Dare to be Different

It's been an amazing few weeks here, with our Participation and Learning programmes going into overdrive as the educational year heads towards its close.  Joel and Gabrielle have been working very closely with the London Māori community to complete the Oral Histories component of our Heritage Project - and the website has now been launched!  Click here.  Once you're on the site, you need to register if you want to access the fascinating archive of interviews, which are there in both written and audio form, dealing with migration, Polynesian life in London, ceremony, lifestyle and change.  There's also a great video about the project, which shows people from the community discussing why this work matters to them, and young people from Malorees School who have been working with the London Māori.  And, the process, they all got their arts awards!

Meanwhile, down in Plymouth, I've been working with a group of young refugees and asylum seekers, known as Dare to be Different, who came to the city as a dispersal centre, and who come from places as diverse as Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe - and probably a few more besides.  Two months of workshops have explored their creativity, and have drawn off their experiences, their hopes and their dreams.  It's been a fascinating and inspiring journey - and it's culminated in a performance called Division which they've presented at the Drum Theatre.

What's very salutary about this group is the complex and fluid nature of the identities they are exploring.  In some ways, they are defined by their past and by their refugee status: they have fled from persecution, and many of them have lived through far more in their early years than most people do in a lifetime.  We had one very powerful session based around the participants sharing personal stories about how their lives had changed - and many of them were astounded by what others had lived through.  And so was I.  On the other hand, they feel an intense need to move beyond that restricted identity, and to create a new way of living in the new space they have come to.  They are young people, with much to give and much to expect; so they cannot and must not be defined solely by a past over which they had no control.  Division was a terrific piece of theatre, because it was able to include a sense of what had been left behind, or perhaps absorbed - but also a sense of the lightness, the comedy present in young lives, and the aspirations and challenges of living in a new space.  

What's more, they were wonderfully eloquent about all this when we had a post-show discussion, and that discussion involved not only theatre people and friends, but also public figures like the police, the racial equality council and other public agencies.  In fact, this work became a study in how theatre can become an attribute of participatory democracy.  Something we are sorely lacking in our society right now. 

Ganesh, the Swastika, and the question of disability

Back in February, I wrote a post about Back to Back's production Ganesh versus the Third Reich, which had been showcased at APAM.  I said then how important I thought it was - and I'd only seen half an hour's worth of the material.  Now I've seen the whole thing, and it is truly extraordinary.

There are two plays at work in this performance.  One of them is the story of Ganesh making a journey to Germany in an attempt to recover the swastika.  This story alone is complex enough, with beautiful stage imagery, multiple languages (there's a surprising amount of German), Hitler and Mengele, and a growing bond between the Hindu god and a fleeing Jew with "mental retardation".  The other half of the piece deals with the making of this piece, and shows the debates between the core actors in the company, who are perceived to have learning disabilities, and their (non-disabled) guest collaborator.  The bravery of the company in sharing this material is remarkable - particularly when it comes to demonstrating in a very visceral way the eruption of frustration which can occur in the intensity of collaborative work and the privacy of the rehearsal room.  The games with the language of theatre create a sense that these scenes are a fiction derived from fact ("When we perform, there will be an audience in these seats" / "There is an audience").  When that fiction topples over into violence, and the non-disabled actor walks out on his colleagues, the dividing lines feel horribly narrow, and the attitudes of the audience are implicated.  What's more, because the backstage scenes constantly elide into the Nazi scenes, you are left with a sense that the deep prejudices of fascism are dangerously close to the assumptions made in our own society.  

It's incredibly upsetting.  It is also very funny.  And it is work of incredible intellectual insight and sophistication.  By people who are usually regarded as having very little ability in that area.  How wrong we always are when we seek to label.

Waiting for Mr. Gatz

I went to see Gatz on Friday.  For those who don't know, that meant that almost all of Friday was given over to the task - the show is more than 8 hours long (including a dinner interval).  For me, that's actually a bonus.  I've always been a fan of the massively long production: loved directing The Ring for the ENO, with the awareness that the rhythm of the show would be so very different from the quick hit, advert and tweet-length attention span we are normally expected to meet.  I love the meditational, dream-like quality of the lengthy theatre experience.  I love the way it changes the relationship between the performers and the public: I remember Tony Guilfoyle talking about performing in The Dragon's Trilogy, and saying that you just can't work with adrenaline in the same way as for a two-hour show.  It's a more mature process, somehow.

Andrew Haydon has done the honours on Gatz for the blogosphere with his insightful essay - so I'm not going to write about the whole show here, except to say that Andrew is right, and that the show is quite brilliant.   But I would just like to think a bit more about one character - Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz.  As Andrew puts it, "even Gatz's father, a tiny walk-on part, gets a whole actor to himself", and his slightly surprised tone is eminently justified.  By the third interval, I'd had plenty of time to peruse the programme, and I knew that, with only another hour and a half to go, in what is in many ways an ensemble production, one of the actors had yet to appear.  I also knew, from his programme photo, that this was the eldest actor in the company by some considerable way, and that he stated with pride that he  had "played the role of Henry C Gatz since 2005".

The play is called Gatz, rather than The Great Gatsby.  Like the dingy office setting and the deliberate metatheatricality of the whole undertaking, the change of title foregrounds the fact that everything about Jay Gatsby - certainly his wealth, his poise, and, as it turns out, even his name - is a fiction.  When Nick Carraway addresses Henry as "Mr Gatsby", he is told "Gatz is my name".  So, in a way, it is Henry who is the title character.  He finally arrives on stage seven hours into the production. Has any actor, let alone one in a title role, ever made a first entrance so far into a performance before?  Not even Godot can really match this.  And, in a way, Mr Gatz is rather like Godot.  Coming so late to the stage, he seems like a deus ex machina, particularly as he arrives not from the framing world of the office but from the auditorium - perhaps implying that the world from which the audience comes might yet throw Nick some kind of lifeline, that somebody might meet his forlorn desire to give Gatsby, in his solitary death, some element of justifiable mourning.  But, like Godot, Mr Gatz is a disappointment.  Very early in the book, Gatsby has told Nick that his family are "all dead now", so we already know that the old man was not somebody his son wished to put on show.  And this makes it even more pathetic that he should continue to hold such pride in Gatsby's wealth, that he should show Nick the evidence of Jay's youthful American dreaming, that he should blame the absence of mourners at the funeral on the weather.  It seems to me absolutely right for the Elevator Repair Service to give this "tiny walk-on part... a whole actor to himself."  His appearance, aged, dignified but deluded, at the end of the marathon, emphasises that here is yet another character outside the circle of charm.

In the programme, there's a quotation from the critic George Garrett, saying the characters in The Great Gatsby are "one and all outsiders".  I agree - but I would go further.  What the arrival of Mr Gatz seems to me to say is that everybody is an outsider, even the Father, perhaps especially him.  That there is no charmed circle.  That the American dream, the capitalist myth, the chimera of wealth, and anything we might want to call a Heaven, is by its very nature unattainable.  That the modern condition, which Fitzgerald so clearly foresaw, is one of endless and hopeless longing for the unattainable.

Huge thanks to the company and to LIFT for one of the most extraordinary productions I have ever been privileged to see.

The Platform and the Panel

An incredibly busy week.  While Britain got its extended Bank Holiday, I suffered the interculturalist's perennial problem that our international partners don't observe the same days off, and headed over to Brussels for the Platform's annual forum.  Actually, I was very pleased indeed to be there, as it was a particularly rich event this year.  I'm the official rapporteur for the Platform, so I'll be writing the whole thing up in detail, and linking to the online version - but just to whet the appetite a bit, here are a couple of highlights:

Jouetta van der Ploeg from City Museum Zoetermeer spoke about some extraordinary projects she is undertaking to link the museum to diverse local communities in this Netherlands new town.  Being a new town, the history is contained less in the preservation of objects, and more in the collection of migration stories.  A real way to give a sense of belonging.

Dusica Parezanovic from Cultural Center REX in Serbia spoke about some of her intercultural mapping projects, including an amazing one starting from the work of artist Zoran Todorovič, whose piece Cigani i psi involved attaching minuscule video cameras to the necks of a stray dog and a Roma child.  Watching from the gallery, you could only see how they were being treated - and it was impossible to tell which was which.

Eli Borchgrevink from TrAP in Norway talked about her project Viewing Palestine 2011, which gathered  thirty Palestinian artists and thinkers from a broad range of disciplines in Oslo - allowing people who are not able to meet in their own homeland to gather and exchange practice and ideas.

I whizzed back from this packed couple of days to take part in a panel at Rose Bruford on Wednesday night.  This was the start of a new research project about the role of the director in 21st century theatre, with a keynote by Richard Eyre, and a panel including James Dacre, Sarah Esdaile, Ian Rickson, Kristine Landon-Smith, Stephen Unwin, Simon Usher, and Natalie Wilson (quite a line-up).  Given that the event was called Re-naming the director, I has expected it might be concerned with new developments in the art of directing, and new ideas about the director's role both as artist and activist.  Strangely, only Kristine and I seemed to think in those terms, and I suspect that's to do with the fact that we both created our companies, and we both work with cultural diversity.  Dialogues with difference force you to think outside the box.  For most people, directing is still a craft - an interpretative role, serving a writer who is the "real" artist.  I refute that model - a director is an artist, as is an actor or a designer.  We have our own creativity and our own responsibility in terms of the work we send into the public space.  So - Kristine and I are planning a lunch.....

Enough time to welcome our new intern from Hong Kong Baptist University, Jennie Wah, and to go to the launch of Jay Griffiths' new book, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon at Sarah Dunant's house.  Jay is a very dear friend from way back, and it's always a joy to connect with her, and with other kindred spirits like Sarah.  The new book is a publishing experiment for Penguin, available only in e-book form.  And you can get it for a mere £1.99 here.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

We had an amazing day on Saturday, kicking off an exciting new partnership with Chickenshed.  As Dave Carey said in his introduction to the day, it's odd that we should be on this theatre's doorstep, and it took an Australian living in Wales to put us in touch - but thanks to Ian McKenzie-Thurley for seeing the commonalities of interest.  We're all very keen that this relationship should grow.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day was a one-day festival of Southern African culture, held at Chickenshed to complement their play The Rain that Washes, and curated by us.  It's amazing just how much you can cram into one day, if you set your mind to it.  The morning saw two storytelling sessions for children, with Nyemu and Wedzi of World Musik Makers - a Zulu couple who are wonderfully charismatic, and incredibly committed to African culture.  Nyemu tells me that they are now letting out their house in Cambridgeshire to pay for the transportation of equipment to the school they support in Zimbabwe. 

The afternoon started with Idrissa Ouedraogo's film Kini and Adams - a brilliant piece of work which shows relationships collapsing as a mining operation shifts the aspirations of a community.  There was a pretty strong discussion after that - and an even more powerful one in the panel session, Theatre for a Change.  I chaired this, with Arifani Moyo from the Indigeneity project, Christopher Maphosa (on whose life The Rain that Washes is based) and Kate Stafford from Bilimankhwe, who has herself been blogging about the day!  The discussion moved between theatre and politics, theatre for development, theatre and prison, theatre for and by children (in particular CHIPAWO in Zimbabwe), and to the very heart of the post-colonial debate.  It was particularly exciting for us to have the South African High Commissioner, Dr. Z.S.T. Skweyiya, and his wife in the room, and contributing very robustly to the debate.  There was also Dr. Ralph Mguni, the Secretary General of ZAPU, who is awaiting the fall or death of Mugabe before he returns to his Zimbabwean home.  Ralph spoke towards the end of our discussions, and made very clear the importance of cultural activism in the development of the post-colonial space.  For an organisation like ours, working at the interface between intercultural theatre and international policy, this was an inspiring afternoon.

The play, written by Dave Carey with Christopher Maphosa, and performed by Ashley Maynard (pictured) is a solo piece dealing with Christopher's own journey with ZAPU, which took him to Bulgaria with Joshua Nkomo, in preparation for the liberation of Zimbabwe, and then into a nightmare of oppression after the election of Mugabe.  Christopher came to England as a refugee, and his story again underlines the importance of cultural work with refugee communities - it was through working at Chickenshed that he once again found himself a home.  The theatre was packed, and the audience excited!

As if all that wasn't enough, we ended the day with a jazz concert from the great South African trumpeter Claude Deppa.  How exciting was that?

Wild Swans

I read Wild Swans when it first came out in the early 90s.  Thinking back, it was probably my first real encounter with modern China: a history and a culture that have become so important to my work and my life.  Since that time, we've done a lot of work around the contemporary Chinese experience and its relationship to the West.  I've met people who lived through the Cultural Revolution and the famine, people whose lives have been scarred by the horrors of the Chinese century.  And empowered by its energies and even its idealism.  So the stage adaptation of this seminal memoir, at the Young Vic, is an important piece of theatre for me. 

The book is huge and epic - and I had rather expected to sit down for a long evening somewhere between Wagner and Lepage, or perhaps more like a Shared Experience Tolstoy adaptation.  Not a bit of it.  The play is about 80 minutes long - and a sizeable chunk of that time is taken up with spectacular set-changes (which have their own power in terms of suggesting a nation very much at work, and a gradual revealing of history as one image is stripped away or exploded to reveal the next).  This means that the family saga with its complex political background is turned into something more like a parable around honesty and complicity in a corrupt society.  It's rather "Brechtian", in a way (the Brecht of the parables, not the historical epics), with a simplified acting style to match.

But Chinese history is not simple.  And neither were the moral and political questions faced by Jung Chang and her family - especially her passionately idealistic father, who was himself criticised in the Cultural Revolution and ended up in a labour camp, still hanging on to his faith in a benevolent Party.  The play is reductive in many ways - it is trying to make a very complex society and the experiences of people caught up in an especially turbulent period of its history seem "accessible", and in the process it shifts into a simplistic moralism.  The father's former girlfriend becomes a melodramatic villain: people did make use of criticism sessions for personal vendettas, but the cultural climate was ultimately more important than the private vengeance operating through it.  The unseen Mao gets the blame for an awful lot - and there's truth in this - but the implication that things suddenly got better after his death is naive, and the idea that a "modern" market-driven society is somehow inherently better than idealism gone awry is questionable in the extreme.

I should say that there is much about this production which is very strong - visually it is stunning.  But, because of the status it has been afforded in the World Stages season and the whole Olympic thing, it has a greater responsibility to its subjects in terms of cultural exchange, historical honesty, mutual respect and acknowledgment of complex truths.  Because of this status, it's getting glowing press like the Dominic Cavendish's review in the Telegraph which suggests that "it belatedly brings that vast country – and fast-emerging superpower – into our parochial modern theatrical arena."  Well, actually, no - Dominic.  Border Crossings produced Dis-Orientations; in 2006, and Re-Orientations in 2010.  Both of these were collaborations with artists from mainland China, which drew off their own direct experience of their history and their present.  And now we're working on Consumed, which will bring our journey right up to the present moment, while continuing to acknowledge the importance of the past.  Some of us haven't been parochial for a long time.  In fact, as long ago as the late 90s, I was working with Peter Sellars on Nixon in China at the ENO.  Alice Goodman's text really explored the many layers of the Cultural Revolution, and permitted no pat moralistic responses. 

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl

It was wonderful to see this play on Saturday night.  For one thing, I had known the text and its reputation for years, but never actually caught a performance, in spite of chances at the Almeida and Stratford East.  Now it's got a production at the National, and I finally got to see that it's every bit as good as I suspected.  And then some.  The play was written in 1958, only two years after Look Back in Anger - but its portrayal of life in the desperate poverty of Trinidad certainly shows up British plays from the time for the bourgeois whinges they were.  Errol John's characters are struggling to hold their lives together - and have their own idiosyncratic ways of doing so, from the never-ending graft of Sophia, to the opportunistic thieving of Charlie and Mavis selling her body to any passing American sailor.  You can understand why Ephraim wants to leave - and you so want him not to, because he'll only leave more havoc in his wake.

The production is fabulous - tons of local detail, reminding us of Mauritius (Nisha recognised exactly the cookery technique being used by Sophia).  The acting is wonderful - with Martina Laird incredible as the tough and witty Sophia.  And it was great to see my old friend Jude Akuwudike as Charley - here they both are in the picture.  Jude and I acted together in our student days - which seem rather a long time ago now!

Maori Troilus and Cressida

I was at the Globe last night to see the second and last London performance of Troilus and Cressida in Te Reo Maori, as part of the World Shakespeare Festival.  I've refracted Shakespeare through the prism of "other" cultures quite a few times myself over the years, from the Indian Tempest to the Native American Dream, via the Mauritian Scottish tragedy...  so the whole undertaking has a lot of resonance for me - and this Maori show is particularly exciting, given our ongoing work with the London community, and my recent trip to New Zealand for Origins.

The play fits very readily into a traditional Maori context, with Greeks and Trojans as warring tribes, and a great deal of macho display, ritualised combat and haka war chants.  What's particularly exciting about the coincidence of this with Shakespeare is the way it allows for an honest rendering of heightened text, with even private moments rendered into rhetoric and accompanied by gestural language.  Like Mnouchkine's Asian-influenced Shakespeare, the production provides a way into a world removed from our own, which by its strangeness serves to comment on our own.  

It was also a great social occasion for our friends at Ngati Ranana.  At the curtain call, the haka from the stage was answered by an incredibly vigorous one from the Globe's Pit, which suddenly became a totally vibrant part of the performance.  The direct communication between actors and audience was very Shakespearean - as so often, performers from a non-naturalistic tradition revitalised the theatre space, and their audience responded in kind.  

After the workshop

The workshop came to an end last week, with a sharing session for the SDAC management, and a few other invited guests.  We deliberately called it a "sharing" rather than a "showing", as we really didn't feel we had got to a point where anything was in a state to be "shown" to an "audience" - although we were definitely in a place where it was helpful to share our work with interested parties, and get their responses.

Happily, the responses were really excited.  A lot of the work we shared involved the use of technology - not because the show is necessarily going to be technology-heavy, but because those are the scenes around which we've hung the structure of the play as it's evolved so far.  We're aware of the need for more naturalistic scenes around them, and have made versions of some of them which we have since jettisoned - but they don't yet exist in a version which makes sense for the final play.  As a result, I felt the sharing was perhaps a bit imbalanced, but nobody else seemed to think that - and, very pleasingly, there was a strong sense that our approach was allowing technology to interact with live performance in a way that lifted the human story and made sense of how it operated, rather than swamping it (always the danger with new media in theatre).  The scenes which attracted the most comment were the ones which involved interaction between actors and technology to do something totally new - as I guess you'd expect.  Very pleasingly, the multi-lingualism of the piece drew no comments at all: it just seemed natural, and everybody understood as much as they needed to.

Liu Liang, the Artistic Director of SDAC, was very excited by the potential of what we've got.  He told me that the piece was much more developed and inspiring than Re-Orientations had been at the same stage.  I think he's probably right: the previous piece was apparently more polished in the "showing", but in fact very few of the characters had interesting psychological journeys in the way they do for the new play, and I ended up cutting vast swathes of the material we had shown.  This time, the sense was one of building on what had been achieved so far, rather than re-thinking anything fundamental.  Nick Yu, who is a wonderful dramaturgical adviser, suggested that we create a scene for Tony and Hui's characters "where language is not the problem".  This is spot on - we need to deepen the idea of failure in communication, so that it becomes about something very deep in the contemporary condition, way beyond the banalities of language, culture, gender and class.  

Feels like we are on the way. 

Ningbo and after

The public workshop with the students in Ningbo was really helpful to us - not least because it showed us some aspects of the play that weren't really hanging together.  We'd been a bit wary of the fact that the play is set in the business world, and opted to make the work-related story about the making of an advertisement, because we felt closer to that world. But the result was that the cultural conflicts we tried to introduce felt forced and artificial - Chinese advertising actually works in a very similar way to Western advertising - it's just that the cultural tropes employed are specific and local - as they would be anywhere in the world.  So there's not enough to hang drama on.  Good to find this out at such an early stage - and good to be pushed back towards the alien world of high finance, which is really an altogether more meaty prospect at the current moment.  We've been looking at characters caught up in a web of inter-personal connections - and, of course, they are also caught up in the complexities of the financial system.  The complexity actually is the point.  I send out some emails to various contacts who know a bit about Sino-British financial relations.  Very pleased to see that they are willing to have their brains picked.  I don't think this strand of the play is something we can create through improvisation during the current workshop - we need to put it on ice and collaborate on a writing process after the research work has been done more fully.  We know the function of the scenes in terms of the personal stories we want to tell - now we need to bring in another level.

Yesterday was spent filming some scenes which we're planning to project in the final production.  We brought in two young actors - Tie Zheng and Zhang Ying - to play younger versions of Li and Hui's characters.  Ying even looks rather like a younger version of Hui, and she has the same ease of access to her emotions - the parting scene is beautiful and very moving.  Great to bring some younger people into this process, especially after the very fruitful encounter with the students in Ningbo.  Roshni Mooneeram, our former board member who now teaches there, tells me that they always seem to be "unlocked" by our drama workshops there.  That, of course, is what theatre is for.....

Deeper into Devising

We're now a long way into the devising process, and a strong sense of the play is starting to emerge. Perhaps inevitably, in a play with three actors, it's an eternal triangle of sorts - though not at all in a conventional sense. What's exciting is the way in which things which initially appear to be obstacles are becoming the most important aspects of the piece. An obvious example is language - though we knew that before we started - but also the way in which some actors respond to particular types of stimulus, while rejecting others very strongly, can reap great rewards. Lu Xun's stories, which I had thought might form the basis of the plot structure, turn out to be very unpopular with Chinese people of my generation, who associate them with the Maoist indoctrination of their youth. I don't think the stories are Maoist - but that's the cultural baggage they have acquired here, and we'll be in trouble if we ignore that. But, in rejecting the subject matter of the stories, we've been able to make a much more interesting use of their structures - in such a way that you won't even know they are there when you see the play.

Ning Li, our new performer, is fascinating and brilliant. He's never done devised work before, but you would never know. He's improvising in both Chinese and English, researching, suggesting ideas, playing with technology and getting very excited about choices of music. The majority of his work is in film, and that shows in the way he brings together different elements of performance, as well as his ability to shift between theatricality and a much more low-key style.

Tomorrow, we are taking a train to Ningbo, to our first public involvement in the piece. We're doing a workshop session with students at the Nottingham University campus there - perhaps including some of the group whose response to Re-Orientations was so inspiring. This is a new venture - I've never involved a creative audience so early in a process before... and I'm very excited about it.

I'll let you know how it goes....

Devising behind the firewall

I feel like a smuggler. When I've been to China before, writing this blog has been OK, even though I sometimes haven't been able to read it. Facebook and Twitter have long since been barred here - and now it seems that Western blogs are also subject to the Great Firewall of China. It all seems very strange and ambiguous, given that the Chinese version of Twitter, weibo, is much larger than its Western counterpart, and was buzzing all week with political gossip around the ousting of Bo Xilai. Anyway - for whatever reason - I am sending this post out by email so that Sheelah can put it online from the office. All very under the table in smoke-filled rooms.... very Shanghaiese.

We gathered on Wednesday morning in the rehearsal room at SDAC. Tony Guilfoyle had flown in from Quebec, where he's been working on the new Robert Lepage production, so he's been battling with a 12-hour time difference. For Dori Deng, who grew up in China, it's a homecoming: she's never worked in her home country before, and now she's experimenting with multi-media and bilingualism. I don't know what I'd do without her shuttle diplomacy! Song Ru Hui, who cooked up the idea of this new show with me back in 2010, is probably even more intense and fascinating than I remember her. She's always incredibly truthful and engaged when she performs - and for precisely that reason she can't do it until she's 100% sure of and committed to what she's doing.

Our new addition is Ning Li - and he's a real find, courtesy of Nick Yu and Jackie Zhang from SDAC. Li started his career in Shanghai, but has been in Beijing recently. He's also lived in the States, and is married to an American, so he has a foot in both cultures. Devising is totally new to him, but he has shown a wonderful openness in these first few days.

So far we have spoken to people from the business world - both English and Chinese; talked amongst ourselves about the current historical moment, about culture, identity and change; played games with language and style; experimented with cameras and the web; improvised scenes and potential stories. As usual in work of this kind, the great benefits are the things you're not looking for, and the knowledge that people bring of their own culture. Yesterday Li and Hui gave me a totally new idea of what it was like to be a young Chinese person in the 1980s - leading to a very intense and touching scene, redefining how I would think of a lovers' parting.

It's very early days, and we're still unsure of what this play will be. But it feels like something very exciting is happening. Let's hope it doesn't get censored!

Pasifika

So, here I am at Auckland airport, waiting for the overnight flight to Shanghai. Very excited to be starting work on our next creative process, and also by the work I've seen here over the last ten days. One of the main reasons for coming to Auckland was the Pasifika Festival, which Rosanna was instrumental in starting some 20 years ago, and which she's been telling me I have to see. Auckland is the world's largest Polynesian city, and this Festival is the largest Polynesian cultural event. Some 100,000 people passed through yesterday. I was one of them.

What's remarkable about Pasifika is just how "grass roots" it is. Every island community has its "village" within the site, with a stage for music, dance and ceremony, plus stalls - most of which are dedicated to their food. It's an alcohol-free zone, and there's a huge stress on family - from elders to babies. I ate far too much and bought a bark painting from the Solomon Islands.

The most interesting aspects are, of course, the quirkiest. To see Samoan tattoo artists at work on the back of a man's legs is a rare treat. To encounter the traditional dances of Tuvalu, being performed not for an audience but for the community itself, in a closed circle, is another. The people of Kiribati had one of the few more politicised displays in their village - pointing out that global warming is destroying their homeland. In just five years, it is likely that this sovereign nation will be submerged. The world doesn't even seem to have noticed.

For me, the lesson of the day is to do with community engagement at the grass roots level. If we can find a way to harness the community spirit of Pacific people in London (and our current work with Ngati Ranana is definitely a move towards this) and to relate that to other communities, then we will be moving towards what Festival is all about. This doesn't mean losing sight of high culture - it means getting it to intersect with an audience which cares.

My final afternoon here was spent at the Mangere Arts Centre - a new space in the Pacific Island area of South Auckland. Many of the same issues are being tackled here: the manager tells me about her desire to get colourful images into the windows, so it stops looking like an institutional building, and people get the idea that it's a welcoming, creative space. Today it's being used to give a "trailer" to the Urban Pacific Festival in Hamburg, with whom we're intending to collaborate in some depth. It's a very interesting look at some work I would never have encountered otherwise. The added bonus is that Lemi Ponifasio of Mau is there, and we're able to talk again, continuing the dialogue we had when Peter introduced us in London a while ago. Lemi is very anxious that any engagement with Europe should be at an 'elite' level - because that's the only way you validate Pacific artists and overcome the old stereotyping. I can see his point - though, of course, it's very different from what I've just been saying.....

Tu

I first met Hone Kouka and Miria George a few years ago when they were in England for Rosanna Raymond's Pasifika Styles Festival in Cambridge. They came along to the Border Crossings Laboratory and ran a workshop for us. In the workshop, Hone was very keen to explore ways in which Maori culture and ideas could be put to theatrical use. He worked on the movement styles drawn from birds, the haka, waiata and chants. At the time, I could see he was working his way towards something. And now, several years down the line, I've seen what it was.

Tu, his new play at the New Zealand International Festival, is a big step forward for Maori dramaturgy. Hone brings the Maori understanding of time and history into the play - in Maori thought it is the past that is in front of us, because we can see it, and in this play people quite literally look at the past. The cultural forms emerge beautifully out of the characters' need for self-expression, giving physical and poetic voice to their inner journeys. It's very exciting work. What's more, it's performed in an urban marae, which is an inherently theatrical space, and lends the whole a sense of community and ritual combined. The marae is traditionally configured like a traverse stage, and Hone uses that wonderfully to articulate confrontation and journey. It's a great night.

It also has a cast of ten and a big set, so I don't think it's going to be practical for me to bring it to the next Festival. Sigh.

Mihimihi

I'm now in Wellington as part of Creative New Zealand's Flying Friends programme - seeing Maori and Pacific Island work at the Festival here. I was on the same programme two years ago - except that then the city was warm and full of light, while today it is grey and soaking. We're supposed to go to the Governor-General's Garden Party later.....

Most of us who are here as international guests came directly from Adelaide. After the 600+ people there at APAM, and the relentless schedule, this all feels a lot more manageable. As happened two years ago, we were taken yesterday to the marae at Victoria University for a powhiri, and the Maori Elders welcomed us to the land. And then, something very remarkable happened. The day moved on to a mihimihi, with an invitation to us as guests to introduce ourselves and to say something in the sacred space of the marae. There were a number of First Nations artists from across the world there, and they all said how very special this event in Aotearoa seemed to them. A woman from San Francisco said it seemed to her that this country has acknowledged the indigenous culture in a way America could never do - that it is at ease with its emerging post-colonial identity. Merindah from the Australia Council's Indigenous board said that she had come especially to learn from the Maori about how to retain indigenous identity and assert it in the public space (echoes of our conversation with Rhoda the other day). I was able to thank the Elders for the gift they were offering us - a way forward for the world on the path of truth and reconciliation. Everyone who spoke said how very much at home they felt - even those of us who were as far from home as it is physically possible to be.

Last night I went to the theatre at the Te Papa Museum to see a new piece by The Conch, whose production Vula I loved at the Barbican some time ago. This piece is called Masi, and has a heavy autobiographical element, starting from photos from the courtship of Nina Nawalowalo's parents. He was a Fijian high chief - she was a middle-class girl from England. They play chess, like Ferdinand and Miranda. The show is very beautiful, with some wonderful Fijian dancers and musicians, and at the end the assertion of the Pacific identity as the whole theatre is transformed into a meeting house, like the one we'd been in earlier that day. There is an important indigenous energy coming from this part of the world.

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.