Dramaturgy for devised work

As we get closer to the next stage of workshops on the Trilogy, I’m working closely with Brian Woolland on the dramaturgy of the third play (and a bit on the first two as well). It’s a new departure for us to work with a dramaturg – though Mahesh took on this task in Shanghai, and Brian is taking it up now, so we’re making a pretty heavy commitment to the idea. Dramaturgy is the art of mediation between text, rehearsal, theory and cultural / political context. In some cases, it can involve a significant element of writing. With devised work, I’ve often felt that the visual and theatrical aspects can be much stronger than the dramatic, the storytelling, the key conflicts and changes. By bringing in dramaturgical voices, I’m hoping we can redress the balance a bit.

For an experienced playwright, like Brian or Mahesh, the job probably feels quite strange. They are used to working alone, imagining the characters, setting them goals and actions, working out their decisions and the stakes. Here, the characters, and many of the dramatic situations, or at least their theatrical realisations, already exist. The way of beginning this process with Brian was to present him with the DVDs of our improvisations in Shanghai.

On our first day working together, Brian laid down lots of challenges to me about aspects of the work so far which didn’t make sense, which were under-developed, or which simply weren’t dramatically interesting. This led us to pull together a potential new structure. To begin with, Brian wrote this, with lots of new ideas. We batted it backwards and forwards, with me weaving into his storylines for different sets of characters the material from the workshops which I felt to be particularly strong theatrically. Sometimes this led to some very surprising alterations: some scenes which we had made around particular characters turned out to be about different ones.

Today, we’ve been working through it again, asking how the various events in the stories can be about the characters doing things – and how the decisions to do these things can be made more significant to them – raising the stakes and putting obstacles in the way. This has been hugely productive, and has started to make the different storylines intersect far more. Brian has also written one scene (to give two actors a new starting point), and we’ve picked out two more which we think he’ll probably need to write once they’ve been workshopped some more.

It feels like a very exciting way of working. Breeding devised theatre with what writers do best. Nice to feel a distinctive approach emerging for us.

From our submission to the Commonwealth Group on Culture and Development

We have been invited to submit our ideas to the Commonwealth Group on Culture and Development. Here's an extract from what we sent in:

"In addressing the dialogue between culture and development, it is crucial that the Commonwealth Group should see these arenas as equal partners, rather than regarding one as the medium through which the other can be achieved. All too often, culture for development practice follows the model that culture can be “used” to put across a pre-conceived “message”. More often than not, this “message” is to do with apparently enlightened mainstream / Western values being “better” than those of the indigenous culture. Such practice, while fitting very clearly the specific agendas of many NGOs, for example in relation to AIDS awareness, is neither good culture nor good development. It is essentially propaganda, and perpetuates a neo-colonial mode of thinking, in which so-called “developing” cultures are regarded as inferior. It is not surprising that such practice rarely leads to real change.

The sort of cultural practice which can genuinely lead to change is practice which acknowledges and validates indigenous cultures and cultural forms, and which encourages a genuine dialogue with and within the community. Performances should not be driven by the “message” that there is a pre-ordained answer to a problem, but should rather seek to open up the problem to the community. It may be that a range of viewpoints are offered or encouraged by the performance, and that the audience is given the space to articulate their own ideas in response. Such approaches lead to creative solutions which work far better than those imposed, because they arise from the cultural context.

The model is, of course, inherently democratic. This is in itself important in terms of developmental agendas. Dialogue and creativity are far more potent than propaganda and passivity.

The key issue is to encourage governments, international agencies and NGOs to put sufficient trust in the cultural sector to permit this sort of initiative. It is difficult, in terms of “outcomes” and “targets”, to justify investment in open-ended processes. However, we would cite a number of initiatives which have followed these models, and which have been highly effective in terms of development, empowerment, and democracy.

It is also crucial to ensure that the cultural productions which result from initiatives at community level are able to engage directly with the agencies, especially local and national governments, with the power to effect change. This is an area where the Commonwealth Group’s reports might be particularly useful: there is a need for a paradigm shift which encourages governments to regard culture as central to the development agenda.

In 2007, Border Crossings published Theatre and Slavery, a book which accompanied our production of The Dilemma of a Ghost. This book includes a case study by Shikha Ghildyal on her work with child labourers (near-slaves) in India and Nepal. The work was emphatically about allowing these children a space in which to articulate their own concerns, and giving them a cultural platform from which they could engage with people in authority.

In the same book, there is a dialogue with Rustom Bharucha, in which we discuss many of the issues around culture and development. In particular, he looks at the ways in which cultural actions can be empowering processes for socially and economically marginalised people and communities, and how these might then become platforms for their interaction with civil society and governments.

The methods used by Shikha Ghildyal were taught to her by Michael Etherton, whose work with Save the Children seems to us to be a model of good practice in this area. Michael’s work is also documented in his book African Theatre: Youth (James Currey Press 2006). Sadly, Save the Children no longer uses his approach, and this is because of the language of targets and outcomes which current funding systems require. There is a clear need for a major shift in the way in which developmental agencies view culture if these more integrated, progressive and effective models are to become widespread."

China Witness

I've just finished reading Xinran's amazing book China Witness. Xinran was very helpful to us during Dis-Orientations, writing pieces for the programme and the website, as well as doing a post-show discussion, and I very much hope we'll be able to involve her in the next stage of the Trilogy too (she's already offered her services if she's around!).

When I met her in September 2006, Xinran had just got back from China, where she had been making the journey and conducting the interviews that eventually became China Witness. It's an incredibly important work of oral history. As much as anything, because so many records were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and so much of the official line is politicised fiction, it is only by direct engagement with older people who lived through the huge changes of China's last century that we have any chance of understanding that history. The work she's undertaken is made all the more urgent by the fact that time and again the interviewees themselves doubt its validity. They keep asking why she wants to talk about the past. Their own children and grandchildren have no interest in history, and certainly don't want to know about their ancestors poverty and struggles. To them, it would seem, all that matters is the immediate gratification of the present economic moment.

Reading these interviews, which are presented in the book almost like dramatic dialogues between Xinran and her subjects, I started to think about the way in which we use testimony in the creation of theatre. There are people who are making plays which are pure testimony - like Talking to Terrorists, for example. In our work, the testimony gets buried in the layering of fiction and intervention - and I tend to prefer this approach in theory as well as in practice. It seems to me that something is not necessarily more telling in the theatre just because a "real person" said it. Art is about refining what "real people" say and do - as Brecht said, "If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors".

Even so, testimony is crucial to our work on the Trilogy. Without the interviews we did through the Naz project, or Pritham's conversations with the hijras, it would have been impossible to construct Orientations and to feel that it had any integrity. My own experiences in China, and Haili, Ruihong and Ieng Un's personal experiences and family histories, fed into Dis-Orientations, just as I'm sure the testimonies of our performers and their contacts will continue to inform the growth of the third play.

When you're dealing with huge traumatic events, testimony becomes very important, but also very problematic. In the Trilogy, we look at the Cultural Revolution, the tsunami and the Szechuan earthquake. In each case, we've drawn off an element of testimony in our research, and yet that testimony is necessarily incomplete, because it is always the testimony of the survivor, and not the victims themselves. Moreover, because it is testimony to trauma, it is not factual - it is a collection of fragments, many of which are deeply emotional responses. But that is how we perceive the world. The demand of the survivor to be heard, to tell their story, becomes a sort of intervention in the historical process, rather than a record of the historical process. That's why it's more theatrical than objectively historical. And perhaps this allows an intimacy and a sort of reckoning with the audience. I hope so.

I certainly felt something of that when I was reading China Witness. Click here for a video of Xinran talking about it.

An open letter to the President of Peru

S.E. Alan Garcia
Presidente de la Republica del Peru
Palacio de Armas
Lima 1
PERU

1st July 2009

Dear President Garcia,

I am the director of the Origins Festival of First Nations: a cultural event in London which seeks to validate the marginalised cultures of indigenous peoples around the world. My colleagues and I are deeply disturbed at the recent violence in northern Peru that has resulted in so many deaths.

As I am sure you are aware, the indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting peacefully for months at the way their lands have been opened up to oil and gas companies without their consent.

Under both Peruvian and international law, these peoples have the right to the ownership of their traditional lands, and development should not take place there without their consent.

The recent actions of your government have been in clear violation of this right.

I urge you to suspend the activities of oil and gas companies in the Amazon pending peaceful negotiations between your government and the representatives of the indigenous people. These representatives, for example AIDESEP and its leader, are well-respected internationally, and to describe them as 'barbaric', 'ignorant' and 'savages', is counter-productive and will surely simply exacerbate an already inflamed situation. I would also call upon you to set up an independent and impartial enquiry into the tragic events of June 5th.

Yours sincerely

Michael Walling - Artistic Director

When the Rain Stops Falling

I was at the Almeida the other night, to see this remarkable Australian play by Andrew Bovell. I really enjoyed reading some earlier work of his: I got to know a piece called Holy Day back when we were working on Bullie's House, because Natasha had been in it. I've been skirting round the idea of doing a production of it ever since.... I suggested it to David Zoob as something we could do at Rose Bruford, and it nearly happened. Maybe now this play has done well at the Almeida, there's a chance to look at Holy Day again....

If that wasn't incentive enough to get across to Islington, the production features Leah Purcell, whose film, Black Chicks Talking, we included in Origins. Her trip to London to perform in this meant that she was able to come to quite a lot of the Festival, and her husband, Bain Stewart, was able to introduce the film - of which he was the Producer. I'm very interested in Leah's theatre work as something we might include in future Festivals: she is an astonishing performer, as this production bears out. She plays a woman slowly losing track of herself through Alzheimer's, and nursing a deep grief for the father of her child, who died in a car crash before the child was even born. Oh, and the child has lost touch, and her brother was murdered when he was 8, and both her parents committed suicide. I won't tell you who it turns out was the murderer, but that adds yet more to the misery. What's more, poor Leah is hobbling around the stage on a crutch, with her foot in plaster, having broken it in a backstage fall. Given all this misery, it's amazing that she manages to be very funny - but she does. In fact, it feels like a surprisingly light and witty evening, which is remarkable.

The play leaps between London and Australia, and is set variously in the 1960s, 1988, 2013 and 2039. The bits in the future are very funny, with references to the extinction of fish, the decline and fall of the American Empire, and a global catastrophe in climate. But the real subject of the play is family, and the way in which we are shaped by events in our family history of which we may have no knowledge at all. Sometimes it gets a bit "clever", as when characters from different eras speak exactly the same lines - but more often it achieves great power by simple means, for example the presence of characters on stage in an era not their own - ghosts whose presence alone makes sense of what is happening. And this is a theatrical poetry.

Mishima

I saw the Stone Crabs double bill of Mishima plays at Oval House last night. It was a bit of a reunion, since I know Kwong Loke (one of the directors), Wai Yin Kwok (designer), Yuka Yamanaka (performer), and bumped into Valerie Lucas, an academic who was in the audience! Small world or what?

The plays are very strange, as you'd expect with Mishima, I suppose. Strangeness is what makes theatre interesting... The first piece, Hanjo, is a three-hander, interestingly played by an all-female cast in this production. It's about a young geisha, who has gone mad with longing for her lover, and is being held by an unmarried woman painter. The gay subtext is very clear, and the fact that when the lover appears, he is played by another woman compounds it. The second piece, about a painter making a screen to represent hell, is remarkable. Yuka plays the painter's daughter, and draws off her knowledge of traditional Japanese dance in a very beautiful and characteristically controlled performance. The rest of the cast (except for the other woman) are Caucasian actors, dressed in modern grey business suits, and the effect is very powerful. Kwong says that the Japanese is deliberately written in an archaic style. I would have loved to hear the translation in a heightened English, like Barker or Barnes. This could have taken it into really fascinating territory. The translation into modern English just seemed a bit too banal for the exotic events portrayed.

Translation is notoriously difficult, of course. I met up with Al Parkinson earlier in the day, to discuss possible technical staff for the Trilogy, and we reminisced about how he'd had to supertitle into a English a scene in Hindi which seemed to change every night. Hopefully, we'll finally tie down the text this time round!

Endless Evaluations

One of the drawbacks of having been funded by so many different agencies for Origins is that we now have to do a specific tailored Evaluation of the project for every single one of them. We finished our own internal Evaluation for the board meeting last week - but it's not enough just to send this to everybody. For one thing, most of them have their own form they want filling in, and the questions are not the same!

Evaluating cultural projects is always a minefield anyway. What constitutes a "success" or a "failure"? We clearly can't measure the success in purely commercial terms: if that were the sole criterion, then there would be no need for funding in the first place. On the other hand, if the cultural event only reaches a small audience, then there's a real element of failure about that - it feels like failure. One good thing about the Festival from this point of view was that there were lots of clear objectives which we were able to lay down before-hand, and which made it attractive to the funders. So yes - exposing London audiences to First Nations arts, but also providing a platform for these artists in London, networking opportunities, artist-to-artist interaction, the generation of the legacy in the Participation and Learning programme....

The latter is still in progress. Gabrielle from Polygon has just sent me the flyer for the play which is touring schools this autumn. This was generated in response to a series of workshops between Roma performers and the First Nations companies we brought over for the Festival. It's called O Patrin (which is Roma for The Way). The title refers to a system of Gypsy symbols imparting knowledge of conditions on the road or showing the way. It's touring London secondary schools 21 September - 16 October 2009, and the performance lasts 35 minutes, followed by workshop (up to 90 minutes). The package, for up to 60 students, can be delivered twice in one day. There's a Resource Pack with activities and curriculum links, and there is no charge for schools! Now, how about that for a good deal?

Teachers who would like to book should email info@polygonarts.org.uk or phone 020 8368 1592. The co-producer is the Romany Theatre Company.

Death and the King's Horseman

I'd known Wole Soyinka's masterpiece for a long time - written about it and workshopped scenes from it on various occasions. So I was genuinely excited finally to get the chance to see a full production at the National on Friday. The play's only been done once before in the UK, when Phyllida directed it in Manchester back in 1990 (!). In fact, I've only ever seen one other Soyinka play at all - which was The Lion and the Jewel at the Barbican a while ago. This is an altogether bigger piece, and it is brilliantly done at the National. Oddly, I'd not seen Rufus Norris's work before - but he has done this wonderfully. It's very funny and it's genuinely tragic.

One of the most interesting decisions is to have the white characters played by black actors, who are "whited up" on stage at the start of the performance. It's very similar to the effect in Almighty Voice and His Wife - where the ghosts are in white-face for the second half - you sense the conventions of a racist theatre being turned on their head by a post-colonial production. If the District Officer and his wife were played by white actors, then it's almost inevitable that, for all the absurdity of the characters, the predominantly white, middle-class audience at the National would end up identifying with them. Done like this, the whole play clearly emerges from the Yoruba viewpoint, so the two-dimensionality of the white characters becomes an advantage, and their absurd, sub-Coward language is the comic relief to the rich poetry of the Yoruba characters.

I keep remembering our own production of The Dilemma of a Ghost - which had a similar aesthetic, though a lower budget! The presence of Seun Shote in the cast makes the memory very tangible.

Politics in Brussels

On Monday, I had a day at the European Commission in Brussels, at a gathering of the Platform for Intercultural Europe. I'd been interested in this initiative since it began (for obvious reasons), and when the invitation turned up, complete with Eurostar ticket, I felt I really needed to get myself and Border Crossings involved, even if it meant getting up at 4am!

In Britain, artists get very little say in the shaping of policy. There's the occasional consultation by the Arts Council, which doesn't seem to achieve very much. In the EU, however, this Platform has an official role as a consultant to the Commission. It's not only made up of artists (and is none the worse for that), but it includes many arts practitioners from across the continent (and indeed beyond), and really does have a role in policy-making. This was powerfully brought home to me when I walked in to the meeting room, and discovered a UN-like set-up, with microphones, headphones and simultaneous translators in sound-proofed booths. Given that this was the very morning when the European election results had been announced, and the rise of the radical right was made evident, including two seats for the BNP in the European Parliament, I was very struck by the level of responsibility attached to this work. If Europe can't encourage intercultural dialogue, then we know where we could be heading.

Of the keynote speakers, the one who really impressed me was Chris Torch, from a Swedish-based organisation called Intercult. He had a wonderful image for the role of the arts in contemporary society: in early societies, people used to gather in a circle for a cultural event, and the circle was broken by professionalisation and proscenium - our role is to repair it. The second keynote speaker, on the other hand, was talking very much in terms of the arts conveying a pre-conceived "message". I found myself banging the drum for the arts as themselves a dialogic process, as a forum which can work towards meaning in democratic society, and not simply as a form of propaganda. This intervention proved very popular, I'm happy to say!

I had lunch with two Slovenians, and Tarafa Baghajati (a Muslim man, originally from Syria and now living in Vienna). The Slovenians were laughing about the way people in the former Yugoslavia are now nostalgic for Tito. Tarafa tells us that the same is true of Syria, where Tito was the only world leader to be a friend. When Tarafa was seven, he and his class had to go to the airport to welcome Tito to Damascus. They stood for five hours in the heat, until he finally arrived. Then, they all released doves of peace into the air.

Tiananmen Square - 20 years ago

If you've been following this blog for a while (and yes, some people actually do), then you may remember that I first visited China in 2005, beginning the preparations for Dis-Orientations, and so, by implication, for the Trilogy. Back then, I was very struck by the way in which the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square had been wiped out of popular consciousness. Click here for that memory.

Not much has changed since, it seems. On the 20th anniversary, while Hong Kong held a huge vigil, the square itself was surrounded by police, and nobody was able to enter. The firewalls went up very high - nobody was Twittering about this in China. And this ongoing silence, this refusal to acknowledge so drastic a moment in recent history, makes the ghosts more hungry than ever.

Dis-Orientations refers to the killings - albeit rather obliquely. My hope is that this will get it past the censors, on the grounds that if you don't know what the characters are talking about, then this won't tell you. We now know that we will be performing these plays in China next year, so I'm feeling very aware of the complexities and responsibilities of our position as cultural ambassadors, especially in the thick of all the current news coverage of the anniversary. So far, none of our Chinese colleagues has even mentioned this scene as potentially sensitive; though they have certainly talked about the Cultural Revolution (which everybody is concerned about) and homosexuality (which bothers lots of people but not the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre). It may be that this is part of the silence. We must simply wait and see.

And not forget.

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.....