to the London stage.

First Nations can teach us about our youth - because in First Nations cultures the energy and strength of the young is channelled into the community through sport, art and cultural ritual, rather than being allowed to turn into disaffection and anger. Several of the films we will be screening, for example Alanis Obomsawin's beautifully photographed Sigwan, and the Oneida nation's animated folktale Raccoon and Crawfish, bring an audience of children into this circle, and so will Robert Greygrass, the Lakota performer appearing in Salvage, who will also be storytelling.

They can teach us about the environment - because these nations feel a deep affinity for land, and have a real understanding of its needs and rhythms. At a time when the mismanagement of the world's resources is leading us into an ecological catastrophe which we are only just beginning to understand, we have an urgent need to listen to people who can offer other approaches to living, which respect, rather than destroy, our fragile planet. Many of the performances, films and talks we are presenting in Origins deal with the environmental agenda: the Inuit viewpoint on the melting of the icecap, the indigenous Australian view of nuclear testing in the deserts, the Native American response to industrial pollution of land and water.

They can teach us about democracy. Because the longest-lasting democratic tradition in the world is not housed in this building, or even in Athens, but in the tribal councils of North America. And unlike our democracies, which can sometimes seem so subject to financial and lobbying interests that they are in danger of themselves being commodified, these councils allow everybody to speak, and rest upon the finding of a true consensus - a consensus in which animals and plants also symbolically participate, with people being called to speak for them.

It is this egalitarian democratic dream which, more than anything, makes this Origins Festival so exciting, so inspiring, so necessary. Because this Festival is a coming together of many people who are working creatively around these issues, assembling from the countries which are represented here today (and others too), allowing them the sense that they are part of something very big and very important, which is a global movement for change. Many of the artists we are working with operate in conditions of quite extreme isolation - Yirra Yaakin is based in Perth, which is one of most isolated cities in the world. But when they come together, and realise that they have so much in common with other people who dare to dream, then we see the strength of the project, then we see the breadth and depth of the vision, as we learn from each other's presence - not online, but physically, vocally and emotionally in the same room - and they can go back to the Perth, back to the Central desert, back to the Great Plains, back to the Manitoulin Island Reserve, back to New Zealand’s South Island, nurtured and strengthened to move forward.

And that is why at the heart of the Festival there is the Quebec theatre company Ondinnok's workshop on the Theatre of Healing: a space which will allow artists to interact on the most intimate level, re-contacting their mythic and cultural roots, and discovering what those may offer, what they may mean in relation to one another, in a global context, in the context of a changing world, in the context of our own generation's responsibility to the planet, to the future, to our children.

It is only in an artistic and a cultural context that we can do this - and that's why it's so empowering to see so many cultural diplomats here today. Because it is only in the cultural space that we can truly meet as equals and have a fair and true exchange. Politically, economically, socially - there is no equality. But in the sacred and democratic space of theatre where everybody has a voice, there it is possible for us to come together with no distinctions, with no inequalities, and to begin.

What Louis Riel actually said in 1885 was: “My people will sleep for one hundred years, when they awake it will be the artists who give them their spirit back”. And for me, that has to be the motto of the Origins Festival.

After two years of work, we are now very close to making this Festival a reality - and this lunch is, in the tradition of First Nations hospitality, an extension of thanks to you all for the energy, goodwill and resources you and the agencies you represent have invested in this project. As you know, we are waiting on a number of funding decisions, both here and overseas, and I should like to thank those bodies in anticipation!

Last but by no means least, I want to thank the only First Nations person who is in the room today - Rosanna Raymond. Rosanna is an artist of Polynesian origin from Aotearoa / New Zealand, and she is working with us and with the small but vociferous Maori community in London to offer a traditional First Nations welcome to the artists when they arrive here in the spring. Those of you who attended the launch of Origins at Australia House last year will remember that we were given a traditional Aboriginal Welcome to Country by David Milroy and Trevor Jamieson. Today, we are very definitely on British land, and it is Philip Davies who has given us the British form of traditional welcome. But I would like to ask Rosanna if she could respond to that welcome in the manner of her culture, and so bring the more formal part of this lunch to a close."

Practice as research

I've spent the last three weeks at Central, working with second year students on the PA course. These are not acting students (although some of them are rather good actors), but people who want to be writers, producers, directors, theatre-makers in new forms. Central, rather sensibly, doesn't offer courses in these specific disciplines, because it thinks students are too young to undertake these roles so specifically. Instead, this course is about opening them up to possibilities.


So, undertaking a residency with them is a great opportunity for Border Crossings and for me. They are flexibly creative, and excited about new ways of doing things. They also don't have anything to prove as performers, and as a result are less likely to be scared of looking stupid. I decided to work on some verbatim material, with a political edge to it. When I mentioned this to Nick Williams, our Arts Council officer, he said "That's a bit of a departure for you, isn't it?". In some ways, I suppose it is. But our work is always related to political realities, and is often fuelled by political energy. And very often the devised material starts from something documentary. If it feels like it's a million miles from what we've usually done, it's because I'd not previously found ways of theatricalising the documentary - I dislike the verbatim cliches of people pretending to be - say - Jack Straw. It makes it all seem too petty.

So I was delighted with this period of experiment, which allowed us to find ways of presenting documentary material without making it feel like a personal dig at anybody, and while endowing it with a vital and telling theatricality. We were able to work with movement and music, combining dance with documentary, as well as with video and agit-prop, with recorded and live voices, even with humour. I'm sure this will re-surface in future devised work. Great to be able to research like this and call it teaching. But the best teaching is learning really, I think.

Quartet: A Journey North

I saw this Iranian production at the Barbican last night. It's the second of their Iranian season I've caught, and much more exciting than last week's rather under-powered Daedalus and Icarus. Quartet: A Journey North is the work of Amir Reza Koohestani and his company Mehr: I really liked his piece Amid the Clouds at the Royal Court a while back. This time, his love of narration and the need to avoid any physical contact between actors for cultural reasons is taken to a new extreme. In the Pit space, the audience is seated on four sides, with one actor at a desk facing each side, narrating very intimately. You can't even see the actor who faces the opposite side, and you get limited views of the two on adjacent sides. However, each actor is facing directly into a video camera, and they have screens above their heads, so you can see the face of the speaker, as well as footage which locates the play in the Iranian landscape. It sounds odd, but in fact it serves to draw you in to an incredibly intense level of performance. Even in Persian. The screens, of course, are the ideal solution to the surtitle problem.

This may depend a bit on where you're sitting. I was facing a performer called Mahin Sadri, who is also the co-author of the piece. It's based on a documentary film she made about an Iranian murderer - so oddly resonant for me at the moment, as I work with Central students on a verbatim piece about a killer. Mahin is an astonishing performer, and the intimacy of the presentation makes her feel very real, very immediate. It's a huge shock when, towards the end, she simply stands up and walks away, while her screen avatar remains talking. You realise that they've switched to pre-recorded footage - but the shift away from the live is so subtle that it reminds you how deeply we care about liveness, and how close our current society is to losing it.

Ngati Ranana

I was invited to a Christmas concert in a Salvation Army hall on Saturday lunchtime. A bit different from my usual fare, you probably think... But this was a concert by an extraordinary community organisation called Ngati Ranana, which is a club for Maori people in London. Amazingly, there were well over 5o of them on stage, singing, dancing, chanting and war-dancing with total commitment and energy. It's very moving to see people from such a markedly minority group working so hard to celebrate their cultural identity from "back home". What's more, this group has been going for a full 50 years. One of their founders was there - an Elder of real dignity. And at the end she got up and danced with the grace of a sixteen year old.

I've often been struck by the way in which performing isn't an issue to people from First Nations cultures - it's so ingrained in the culture that people just do it. This Maori group had absolutely no hint of self-consciousness: even the men in their grass skirts. Fantastic.

Rosanna Raymond and I are plotting to involve this group in the opening ceremonial of Origins. They could welcome the artists to London in a way which makes sense to them as First Nations people, and show a clear link between the city and their homeland. Having seen and heard them, I'm pretty sure this will work like a dream.

The Producer's Travels

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

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

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

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

Cultural Diversity and Internationalism

I was at the Commonwealth HQ last week, for a long and very involved discussion of the 2005 UNESCO convention on Cultural Diversity. It's a very interesting and useful document - partly because it enshrines cultural rights alongside those other rights which are normally considered more basic, and partly because it serves as a manifesto against cultural imperialism and in favour of intercultural dialogue. The meeting was all about trying to give it some force nationally and internationally. Far more Francophone countries have ratified it than Anglophone ones: the usual story, of course. Oddly enough, the UK has ratified it, which means it is the law of the land.... but Valerie Synmoie, who is Head of Diversity for the Arts Council in London was there, and hadn't heard anything about it! The ratification process actually consists of the document sitting in Parliament for a while, and - if no MP objects to it - it just goes through. What, I wonder, is the use of law if nobody actually realises it's there?

Over the weekend, I saw a film called This is Our Country Too at the British Museum. It's part of the BFM Festival - the work of a fantastic young director called Ishmahil Blagrove Jnr., and his group RiceNPeas. Follow the link, and you'll see how close I find this work to our own in its concerns. This is Our Country Too is a documentary about Australian Aboriginals, and is the fullest account of the contemporary position that I've seen. It manages to be both passionate and balanced - you get Kevin Rudd's apology, and you get images of the poverty-stricken communities.

Penny is in China at the moment, setting up the structures for February. Good news today is that Ruihong will be in the workshop then. And, to add to my happy morning, we've also heard that we have US Embassy funding towards Origins.

The Obama Presidency

At last. America seems to have elected a leader of vision, intelligence, honesty and morality; a leader whose personal history can serve to unite, rather than divide, communities within America and across the world; a leader whose very name is a symbol of what the 21^st century has to be about, a symbol of Truth and Reconciliation – Barack Hussein Obama.

Of course, the election of this man is only a beginning. An astonishing pioneering first is not the same thing as a paradigm shift, and the election of a black President will not overturn American racism overnight. He may (perish the thought) be assassinated – there have already been two foiled conspiracies to do this, and it was striking that, on election night itself, the world saw the poignant image of this lean man standing alone between two panes of bullet-proof glass. I know all about the deadly intents of the radical right in the USA, having myself been the subject of death threats for casting a black performer as Juliet. I imagine that the racists would rate that capital crime as less serious than that of being the first black President.

Obama’s campaign against Hillary Clinton was largely focussed on foreign policy, and on his opposition to the Iraq war. I’m sure that this, together with his great charisma and oratorical abilities, was what won him the nomination within a Democratic party, and also won him so much worldwide support. But it’s worth noting that in the campaign against John McCain, Obama shifted his battle-ground significantly, and made comparatively few references to the war or the Middle East. Some of what he did say, particularly about Afghanistan and Pakistan, sounded distinctly hawkish. It may be that the shift in constituency from the Democratic Party to a wider American public led him to alter the emphasis of this policy – so we’ll have to see what actually happens once he takes office.

America, after all, is complex in terms of the role of government. In many ways, it distrusts government, or “state interference”. Bill Clinton, who also had the potential to be a great reforming President, was stymied by the power of the corporations, particularly the vested interests of the drug companies with regard to health policy. On the other hand, Obama arrives at the moment in history when global capitalism is at its weakest point, when the banks have gone cap in hand to the Federal Reserve, and in now in thrall to the state, in what amounts to a socialist model. So perhaps he really can push through a reforming agenda against the might of these amoral giants.

Here’s hoping.