Why don't we have an APAM?

At the closing lunch of APAM, I found myself on the same table as Jane Claire from English Touring Theatre. We'd both found the event incredibly helpful, and wondered why on earth there's nothing like it in the UK. The Arts Council are always talking about "capacity-building" - this would do it. Set up a forum for theatre companies to show and talk about their work, and invite promoters and venues from around the country and overseas. Dead easy. And think how much time and energy could be saved - farewell to so much of that tedious cold calling. Jane says she'll talk to the Arts Council when she's back in England.

Also on the table was Catherine Baldwin from Bangarra. Apparently Amy Hammond, who came to Origins 2009 with Windmill Baby, told her that the one person she had to meet was me - which was nice! I had thought that Bangarra's work was a bit large-scale for us (their last London gig was Sadlers Wells!), but in fact they turn out to have some really interesting projects in development which we could link with. And so do Marrageku. And so do Ilbijeera. And so do Yirra Yaakin. It's kind of amazing.... I email Emma and say that we could do a colossal and amazing festival if we had more resources. She asks how much we need.....

I spent the afternoon with my old friend Rhoda Roberts (in the picture), who used to run the Dreaming Festival - such an inspiration to me in developing Origins. Rhoda updates me on some of the issues facing Aboriginal people at the present, particularly around the ongoing intervention in the Northern Territory, and the big problems over developing culturally appropriate education. Apparently the government is stressing the need for children to be educated for work in something called "the real economy". To provide this education, they need to move away from the communities to "hubs" - which happens to free the land for mining. It's all a bit depressing.

Which said, Rhoda is never one for pessimism. She's been very excited by the Creative New Zealand event at APAM, where even the white CEO made the first part of his speech in Te Reo Maori, and the indigenous protocols were very carefully observed. She talks about pushing to get indigenous language and indigenous protocol into the Australian national identity - not just in terms of Elders doing a Welcome to Country, but white people also recognising that the indigenous culture is the national culture. She's right, of course. I so hope it happens.

APAM so far

I'm in Adelaide, during its buzziest time of the year, the Festival period. Huge thanks to Arts Projects Australia and the Australia Council for this one - they've invited me here for APAM, which is a "Performing Arts Market". At times, this is every bit as crazed, commercialised and un-creative as it sounds - with much talk of "buying" and "product" - but it is also a chance to meet some amazing artists and cultural workers, see some remarkable shows, and hold some very important conversations, particularly about the next Origins and indigenous Australian involvement. I've re-connected with some of our key collaborators and advisors from previous years, including Rhoda Roberts of Dreaming Festival fame, David Milroy, who is here with his latest piece Waltzing the Wilara, and Michelle Broun from WA's Arts team. Other people who've been on the radar for a while include Marrugeku - I met Rachael and Dalisa years ago in Perth when they were performing the great Incognita, and more recently saw Dalisa on her home territory of Broome (where the work is deeply rooted). They're currently creating a new piece for her to perform solo - which sounds more manageable than their usual vast-scale performances. And I've made some very exciting new contacts, including Rachael Maza from Ilbijerri, whose piece Jack Charles v the Crown is an exciting example of the autobiographical genre. Rachael is working with a really edgy political theatre group called version 1.0 on a new play about a notorious death in custody on Palm Island. I saw version 1.0's play The Disappearances Project, which deals with the effects on families of missing persons cases, and I cannot wait to see how they come together with indigenous artists.

The other highlight for me so far wasn't to do with indigenous work at all - although it certainly crosses a great many borders in very radical new ways. This is a company called Back to Back, which is built around an ensemble of people who are perceived to have a learning disability. When I told Rachael Swain how powerful I found their work, she said that she thought they were the most important company in Australia - which, coming from her, is one hell of a compliment. Their piece is called Ganesh versus the Third Reich (there's a "versus" theme here....), and it deals with the Indian god's need to re-appropriate the swastika for its original, sacred meaning. The story opens up all sorts of debates about rights of representation and self-representation, appropriation, perception..... It's coming to LIFT later in the year, and needs to be seen.

Posh and period

Bingo is one of the best plays of the last hundred years. Most of Edward Bond's plays are pretty good - but the Trilogy around Shakespeare (Lear, The Sea and this one) are truly amazing. It's also a very complex piece, and one that needs a clear, rational production to make sense. I saw a brilliant production of Bond's Restoration some years ago with Simon Russell Beale and my chum Vivienne Rochester, which was set on an empty white space, blazingly lit, with only occasional, very specific props, each of which glowed with economic and dramatic significance as a result. The new production, at the Young Vic, which I saw on Saturday, is in a very different style. In fact, it looks like a Sunday-night BBC period drama. As the photo shows - there are period costumes and heavy detail in the set and props. It all weighs the production down, so that it feels lacking in the mental energy Bond requires.

There is a lot of this sort of thing about, of course. Downton Abbey; Birdsong; Upstairs, Downstairs..... all of them are dramas to fuel the heritage industry. Never mind the way the Dickens anniversary has been treated. It feels as if the past has been appropriated by the right - and culture has become the repository of the worthy and dull. We've got posh and period mixed up with profound. It's a very strange thing to happen to somebody so avowedly of the left as Bond - but he's been packaged up as part of the 2012 heritage industry.

I recall, during the Thatcher years, Salman Rushdie commented on the preponderance of Raj nostalgia in books, TV and film (Passage to India; Jewel in the Crown; The Raj Quartet...). It happened, he pointed out, just as a right-wing government was reasserting British imperialism elsewhere. Today's manifestations of heritage culture have a similar background, though closer to home. The TV dramas celebrate the aristocracy just as a cabinet of Etonian millionaires squeezes the country dry - and even theatre, that most democratic form, is starting to serve up productions of socialist plays that make them cosy, nostalgic, and in thrall to the establishment.

By the way - I also think the Young Vic has one of the best programmes of any theatre I know - and I love most of the work there (including the current Changeling). So please nobody take offence - but I do think this debate needs to be opened up.

Sgint

I don't think I'd ever seen a play in Welsh before. Sgint, which was thankfully super-titled, is a verbatim piece based on interviews with people in Carmarthen about their lives since the financial crisis kicked in. Good to be reminded that there are places outside London, outside all sorts of mainstreams, that are really bearing the brunt of the current lunacy.

I went along to see it in Cardiff, because the producing company, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, is doing some amazing work in developing Welsh language theatre. I've thought for a while that Welsh and Scots Gaelic should be part of the Origins Festival - indigeneity close to home. Talking to Arwel and Elen, the directors, I sense a certain trepidation at the potential romanticism and exoticism of categorising the Celts alongside indigenous peoples from elsewhere. But there are very clear similarities of experience - the suppression of language and culture, the socio-economic marginalisation, the potential for new identities within both larger and smaller, more defined, political structures. It slowly turns into a worthwhile conversation - one we can develop as their new projects come along. At the moment, they are very focused on Elen's Welsh-language production of The Tempest for the 2012 Festival. We talk about my Indian Tempest and Toufann. Amazing how that play can resonate in so many contexts. But I do wonder how Elen will deal with the centrality of language to the piece, and the fact that the main language of the play is that of the coloniser, Prospero, and not the colonised Caliban. Will be fascinated to see!

Plymouth

Just got back from a very interesting couple of days at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. Faith Collingwood, who works in the Creative Learning department there, has been talking to us for some time about the possibility of collaborating on their Dare to be Different project for young refugees and asylum seekers. Since Plymouth became a dispersal centre in 2002, there's been a huge influx of displaced people into the city, and a lot of tensions as a result. On Tuesday night, I was able to watch the group in action. They're mainly from Africa, mostly in their teens, and full of energy. There's inevitably a certain insecurity around culture and language, but also (very pleasingly) a security and indeed a pride about who they are, about cultural identity. It was almost like being back in Botswana at times. But much colder.

This morning I met with Faith and her colleagues to talk through ways in which we can collaborate around May and June - so there might be quite a few Plymouth trips coming up. Then whizzed across town to the main theatre for a meeting with David Prescott, who programmes the Drum and is very interested in Consumed. So interested that he gave me some very good ideas on its artistic development, actually!

Kampnagel

I don't often fly to Europe for the day, but when a theatre like Hamburg's Kampnagel calls, you tend to go! Helen and Dani from the Indigeneity project and I went out there to talk about another indigenous festival, being planned there for next year. I first got wind of this when Rosanna Raymond introduced me to her friend Yuki back in September. Yuki is collaborating with the Kampnagel's Artistic Director, Amelie Deuflhard, to bring a range of New Zealand and Pacific work to Germany during 2013. Even better, the dates are close to the ones we have in mind - so it looks like we can share some artists, and really make the most of the intercontinental airfares.

The venue is stunning: no fewer than six theatre spaces in a converted crane factory, plus huge public areas. There's a deliberate roughness, with bare walls - it's functional and tough, without a hint of luxury. And yet you can really feel the possibility of celebration there. For Amelie, like myself, exchange between artists and between artists and communities is central to the idea of a festival. I wonder if we might be able to do even more than share artists - perhaps we can develop some of the work in collaboration???

Our Māori Heritage Project is entering its last stages; and on Tuesday night Joel, Gabrielle and I went along to Ngāti Rānana at New Zealand House to recruit likely interview subjects for the Oral History work. Gabrielle and Rosanna have been working with young people in schools on Māori culture, including visits to Hinemihi and the British Museum, and now they are ready to talk to some elders about the experience of migration and making a life in the UK while sustaining a Polynesian culture and identity.

This week we said goodbye to Aike Broens, our Dutch intern, who has been a great help to us in the office for the last five months. Her internship was part of her college work, so it was important to structure it towards learning outcomes - Carissa did that brilliantly, so we got the most out of one another! Here's part of Aike's report on her time with us, which includes a sneak preview of some future work....

"Since the development of the [mentoring] project alongside the new theatre production called Consumed started when I first came in I could be part of almost every stage of its development. I was given so much freedom and responsibility I actually experienced what it was like to set up a project from the beginning. The general idea for a mentoring project with both Chinese and English young people was already there but the rest still needed to be filled in. And so I designed and developed most of the content of the project alongside Carissa. I actually thought of the name ‘The Flip Flop Scenario’. It started with research into the Chinese community, research into other linked projects and research into funding possibilities. Then we set up the basic description, the aims and the budget.... Then we worked on the things that were still missing such as an education pack and a case for support. Carissa let me do the first thinking again and we discussed the content of each product and then I started working on it. I learned to be very independent and to follow my own instinct but also be able to get criticism and improve my work. When leaving the company I felt that Carissa and I really left a good project outline for the company to continue and I can actually see what my influence was and put a stamp on it in general."

Thanks Aike - we will miss you!

Caravan

Sheelah and I went to Brighton on Tuesday for the Caravan symposium on touring overseas. Always interesting to compare notes with other people, and to hear what the funders have to say! The eye-opener on the funding side was, of all things, UK Trade & Investment, which turns out to be willing to support theatre, like any other business, as it "exports" its work into "new markets" - which is one way of describing what we do.... At a time when most government departments and the prevailing economic discourse seems to think of the arts as nothing but a drain on resources, it was very refreshing to hear from a civil servant who was viewing theatre as a way of improving the nation's balance of payments!

This view, like most of the others on display through the day, still regards other countries as places to which existing work should be taken, rather than places where it can be made collaboratively. I was pleased to hear Tim Crouch talking about his own doubts when he first started international touring; how he felt that there was something rather colonial about "exporting British culture", and how this led to his piece called ENGLAND. I like his work very much - The Author is stunning - and ENGLAND deals with so many of the discomforts of cross-cultural communication. Interesting how the artistic work and its business framing conspire together to create meaning.

Of all the funders present, it was actually the EU Culture Programme which seemed to me to offer the most progressive and exciting models. Perhaps that's why they supported our biggest project yet. There are many pitfalls around European bureaucracy, but somewhere at the heart of it there is a trans-national idealism of intercultural collaboration which we have to access and capitalise upon.

2011

The end of a rather wonderful year for us at Border Crossings. The highlight, of course, was the Origins Festival back in the summer, with the amazing theatre of Noel Tovey and Robert Greygrass, great concerts at Rich Mix and on Hampstead Heath (with Pacific Curls a particular highlight of both), and a film programme which earned two Critics' Choice mentions in Time Out, plus one in the Guardian. The legacy of the Festival is still continuing into 2012, with our Māori Heritage Project developing further into oral histories and a new website. So watch this space....

It's also been a year in which we've been able to grow and develop our organisational base, thanks to the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's support, with Lance Bourne, Carissa Lynch and Sheelah Sloane as core team members at various points through the year, plus a really exciting selection of international interns. There are a great many new initiatives underway for 2012 - the first of which will be a devising workshop in Shanghai, with our old friends at SDAC, developing a new production. The work we did in Botswana during 2011 will be built on as well, with some exciting plans to help develop the theatre scene there.

Looking at the arts elsewhere, the most inspiring theatre I've seen during the year has been in the form of pieces dealing, in some way or other, with the processes of healing we need to undertake in today's world. Peter's new piece with Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Desdemona, is one really powerful example, and debbie tucker green's brilliant new play, Truth and Reconciliation, is another. My other theatrical highlights also followed the theme, though perhaps in more oblique ways: Marc Bathuni Joseph's Red, Black & Green: A Blues, which I saw in San Francisco, and ATC's production of The Golden Dragon.

San Francisco also gave me the chance to see my film highlight of the year - If Not Us, Who? - which I very much hope will get a UK release in 2012. Among mainstream films, the best by far was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This morning's Guardian includes my books of the year - but rather heavily edited - so here's the full version:

I read Amy Waldman’s The Submission (Heinemann) in the USA around the time of the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. In the midst of uncritical collective self-pity, it was refreshing and invigorating to encounter this penetrating and complex novel. There are no heroes and (more importantly) no villains here – but a Dickensian nexus of interconnected characters, each striving to achieve and express some kind of identity in a world that militates against the creative impulse. The Raw Man by George Makana Clark (Jonathan Cape) brings a powerful and unique new voice to the African novel. The narrative moves beautifully between mythic and realistic dimensions, denying, as African thought does, any distinction between the two. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (Zero Books) is a brilliant, succinct and brief analysis of the social, political and psychological structures at work today. It’s the best, and most deeply disturbing account I’ve read of the appalling state we are in.

Moving away from the arts to wider questions: the last month of the year has given me the chance to think a bit more about identity politics in relation to two small, comparatively new countries. The Platform for Intercultural Europe held its 2011 Practice Exchange in Slovenia - an interesting contrast to the one we hosted in London in 2010. In this small state, which emerged from the former Yugoslavia, the impulse towards generating a national identity seemed to be a negative factor - one which was causing a lot of concerns for minority groups like the Roma and the Muslims (although the latter are themselves predominantly Slovene). I was left feeling that we need to move away from the nation as the means to self-definition, indeed that we should be moving away from identity politics altogether, since identities are by their nature forms of closure, which prohibit fluidity and undermine the possibility of change and flux. And then, I went to Mauritius for Christmas with our family there (hence the picture). And, in this emerging multicultural nation, the converse seemed to be the case. Because everything was provisional, developing, unfinished, nothing was really being achieved. Because culture was perceived as being outside the space, there was an inherent alienation. Because nationhood and the defining force of national identity, the language, was being denied, there was division and communalism rather than the true intercultural space which Mauritius could become.

It's a complex set of questions. Hopefully the new initiatives for a drama course at the University of Mauritius will allow us to engage more in this during 2012 and beyond.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Paris - Reconciliation

Thanks to a grant from the EU's Grundtvig fund, I spent a great couple of days in Paris at a conference on Indigenous Festivals and their role in processes of Reconciliation, organised by the Indigeneity project at Royal Holloway. This is an amazing research project, run by Helen Gilbert, who we've been consulting with for years, and who has also helped us with many aspects of Origins, including some funding towards Marie's workshop this year. For the next Festival, Helen and I are discussing a plan to work together very closely, as it will coincide with the final exhibition at the end of her project. That's too good a chance to miss.

The conference was a great chance to meet some people I'd heard about but never actually encountered before, and to renew some old acquaintances. There were people there who had been at Origins, but who I'd never actually spoken to. Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal was there too - a very exciting Māori scholar and musician, who is working to recreate the performance forms that existed before contact with Europeans. He spoke very eloquently about the need to move indigeneity beyond the passive experience of suffering, and to see it as "a gift to the world". That prompted me to some thoughts in my own speech. There were also some really fascinating French contacts, whose involvement could broaden the remit of the whole festival. And they introduced me to New Caledonia.

I knew very little about this land, and its indigenous Kanak people, although we did have a poem by Kanak writer Paul Wamo in the last Origins programme book. There was a struggle for decolonisation as recently as the 1980s, led by Jean-Marie Tjibaou. After he had achieved an agreement with the French government, Tjibaou was assassinated by the more radical figure Djubelly Wéa, who felt he had compromised on the aim of absolute independence. Fifteen years on, through a ceremony of reconciliation which exists in Kanak culture, it became possible for the widows of these two men to embrace. The process through which the reconciliation was achieved, and the extraordinarily moving ceremony which it involved, was the subject of the film Tjibaou, le pardon, which was screened at the conference. And Marie-Claude Tjibaou herself was there to talk about it with us. It's a very special film indeed - and you can watch it here.

Xerxes in San Francisco - Thunder in the Pleasure Garden

This is the programme note I wrote for the production of Xerxes at San Francisco Opera.

*

Xerxes was one of the last operas Handel wrote for the London opera scene, of which he had been a central figure for some twenty-seven years. Not surprisingly, the music reflects the city at the time – poised and elegant; at times astonishing in its emotional depth and purity; often urbane, ironic, even jazzy; occasionally exotic and a little strange. Our production frames the machinations and passions of the characters within a world that seems most clearly to capture that characteristic complexity of tone: the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

In 1738, under the management of Jonathan Tyers “Undertaker of the Entertainment there”, the Gardens were the centre of fashionable London. They also expressed the city’s reaching out to a wider world. This was the age of early imperialism, of the Grand Tour, and of the first museum collections. Tyers gathered exotic artifacts from warmer climes, showing a particular obsession with the Middle East – a region considered at once fascinating and dangerous, from whence came such innovative fashions as coffee drinking and umbrellas. He also commissioned the French sculptor Louis François Roubiliac to create a statue of Handel himself, which was unveiled in the Pleasure Gardens just as Xerxes was performing at the Haymarket Theatre.

An anonymous Irish gentlemen visiting Vauxhall wrote: “The garden strikes the eye prodigiously; it is set with many rows of tall trees, kept in excellent order, among which are placed an incredible number of globe lamps, by which it is illuminated, and when they are lighted the sound of the music ravishing the ear, added to the great resort of company so well dressed and walking about, would almost make one believe he was in the Elysian fields. In the middle of the garden are two semicircles which appear like an amphitheatre, in which are placed a great number of small booths which may contain about six or eight people apiece, where they commonly refresh themselves with sweetmeats, wine, tea, coffee, or suchlike. The backs of these boxes or booths are adorned with curious paintings, all which are enlightened to the front with globes. They are all numbered, and very just attendance is given by a vast number of warders kept for that purpose. Near to this is a grand orchestra, where the music plays in fine weather; but this night the concert was held in a magnificent hall neatly furnished. At one side of the orchestra is a noble statue of Handel. The music no sooner began than we entered the hall, where fifty-four musicians performed. Mr. Lowe soon sang, whose character I need not here mention, and after him the inimitable Miss Burchell.”

With Handel’s music running through my head this morning, I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park. And here, in the city where we are recreating the opera, was another Vauxhall. Here were the neo-classical pavilions and follies; here were the shrines of art, with busts of writers and composers appearing through the trees; here were the museums and galleries, the coffee houses and the concerts. Here were botanical specimens from overseas put on display for education and delight; here was the fascination with an exoticized and economically colonized Asia. Perhaps contemporary San Francisco is closer to Handel’s London than it may at first appear.

Handel, I am sure, would have recognized the city’s famous queer culture. Although there is no conclusive evidence that he was gay, it was very unusual for an 18^th century man to remain unmarried, and even more unusual for all his close friends to be other unmarried men. Certainly he took great delight in the gender-bending possibilities presented by the form of baroque opera. The role of Xerxes was originally sung by the famous castrato Caffarelli, and Arsamenes by a female soprano, “The Luchesina”. I suspect our reversal of the genders of the singers playing these royal brothers would not have perturbed him. Some of the most expressive music is reserved for the cross-dressed Amastris, whose tessitura is so low that in the final ensemble it is she who takes the tenor line. The conventions of gender are blurred. Identity, certainty, becomes brittle and impermanent. Like performance – it delights and then disappears.

The replica of Roubiliac’s statue on the stage tonight does not say “Handel” on its base, but “Timotheus”. Timotheus was the court musician to Alexander the Great; and in 1735 Handel had set John Dryden’s poem Alexander’s Feast, which describes Timotheus playing through the night in Xerxes’ palace at Persepolis, to celebrate Alexander’s victory over the Persian Empire. Alexander then razed the palace of Xerxes to the ground.

Any Pleasure Garden holds within it the seeds of its own destruction.

California Culture

Opera rehearsals thin out towards the opening (which is tomorrow), so I've had a bit of time over the last few days to check out some of the cultural offerings in the Bay Area. It's a very rich place culturally - tons going on - though it helps to have a few dollars to spare if you want to catch a lot of it! Nice to get a few invitations.....

I was at the Closing Night of the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival, which was Andres Veiel's If Not Us, Who - about the Red Army Faction, and in particular Gudrun Ensslin. I remember being very struck by her centrality when I watched The Baader-Meinhoff Complex a while ago. That film was very strong as a chronological account - it simply stated what happened, and left you to deal with it. Veiel, by way of contrast, begins to undertake the difficult task of exploring why it happened. To begin with, I was a bit concerned that we might be in for the pat Freudian explanation: Veiel's degree is in psychology, and the film begins with Bernward Vesper's father shooting his son's pet cat. It looks like another "if only the parents had loved them" film. But then, Veiel brilliantly shifts the ground, as the father tells Bernward that cats are "the Jews of the animal world". The issue is not pat psychology: it's living with the legacy of Nazism. In a stunning moment later in the film, the adult Bernward is told by his mother that his pro-Nazi father only agreed to have children because Hitler was urging Germans to breed. His very existence is the result of the Nazi era. Gudrun's father, perhaps even more strikingly, was a pastor who knew that the regime was evil, but still served in its army. Much of the film is about the disappointment younger people feel with older generations who they feel to be compromised. Powerful stuff in the time of the "Occupy" movement.

David Mamet's latest play, Race, is at the ACT in San Francisco. I had hoped to see the sophisticated and gritty kind of work expected from Mamet - and I confidently predict that when Race gets its UK premiere it will be hailed as doing for race what Oleanna did for gender politics (whatever that was). In fact, Mark Lawson has already done as much when he reviewed the New York production. Well - to my mind, it was a truly repulsive play - and I do not use such terms lightly of an art-form I love. Yes - it was certainly topical - more so since the Strauss-Kahn case, which it echoes, or even foretells, in a number of striking ways. But the underlying point Mamet seems to be making is that questions around historical and current inequalities are being allowed to get in the way of "business success" - and that, apparently, would never do. Mamet, the programme note proudly explains, has announced his "conversion" (note the religious wording) to the Republican right, and published "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, his 200-page pledge of allegiance to conservatism." The law firm where the play is set is "sold out" by a clerk, who is young, female, and black. And a cipher of a character. She manipulates the firm into defending a white man accused of raping a black woman, and then engineers the case so that he is sure to be convicted, against the best efforts of the tough-talking Mamet-style lawyers. Frankly, it smacks of White Supremacism to me.

The contrast with the piece I saw last night in Berkeley could not be greater. Desdemona is directed by our Patron, Peter Sellars, so I will confess to a certain bias born of long friendship - but it is a very deep and necessary antidote to the poison which Race embodies. Scripted by Toni Morrison, with music by the Malian Rokia Traoré, the piece is a response to Othello, following the central female character into an after-life, and allowing her to probe her actions, and Othello's too, and to search for solutions beyond literal or emotional violence between races, or between sexes. Rokia's music is incredibly beautiful - you can get an idea of it here - and Peter's production provides a contemplative space in which you can listen to every nuance of that sound, and to every weighted word of the slim, poetic text. Rokia embodies the figure of Barbary - Desdemona's mother's maid, who died singing the Willow Song. In Renaissance England, "Barbary" meant "Africa" - so the conceit of this piece is that Desdemona was brought up by a black woman, who died - and that this makes sense of her attraction to Othello. In the play, Desdemona and Barbary meet in the world of the dead, and begin a process of negotiation, of working through histories and difficulties, of searching for common language. The end hints at some kind of reconciliation, without stating it in naive or evangelical terms.

There's a sentence in the text that really struck me very powerfully. I'm writing it down from memory, so it may not be totally accurate - but it's close enough for you to see how clearly this tells us where we are:

"If we have not achieved
the passionate peace
that we desire,
it is because we have not
imagined it."

Red, Black and GREEN: a Blues

This is not an easy piece of theatre to write about: but the best theatre rarely is. When theatre is most powerful, effective and meaningful, it's because it is doing something that could not be done in any other way. It is communicating something very pure through the presence of the live performance.

Red, Black and GREEN: a Blues, which I saw last night at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Centre, is a performance which fuses narrative and poetry, character, dance, video, music, hip-hop, blues, and a sculptural set in many ways more akin to museum than theatre. For the first half hour, the audience walks around the set, which starts off looking like a contained house (or shack), and slowly splits into four separate spaces. There are also four performers (the creative artist himself, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the set designer who also sings the blues, a musician and a wonderful actress-dancer-singer called Traci Tolmaire), four seasons around which the piece is structured, and four locations, of which more anon. The performers are very active during this first section, including a speech by the sculptor-singer Theaster Gates (some of which is in the video here), which amounts to an artistic manifesto for the whole project. The next hour has the audience seated, and uses the range of art-forms to tell a series of related stories which have arisen from the lengthy process of the piece's development - in Oakland, Houston, Chicago and New York.

In each case, the company has gone into the community, and especially the black community. Marc has engaged with these communities through his eco-arts festivals (remind you of anything?), and has asked questions around what sustainability actually means in these poorer neighbourhoods. The relationship between the green movement and black politics is explored and problematised - especially in relation to the construction of Africa as an unspoilt green space. Marc talks about meeting a Sudanese woman who lost her son in the war there. He also talks about his own visit to the Sudan. In the week of Gaddafi's death and the accompanying awareness of a new colonialism on the African continent, this was salutary stuff.

I could go on and on about this piece, and about its significance beyond the moment of performance itself. It reminds me of Ngapartji Ngapartji in the way it brings the community engagement very directly into performance, and allows the performance to operate in a very direct dialogue with community. It practices what it preaches (the set is made of re-cycled materials, and much of the power is from solar batteries). It is art which envisions a better future. Which is what art is for.

Chez Panisse

One of the great things about being in San Francisco is the wealth of good food - and last night David Fielding and I sampled the best of the lot - the famous Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Alice Waters (pictured) set this place up back in the 70s, and now it's so famous that you have to reserve your table a month ahead. I first heard about Alice and the restaurant from Peter Sellars, who brought her over to Vienna as part of his New Crowned Hope Festival there. Our waiter last night turned out to know Peter very well - he eats at Chez Panisse whenever he's in the Bay Area (which I guess will include next week). Some of the ideas which Alice brought to that Festival have been very influential on the way we've integrated food and ideas about food into the Origins Festival, particularly with Joy Fenikowski's fantastic Māori food at our opening event.

One of the most crucial aspects of Chez Panisse is the politics of its food. Everything is locally sourced, everything is sustainably grown, everything is organic, everything is fresh. In fact, I could not believe just how fresh my zucchini salad starter tasted. Or how tender the roast lamb was: the menu pointed out the nearby ranch where it was farmed. This approach to food has always been the way with indigenous peoples, and so has the time taken to eat the meal and its central role in social exchange. You feel that in the restaurant too. Chez Panisse is right at the centre of the worldwide Slow Food Movement, and I would like Border Crossings to be there too.

Ten Years On

I've been in the US for the last ten days, directing Xerxes for San Francisco Opera. It's very striking how, ten years after the event, the country is still so dominated by the events of 9/11. At the recent talk I did for Central with Geoff Colman and Maya Zbib, we talked about how the arts take time to absorb and respond to major historical events - Geoff said it was about a decade before the German theatre engaged with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Maybe it's the same here - 2011 is the moment when America takes stock of its moment of trauma.

The responses are very varied, though. I've encountered two since I've been here. The first was the opera company's production Heart of a Soldier (pictured). This is a huge new opera, which is clearly attempting to construct itself as the great piece of the moment, and is also trying to engage directly with politics. It's the life story of Rick Rescorla, a soldier in the US army (though originally English), who became a security manager at the World Trade Centre, and died in the attacks. The piece is very much about the "ordinary hero" and his sacrifice - the problem with it is that there's no sense of the context in which his heroics take place. He serves in Zimbabwe and Vietnam, but there are no African or Asian characters on the stage, and the wars all seem to blend into one. There is a Muslim character (Rick's best friend Dan Hill became a Muslim, and there is a strong moment when Islamic music portrays the religion as a real calling for him) - but even so Islam features only as an ideology of the Other (and seems to have very little effect on Dan, who you would think might have been very disturbed by his best friend being killed by his co-religionists). There is no sense of why anybody, Muslim or otherwise, might wish to attack America; and so the audience is invited to unite in mourning, rather than look for solutions. Perhaps the very public and emotive form of American opera is incapable of a more nuanced response, at least at this distance - we're still waiting for an American company to be brave enough to stage The Death of Klinghoffer in the 21st century. As the performance began, the audience stood to sing the Stars and Stripes, as a vast projected flag fluttered on the front-cloth.

By way of contrast, I've just finished reading Amy Waldman's remarkable novel The Submission. Unlike the opera, the novel does not focus on a victim, and so avoids sentimentality. Rather, it looks at the complex question of how the survivors should best deal with the events, and with the process of mourning. It asks how America can best re-define itself in the light of the attacks and their aftermath. It also manages to do this without launching any diatribes against Bush's foreign policy. The basic premise, that the architect of the winning entry in a competition to design a memorial for the victims turns out to be a Muslim, is of course counter-factual (the real architect is a London born Israeli-American, which leads to intriguing speculation in itself - why did this not lead to any controversy of the kind unleashed in the novel?). Waldman's premise allows her to take in a wide cross-section of American society, including the crucial figure of a Muslim widow, an illegal immigrant, whose husband was a cleaner in the Towers. It's a subtle, sophisticated piece of work, which challenges America to make sense of its own multiculturalism, and to redefine its global role in the light of the need for intercultural dialogue.

Zeynep's internship

This is the team in the office, including Aike and Zeynep, our two interns. Zeynep, from Turkey, finished her internship this week, and here's what she had to say about it:

"I arrived in London for my internship in the middle of the Origins Festival. So I took my part in it. I have seen how things work in such a big event. I had a chance to meet a lot of indigenous artists and see their work, and they were amazing. But the most important thing I learned during the festival is that it is actually possible to help indigenous cultures to present themselves to other cultures without being 'authentic' or 'nostalgic'. I have seen how indigenous cultures live and how they are affected by other cultures; which made me realise that cultures which are not 'modernised' or 'globalised' are the ones closest to human spirit. It was so intimate that I felt like I will be able to see the ropes connecting us with the nature if it kept going. Fortunately, Border Crossings is not doing this like a hobby; there will be Origins Festivals every two years.

Although Michael Walling is the heart of the company, he is aware of the vital importance of collaborative work and will make you realise it. So I found my internship period quite productive because I was in an environment where my opinions and thoughts were valued and respected.

During my time in the office, I have learned about publicity, fundraising and mechanics of a non-profit theatre company. I get the chance to have many conversations with a wise and committed artistic director, Michael Walling, about his work and theatre making. I learned many things about playwright dramaturgy, play development and dramaturgical researching from an inspiring associate director Carissa Hope Lynch.

I had many opportunities to see different artistic venues and communities in London. I attended many talks, openings and workshops with Michael Walling’s guidance. I watched more than thirty plays in three months, thanks to recommendations and help for finding affordable tickets.

One of my primary aims was to see devising process of a play. But my internship period ended before Border Crossings started devising. Nevertheless, I have been given the chance to work with other companies like MeWe and I observed several rehearsals.

All in all, I spent three months in London full of art and inspiration thanks to Border Crossings. I am going back to my country with my hands full of knowledge and new ideas."

Truth and Reconciliation

debbie tucker green's new play at the Royal Court is a brilliant piece of work. I've always liked her writing - stoning mary was another beautiful play - but this time she combines her characteristic poetic language and provocative stance with an amazing manipulation of space which makes the play speak with great immediacy. When you first enter the room, the audience chairs are distributed around the playing area (theatre-in-the-round, basically). You have to choose where to sit with care. A lot of the chairs have reserved notices on them - often saying things like "Victim's Family" or "Witnesses" - which lead you to believe they will be used in the performance, although in fact many are not. Every chair has the name of a victim from a recent conflict carved onto the seat. The chair I sat on had the name and dates of a little girl from Bosnia, killed in her first decade. It was, to say the least, discomforting. On Friday night, there were also surtitles for the hard of hearing, so another factor around justice and its relationship to where you sit came into play.

What was so exciting about all of this was how it blended into the performance itself. The first line referred to the hardness of the chairs for the families coming to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The mother of a victim felt unable to sit in the room while she waited for the perpetrators. How people sat in relation to one another, how this reflects power structures and power struggles, became integral to the performance. There's been much talk of the theatricality of such events - and now the links were made explicit, implicating us as an audience in the reality of the political and moral crises under exploration.

Only two characters ever got to sit in the centre of the stage - and they were both ghosts. A Rwandan man and the South African child whose mother refused to take a chair. They were evoked to speak to those who had killed them, those whom they haunted, those who knew exactly how they died. But, even at the centre of the stage, they could not speak directly to those they had left behind and who were desperate for knowledge of them.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I thought this film was wonderful. I came out of it feeling that the world had changed. People walking at night looked suddenly sinister, seething with subtext. Getting into the car to drive home seemed full of meaning and menace. The film had generated an atmosphere and I was still living in it - a real object lesson in dramatic art.

The Alec Guinness TV series was hugely influential on me in my teens, and I really didn't expect a two-hour adaptation to be comparable. Actually - in some ways it's better. Gary Oldman's performance as Smiley is astonishing - he is as mild-mannered and unassuming as Guinness, but he is also bitter, edgy and deeply disturbed. In one fantastic (and very theatrical) scene he is quite drunk (Guinness's Smiley would never have been drunk), and re-lives his one meeting with his great adversary Karla, using an empty chair to stand in as the other man. When the camera then takes Karla's viewpoint, the effect is totally chilling.

As with any film version of a complex book, there are losses. The mole is unmasked very near the end of the film, and Smiley's interrogation of him, which is the core of the novel and was brilliant in the TV version, is very brief here. Some of the great lines about the mole's loathing of America and Britain's role as "America's whipping boy" are sadly missed - I remember Ian Richardson delivering these with great elegance. But TV is more novelistic than film - and this film does what it needs to do with great elegance and power.

Whenever I see something really good, I try to learn from it. The next show is going to be about intensity and claustrophobia: I knew that anyway. Now I've maybe got a bit more idea how to go about it.

The Golden Dragon

Carissa, Zeynep and I all saw this fascinating piece at the Arcola last night. It's the first production my old university chum Ramin Gray has done in his new position at ATC - and it's characteristically inspiring stuff. The text is from a German writer called Roland Schimmelpfennig, and it looks at globalised economics and human trafficking through the microcosm of a Chinese restaurant and the various people who live in the block above it. I found the play's form really exciting - it's a storytelling piece in which the five actors play characters as far removed from their own persona as you can be - particularly in terms of age and gender. The entire cast is white - and that's been a source of some controversy - but for me it worked, precisely because there was no attempt to represent race or any other biological aspect of humanity. The actors were honest about who they were - a group of people in London right now, telling a story in a more objective, detached, but none the less affecting way. It's a different approach from our own, and every bit as valid.

Ramin asked us to join him for a drink - which turned out to be ATC's fundraising gala. He's laying lots of stress on international work with the company, as his speech / fundraising pitch made very clear. But it's not in competition with us in any way - Ramin's approach is collaborative, but it's also very clearly writer-led, and it's not cross-cultural in the way our processes are. I think we probably need to work quite carefully to define ourselves more precisely, so that people know what we do and why we are different.

Chat to Nick Williams, who used to be our ACE officer, and is now Executive Director at ATC. He fills me in on the current situation with booking tours. And I also get to chat with Maria Delgado, who is Chair of the company, and whose interests overlap with mine all over the place! I'd been reading her notes in the London Film Festival programme, and feeling annoyed that I'm going to be away for the whole of October. Maria says it's a particularly strong programme this year.

Woyzeck on the Highveld

As so often, I am hugely grateful to the Barbican's programmers for the chance to see a legendary piece of theatre. I'd known about William Kentridge's work with Handspring puppets for years (I mean, Handspring did War Horse, right?) - but never had the chance to see these pieces, which are so powerfully embedded in the early years of South Africa after Mandela's release, at the same time as drawing off European classics. Ubu and the Truth Commission is the most famous (and I missed it at LIFT all those years ago), but Woyzeck on the Highveld was actually first, and in many ways defined the new theatrical language of puppetry for adults which has become so important in recent years.

In spite of being nearly 20 years old, the production feels incredibly contemporary and immediate. I loved the combination of puppet performance (often with the puppeteers thrillingly visible, their intense concentration a model to us all), with scratchy charcoal animation and equally scratchy music. You could see exactly how everything was done, and that made it all the more magical. Magic in the theatre happens when the audience does know how something is achieved. You don't need high-tech: you just need concentration and integrity.

Slave - A Question of Freedom

I was at Riverside Studios last night for the opening of Slave - A Question of Freedom: the play that won the first Pete Postlethwaite Award in Manchester earlier this year. It was an extraordinary night - and not just because of what was happening on stage....

The play re-tells the life story of Mende Nazar, who was born in Nuba, and was taken into slavery at the age of 12, during the Sudanese Civil War. This was 1994. She was trafficked to the UK, and finally escaped slavery in 2000. It took several more years before she was granted refugee status: apparently "slavery is not persecution" in the eyes of the Home Office.

The play is engaging enough, especially after Mende's arrival in London, although the captors are constantly portrayed as melodramatic villains (there's even some wild laughter about rape), and Mende's childhood is portrayed as a rural idyll, which seems odd given that she is now trying to raise funds for a school and supplies of clean water. The morality seemed too simple: we all know that slavery is appalling, so how on earth can it still be happening, right here, right now? The central question was left unanswered.

But none of this mattered, given that Mende herself was in the audience, and sitting quite near to me. I could hear her crying at the accounts of rape and brutality. At the end, she was brought onto the stage, to a standing ovation, and made an emotional speech of thanks to the company. And then she said: "If I can make a difference, so can all of you". Which is true. She had absolutely nothing, and now is a celebrated campaigner. So people who have something have the responsibility that goes with it.

Oh yes - the director's father collapsed just before the interval and had to be taken to hospital. Apparently he was OK - but it was another moment of emotion and spectacle...

Lebanon

I was at Central this afternoon, doing a panel discussion on "Narratives without Borders". Geoff Colman had asked me to speak alongside himself and Maya Zbib from Zoukak Theatre Company in Beirut, as part of the Haymarket's Masterclass series. It turned out that Maya is in London as part of her involvement with the Rolex mentor scheme, and her mentor is none other than Peter Sellars. So - much in common from the start. The discussion was fascinating, as much as anything because our positions on so many things seemed to be so similar, even though we were starting from such different places - both geographically and culturally. Zoukak is a collective in the fullest sense - there is no single director, and every project is evolved collectively. Border Crossings does have a director (me) and doesn't have a permanent ensemble - but the company's core methodology, bringing together artists from wildly differing cultural backgrounds and theatrical styles, necessitates a collective approach.

The audience was quite young, very focussed and very excited. Lots of people were asking about the riots, and how theatre might respond. I guess one reason was Maya's presence, and a sense that she and Zoukak might in some way be "responding" to the long wars of Lebanon and the current changes in the region. They are, of course, totally engaged with what is happening around them - and so are we. But we both found ourselves saying today that the role of the artist is not the same as that of the journalist or the social worker. Yes, culture can and should respond to historical change - but it requires time and reflection to do so. Yes, culture can empower and engage disaffected youth - but it cannot be applied like a sticking plaster; it needs to be integrated into the fabric of society in order to be truly civilising.

Greenbelt

Bank Holiday Monday saw me making a trip down to Cheltenham - to the racecourse, in fact - for the Greenbelt Festival, where I'd been asked to give a talk after a screening of Our Generation. It was one of the most important films we screened in Origins - a documentary about the Howard Intervention in the Northern Territory, which was Critics' Choice in Time Out, and which fires up audiences, turning them into instant activists!

I was a bit dubious about Greenbelt, given that it is vast, open air, summery and Christian - a combination which suggested I was in for a lot of happy-clappy evangelical bigotry. In fact, my prejudice could not have been further from the truth. The festival combines an intelligent and broad-minded approach to faith with a real concern for social, economic and political justice (Palestine featuring particularly strongly around the various tents), and a very positive ecological agenda. The talk after the film lasted for more than an hour, with an audience who were deeply concerned and committed to the ideas we were dealing with. It was only after the formal end of the debate that I was asked, very politely, whether I was a Christian myself. I suspect the questioner actually wanted to know if I had ideas about involving churches etc. - he certainly wasn't out to save my soul!

The political film programme at Greenbelt is organised by Tipping Point, run by a fascinating and energetic woman called Deborah Burton. I suspect there is going to be an ongoing partnership here: Tipping Point do monthly screenings of politically conscious films with talks at the Lexi. That's something we would definitely support....

Sheelah's first week

Border Crossings` new General Manager is Sheelah Sloane. Sheelah has worked as Tour Manager and Lighting Technician for Shared Experience, Glasgow Citizens and Albany Empire. She was General Manager for Theatre-rites and Quicksilver, and more recently Islington Music Forum. She has project managed a range of young people’s theatre projects and site-specific productions, working with professional theatre artists and participants from London’s culturally diverse communities.

Sheelah is very welcome to the Border Crossings team! We were sorry to say goodbye to Lance Bourne, who saw us through Origins 2011. We`re also very happy to have the help of our office interns: Cloris Ng from Hong Kong, Zeynep Incir from Turkey, and Aike Senna Broens from the Netherlands. An intercultural office indeed!

Riots

It's very difficult to respond to what happened in London last week. Returning from the States felt like walking into a war zone - usually I've felt it was the other way round. It's a huge warning shot across the bows of our social ship - and if we don't respond, the next one may sink us. It was strange, as we worked on the documentary we're doing about our Origins work on Maori heritage, to hear my own voice saying that London needed to learn about community cohesion. The idea has a much more urgent meaning now.

The response from Westminster has, perhaps inevitably, been short-termist and short-sighted. Art takes the long view. I had an email this morning from Jonathan Chadwick, who is a very thoughtful director, also very interested in interculturalism, asking if a space might be created in which theatre-makers and the like could consider ways of responding. That sort of space is very needed right now - there has to be consideration and a long-term strategy for an enormous project: there is a whole culture to be achieved.

In Saturday's Guardian there was a letter from a Venezualan man, pointing out the way in which El Sistema has been instrumental in diffusing the culture of violence there. It sounds crazy - teach kids to appreciate beauty, to love music, to perform, and there will be peace on the streets - but it is actually true. Our work is urgent and central at the current moment.

The Museums of San Francisco

A bit more time to explore - in between meetings and actors' auditions at the Opera. San Francisco has a wealth of culture - I am going to enjoy being here for a month, if I can find any time around what looks like an insane rehearsal schedule.

There are three exhibitions here at the moment which won't be around come October, and I've managed to take them all in. The Asian Art Museum, which is a complete treasure-house on all sorts of levels, has an exhibition about Bali, much of which is about performance as something integral to the way of life. There are the famous shadow and rod puppets, of course - but there's also material about the dances of the Barong masks, and the performative rituals associated with cremations.

At the Modern Art Museum, there's a fantastic exhibition of the paintings collected by the Stein family (Gertrude, Leo, Michael and Sarah) in Paris in the early years of the 20th century. I'd read a lot about this in the John Richardson biography of Picasso - wonderful to see so many of the original paintings gathered together. In particular, there are Picasso's first forays into mask-like portraiture, including a surprisingly tiny self-portrait, and the incredible portrait of Gertrude Stein herself. The exhibition also has loads of Matisse, purchased mainly by Michael and Sarah, as well as the revolutionary Woman with a Hat, which still feels radical and wildly colourful when you encounter it in the raw. One of the curators has written a piece suggesting that these radical movements in painting took place in "tranquil times" in comparison to the turbulent 21st century..... what about Guernica? Still - it's interesting that he suggests the abandonment of the representational allowed artists to think of the painting as an object in its own right, operating in the world by virtue of its presence.

The third exhibition is the smallest, but for me the most relevant and specific. It's a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Angels in America, called More Life! It has costumes, props, videos and photos, Tony Kushner's desk.... and, fascinatingly, his original notebooks. The layout is very instructive. He writes down ideas as if they are lines of dialogue, without allocating them to characters or situations. And yet they form a sort of conversation. This is how his work is so brilliantly dramatic, so totally dialectical - he's constantly having a dialogue with himself.

And there was an image of Nancy Crane, playing the Angel. Our old friend, here on the walls of San Francisco.

Foreign Cinema

I've been at large in San Francisco - helped by the fact that the technical work on Xerxes has been much smoother and simpler than expected. Paul Pyant, the Lighting Designer, has been here too - and we've been trying out a different restaurant each night. Carissa is from San Francisco, so there have been some insider tips. Last night we were at a wonderful place called Foreign Cinema, which does indeed screen European films in its courtyard, in case you don't fancy chatting over the delicious food. This city is the food capital of the US, with a restaurant for every 28 inhabitants.

We got through our cue-to-cue by lunchtime today, so I was able to spend some time exploring. I went up to the San Francisco Art Institute, which is an art school but also happens to contain an original Diego Rivera mural - the first one I've ever seen in situ. It is totally incredible. As expected. The bonus was an exhibition of contemporary work, called East Meets West. Most of this is rather ordinary, but there is one stunning piece of work by an artist called Amie Siegel - called Black Moon. It's partly an hommage to Louis Malle, but it's also a fascinating use of film in the gallery setting, projected in such a way that you feel very much involved in the post-apocalyptic narrative, alone in a dark room with a screen that covers an entire wall.

On to the legendary City Lights bookstore - where I am able to buy a signed copy of Winona LaDuke's book All Our Relations, plus some other indigenous materials from the vast stock on display - and (of course) a copy of Howl. Well, you can't leave San Francisco without a copy of Howl, can you?

San Francisco

I flew out to San Francisco yesterday. Nothing to do with Border Crossings - though as so often with freelance work there are lots of possibilities in the trip - but to re-work Xerxes again. It's essentially the same show I did in Houston last year, with very few cast changes, so in theory it should be quite an easy job. In theory. I spent the morning watching the video of the Houston production and having a rush of "Oh - is that what we did? How are we going to get something that complex back in a very short time?" The system here is very odd: we don't actually rehearse till October, but we're doing much of the technical work now, a long way ahead of rehearsal proper. I just hope it doesn't mean we can't change any staging because of where the lights are.... luckily this is quite a bright show, so we ought to be OK!

The city is very different from other parts of America. I had a lousy introduction to it last night when I stumbled jet-lagged into the Tenderloin district, and found myself surrounded by homeless people pushing shopping trolleys containing all their worldly goods, and drug addicts in incoherent rages. It was deeply depressing. Today I discovered that this is not typical, and that San Francisco is rather an attractive place! I picked a museum at random, and went to the Museum of the African Diaspora. I'm not sure it's a museum in the conventional sense - there are no artifacts to speak of - it's more of an historical centre, with displays exploring slavery, the Haitian revolt, Mandela, African music and food, plus an archive where people can type in their own family histories. There's also a wonderful temporary exhibition of Siddi quilt-making. The Siddi are people of African ancestry living in India as a result of the Indian Ocean slave trade and similar - I knew a bit about them already because Rustom talks about his work with the Siddi of Karnathaka in our Theatre and Slavery book. I'd not seen pictures before, though, and I'd certainly not seen the lovely vibrant quilts which the women make. The exhibition is linked to an initiative to help them make some money for the community out of this craft. Here's the link:
http://www.henrydrewal.com/sales.html

The Tree of Life

I went to see The Tree of Life last night. It was, I admit, with a degree of trepidation. For one thing, some aspects of the film (which I'm sure must be at least partly autobiographical by Terrence Malick) seemed a little close to my own life (actually, as things turned out, that wasn't disturbing at all). For another thing, the film had been met with derision, laughter and catcalls at Cannes, and with silent awe in other less jaded spaces. Neither boded too well, but - the film just sounded interesting.... and that matters. Arouse and hold intelligent interest. That's our business.

Much of the controversy concerns the film's Christian content. And it is Christian, no doubt about it. Christianity has had a bit of a bad press recently, thanks to the lunatics on the American Evangelical right and the bigots who've been elected at the last two Papal elections - but there is actually still a profound and important theologically capable and intellectually credible element in Christianity, of which the current Archbishop of Canterbury is a part. It's the faith in which I grew up, and to which I remain attracted, even loyal. So to see it explored in a film which doesn't reduce morality to simple binaries is a great pleasure.

What's more, Malick's film brings a spiritual awareness to contemporary living in surprising, unsettling ways. The central character, looking back from a middle-aged perspective on his childhood, does not overcome the past through time and contemplation, but rather becomes all the more acutely aware of its immediacy, the weight it places upon him, as he contrasts his own insignificance with the scale of the cosmos and the workings of history. Context on the grandest scale meets psychological realism. It's very easy for us to avoid the spiritual in our contemporary lives, but if we do so in art then we are actually denying what validates it. That's why I like to work with non-western traditions, where the spiritual is still explicit in performance, and with music, which simply wouldn't exist without the spiritual dimension. And bravo to Terrence Malick for attempting such a challenge in the most westernised and realism-bound medium of them all.

Two days in Germany

Last Friday and Saturday saw me in Saarbrücken. I was last there in 2004 (I think) at a conference organised by Prof. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, about the Indian diaspora. I spoke then about Toufann - and she'd asked me back to talk some more about this play, its relationship to The Tempest, and its political and cultural context in Mauritius.

It was quite an intense time - talking for nearly three hours on Friday afternoon, then screening a video interview I did with Dev Virahsawmy in the evening (with Q&A), and a long seminar on the Saturday. Still - it was a lot of fun and great to be surrounded by people who really want to know all about this work. There was an unexpected bonus in that I turned out to be a double-act with Farrukh Dhondy - a very interesting writer. Farrukh had been working with the MA students on possible creative, post-colonial responses to The Tempest - and he also talked very entertainingly about CLR James (who lived in his house for four years) and VS Naipaul. What they said about one another is not printable....

I get home to discover Farrukh has emailed me a play. Oddly, it's about the myth of Karna - a subject we had wondered about before. It's already been very well received in India....

Back to Toufann

I've been re-visiting Toufann - the Mauritian play we did as long ago as 1999 - because I've been asked to talk about it and lead a workshop in Saarbrücken on Friday. It's been strange but refreshing to go back all that time and look at the way we were working then - and at the politics we were engaged in. It's still about interculturalism and post-colonialism: but the ground has definitely shifted.

Very interesting to stumble across some work by Francoise Lionnet, the Mauritian scholar now working at UCLA, to whom Toufann is dedicated (along with Shakespeare). In her book Minor Transnationalism, she looks at the play, and indeed at our production. I find it a bit odd that she analyses the effects of that production, and the meaning generated by presenting the play in a London context, seeing as she wasn't actually there..... I also think it's a bit disingenuous of her to say that I'm wrong to regard the use of the Hindi word "toufann" to convey "storm" as harking back to an Indian past, on the grounds that Dev is from the Tamil community, not the Hindu, and that he's interested in present and future, not past. It wasn't Dev I was talking about - it was his central character Prospero, who quite clearly names his tempest "toufann", even though it's not a common Creole word (or wasn't in 1991 when the play was written), and who obviously IS interested in the past. The play critiques Prospero and his standpoint, and that's where Dev's radicalism comes out.

Where she does say something very interesting, however, is in relation to the Creole phrase "tou fann", which I had not heard being linked to the title before, but clearly is. "Tou" means "all", and "fann" means "wilts" or "decays". So the title might mean not only "tempest" but also "Things Fall Apart" - evoking Yeats and Achebe to engage in a post-colonial battle alongside Shakespeare. And (though this is not in Lionnet) the Labour Party of Iran, which is also known as "toufan".

Things fall apart. There is a storm.