Still talking about the Dilemma!

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/ArtsandCulture/Books/5576862-147/story.csp

Nice to feel appreciated!

Alaknanda's wisdom

Long chat with Alaknanda Samarth. As so often, she is incredibly inspiring, even in her deep pessimism about the present moment. "How can you put on stage the fact that everything is falling apart?" she asks me. "Even language". Of course - she's hit the nail on the head. That is the challenge - and a huge one.

I have some ideas, but they really need to be tried out experimentally. Alak tells me to contact the National Theatre Studio. Just as I decide to do so - they contact me. Which is a very exciting development indeed!

Two actors, Jeremy Tiang and Julia Sandiford, invited me to a play called Limehouse Nights. It's about the Chinatown which was in Limehouse in the 19th century, and is performed in the dilapidated old Limehouse Town Hall. A beautiful sense of ghosts hanging over East London.

More festivals

I'd never been to the Hay Festival before, even though I grew up in nearby Hereford, and my parents still live there. I'd expected the Festival to operate across the little town of bookshops, but in fact it's a posh, Anglicised version of the Festivals I've attended in Australia and New Zealand, with all the events in tents (or marquees, for Hay), somewhere in a crowded field. We went to a debate about youth and education, which included an inspiring contribution from Hilary Hodgson, who was our contact for the grant we had from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation towards O Patrin. Then listened to Ian McEwan reading from, and talking about, his new novel Solar. I'd already read the book - very quickly and with much laughter. It's a return to form by McEwan: I loved Atonement, and then felt that both Saturday and On Chesil Beach were disappointing. Solar manages to employ the ironic method McEwan used in Saturday without having the effect of patronising the characters (or the reader). Although his central figure is repulsive, he is also capable, and strangely sympathetic - his life spinning out of control, entirely as a result his own actions. I also much enjoyed the fact that this was a comic novel about climate change. McEwan spoke interestingly about this: he had been very anxious to avoid the preachy, the worthy - and so decided to come at his subject from an oblique angle. I find this very helpful at a time when all the funders are asking for socially relevant subjects and "impacts": there have to be ways of making art which allow for this and yet are still artistic instead of being dull propaganda. McEwan has found one.

In the evening, we listened to a Christy Moore concert. I've loved this singer for years - a great teller of moral and emotional truths. I'd never heard him live before, so this was a real treat.

I find Festivals more and more appealing: they really allow people to clear some space, stop their everyday mania and contemplate other things over a period of time. Far better than a show hastily snatched at the end of the day, after a quick meal and before the last train. I very much want to do another Origins, and have also been chatting to a number of people about joining forces, so that other Festival events can get an Origins input. There's a lot of excitement about the initiative across the globe... this morning I met up with a Native American storyteller who was in London and wanted to chat about it. And I'd also like to get the work we create into more Festival settings: it somehow seems more appropriate for our audiences to be receiving the work in that kind of environment.

Eurydice

I watched Sarah Ruhl's play Eurydice at the Young Vic last night. I found it whimsical, charming and magical... though I am not in agreement with many of the critics, it has to be said. Maybe I just enjoyed it because it was the first thing I've seen in six weeks which wasn't directed by me.... but I suspect it's more to do with the playfulness of this American writer's voice, and her daring interweaving of mythic and dream-like material with something close to aspects of American social reality. Magical realism, or something approaching it, is, after all, what I enjoy doing in the theatre. The inter-penetration of different worlds, of complex visible and invisible realities. You don't get much more invisible than the realm of the dead - or closer to our emotional heart.

Ling Skypes me from Beijing. She's working with a company that wants to do Brecht's Good Soul of Szechuan at the National Theatre, and she wants me to advise on the production. It opens the week before Re-Orientations is due to hit Shanghai - which could oddly work quite well if they want me just before the opening and at the start of the (lengthy) rehearsal period. It would be interesting to colour the rehearsals with some immediate experience of China again. And perhaps pick up the odd prop and costume item....

Long chat with Nick Moran about the technical side of the show. We need to find ways of integrating the lighting - which Nick is keen should not be set ahead of the performances, but should have an improvised element like the rest of the show - with the very solid pre-recorded elements of video and sound. Except, of course, that some of the video and sound is live too. Hmm.

The board met on Tuesday. Very pleased that Martin Bloom will be joining us. He's currently in China, having rather more commercial board meetings! We discuss the effects of the election on funding for us. It's clear that the cuts are not going to miss out the arts budget.... in fact, our current record on applications suggests that the economic situation is already biting very hard. Emma rightly says that the only way in the new climate is to build relationships with business and individual donors - which is the American model. But how????

Living in an unsettled time

I've been back in the UK for just over a week, and it has been a very remarkable week. After our election last Thursday, it's got to Tuesday and it looks as if David Cameron might finally be about to limp battered and bruised into Number 10, having conceded vast amounts to a Lib-Dem party that actually didn't get anywhere like the number of votes it should have done on the basis of the campaign.

Everybody is treating this as if it's a bizarre event - but globally, and certainly in Europe, coalitions are the norm. In fact, Europe now has only three remaining majority governments - in France, Malta and (wait for it) Greece. Hardly a recipe for perfection, then. The fact is that coalitions, and their attendant negotiations, are the essence of a consensual democracy. In recent years, they have been waylaid by the centralising of party power in the leaders' offices. Before that, parties were also mini-coalitions, which only evolved in the first place to facilitate the inevitable process of give and take involved in forming a government. I said before the election that a hung Parliament would be the best result because it would re-vitalise our democracy - and nothing I have seen in the last few days undermines that idea. Who knows - we may even get a Tory-led government which brings in a form of PR and raises the tax-free allowance to help the poorest workers.

Talking of helping poor workers.... (!) we've had some positive results on some of our recent funding bids. The Swedish Embassy is helping us, as is the Commonwealth Foundation, and Nick Moran has some funding for the research aspect of lighting the show. It's still not as much as we need - so we've had to take the difficult decision to stage only Re-Orientations this autumn, rather than the full Trilogy. Which said - that's the new show and the one we are most proud of - so there's still a very big and exciting project here!

Also sent in another EU bid - this time for a project with Palestine. All fingers crossed, then....

The reviews for the Houston Xerxes are out. They are all really good - but here's a link to my favourite!

Artists' processes

We had the dress rehearsal for the Houston Xerxes last night. Opera being opera, we now have a gap before the opening night, during which the most I can really do is phone the singers with some notes and explore the city. And catch up on admin.

It's been fascinating to work with this cast. Often I've felt that opera singers have a different approach to the creation of a performance from actors. The norm is that they sing the same roles in lots of different productions, so they know the text and the music well, and expect the director to provide something called "the production", which tends to mean lots of things to remember. What's been different with this group has been the open-ness to growth and process. It probably helps that they've not sung the roles before - but I think it's also to do with a particular approach which certain special singers have, which is closer to that of an actor. For somebody like Susan, direction is not just a set of notes - it's a creative dialogue which allows her to develop a performance in which music and acting are integrated and indivisible. She didn't turn up knowing the music - in fact it took her quite some time to learn it while we were rehearsing. And the reason for this is that she can't learn it unless it makes sense to her, unless it's something she can inhabit. The resulting performance is - to my, admittedly biased, mind - one of the most extraordinary things I've seen on an operatic stage.

Still working out some of the admin aspects of Re-Orientations for the autumn. As so often for us, there's going to be a last minute element to the project. I guess it's just the context in which we are operating - but it would be so nice to be free of these concerns in the way I have been on Xerxes. For a director just to direct is a rare privilege these days.

The Rothko Chapel

When I first heard I was coming to Houston, there were two places I felt I really had to visit, alongside all the operatic goings-on. One was the Space Centre (which should happen on Wednesday) - the other was the Rothko Chapel. I'd known about this space for years - ever since I first started researching Rothko as a visual inspiration for The Great God Brown in (I think) 1993. He then became a major source for one of the early Border Crossings shows - the multi-media devised piece I did as a solo show, Departures / Arrivals. In that production, I played Rothko on film (though I look nothing like him!), as well as a version of myself on stage. We used imagery from his work and quotations from his letters in the form of projected text. His incredible use of emptiness to portray so much of the contemporary human condition carries on being a huge influence on me. The stage spaces for the Trilogy, and even for pieces like Bullie's House, Mappa Mundi and Double Tongue, all owe something to this aesthetic - and, more importantly, to its underlying spiritual power.

The Chapel is in an area of Houston which was bought by an incredibly wealthy philanthropic couple called the Menils, who collected art from all over the world, including an amazing selection of Greek vases and a vast array of Magrittes. Their collection is now on free display in an ever-changing exhibition space, which currently features a whole series of very funny, and very disturbing interventions by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (he's the one who did the Pope being struck by a meteorite). The presence of this iconoclast is another tribute to the open-mindedness of the Menils, who were, after all, devout Catholics - they also endowed St. Thomas's University in this same area of Houston, which appears to teach everything within a Thomist framework.

The Rothko Chapel, however, is not Catholic. In fact, it isn't even Christian. It is visited and used by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus... you name it. It is a space of contemplation, meditation, and spirituality in the widest sense. What you do there may or may not involve a deity. To my mind, Rothko's paintings are about the spiritual meaning of the deity's absence (or apparent absence), in the contemporary world. They seem to work like icons - providing a bridge into another reality - but that reality is empty. His fourteen vast canvases, nine of which form three triptychs, are open shimmering spaces of black, dark reds and deep purples. They are not about "glory" or "redemption" or "consolation". They are about our need to face up to emptiness, and to find a relationship with that vast void which envelopes our existence.

I went twice during the day. The first time there were quite a lot of people there: including one who was trying to take photos and set the attendant scurrying towards him. The second time, after I'd been to the Menil Collection, I was able to sit there on my own with the paintings. It was totally silent, apart from the attendant occasionally turning the page of her newspaper. The silence was like a noise. And the emptiness of the paintings was like a fullness - shimmering and numinous, overpowering with the presence of absence.

Outside, there is a pool, with a broken obelisk by Barnett Newman. It's set in a little garden. The sun was very hot, and the birds were singing.

The size of the space

Apparently the Americans regard the Brown auditorium as "small", because it "only" has 2500 seats. Hum.... I've worked in theatres with many more seats than that, which were much smaller. In ancient Greece, there were theatres which would fit many times into the Brown, yet seated twice that number (admittedly the ancient Greeks were significantly smaller than the Texans and less conscious of personal space). What strikes me as odd about American theatres is the amount of empty space, with the circles not even starting until the rear of the stalls. So the seats at the back of the balcony are miles from the stage. When a space uses the vertical dimension, and when it curves the circles (so called for a reason), then even very large numbers of people can be quite close to the stage. I'm finding the scale of the Brown space a big challenge. Luckily I have a cast who are used to this scale of work.

A bit of bad news on Re-Orientations. In spite of huge enthusiasm from their staff, the Heritage Lottery Fund have turned down our application. It's mainly a blow to the Education programme we'd intended to associate with the work - but it does also have an impact on the main project. Lots of the inevitable re-budgeting and emailing..... We will not be daunted!

On a very different note - I phoned my Dad today, because it was his 82nd birthday. He'd spent it... at work. Dealing with Council business, answering memos and emails. I can't help but be impressed.

Queen of Spades

Will Lacey and I went to the opening of HGO's Queen of Spades last night. Will had seen the production before - it was originally done in Wales by Richard Jones: I'd never even seen the opera. One of those increasingly rare moments when I get to encounter a classic piece that I don't know at all (it's about twenty-five years since that happened with my last Shakespeare!). I know Onegin very well, having worked on and written about the Glyndebourne production - and there were times when this evoked memories of that.... Tchaikovsky clearly had a thing about old nurses putting young girls to bed. But generally this piece is much more nihilistic, fatalistic and altogether strange than the earlier opera.

This makes it an ideal piece for a Richard Jones production - and, as he often does, he's set it in an early 20th century grubby world, with more than a nod to Freud's Vienna and Berg's Wozzeck. There are some stunning theatrical moments - the old Countess dying like Marat in a bath; her ghost returning as a huge skeleton; Herman's nightmare being viewed from above, with the bed vertical on a painted perspective back-cloth. And the tenor, Vladimir Galouzine, is extraordinary. After the first scene, Will whispered "That has got to be the loudest voice in the world". Not only that, but he is also an incredibly intense actor, and, in spite of singing more than everybody else put together, he doesn't sound remotely tired at the end. Wow.

It was also great to see the HGO Chorus doing a different show. They are every bit as good in this as they are in our Xerxes.

Funding for Palestine

We're planning a possible new project in collaboration with Ashtar Theatre in Palestine. If we're to pull this off, we really need to get another EU grant, and the deadline is fast approaching. I'm trying to co-ordinate this at the same time as rehearsing Xerxes. I realised yesterday that there are lots of documents requiring signatures from our partners - and have just spent a couple of hours emailing them all out for printing, signing, and sending on. It's a logistical nightmare with limited time available to pull it off. Technical rehearsals start tonight, but at least that means I get a day off tomorrow and some free mornings over the weekend, when I can work on this. Coffee may become quite important, I think.

The opera is getting more exciting by the day. Sonia and Will are very interesting on the process. Apparently, it's quite rare for an opera director to examine the text with the singers. Most "direction" is actually choreography. So, I gather I'm making some ripples here - though in a good way!

Texan times

I'm trying to keep up with my Border Crossings work at the same time as directing Xerxes here in Houston. Not easy - since the rehearsals are intense, run for six days a week with a variable day off, and often include evenings. And I have a three-session day tomorrow. Still - somehow this week I managed to get an application in to Cultures Action France towards the costs of Denise and Micha's work on the Trilogy, and to begin another EU application for a project we're hoping to do in collaboration with the Palestinian company Ashtar. A lot of their work is in the tradition of Boal - very interesting as a politically open and egalitarian approach to devising. The forms for the application are, of course, very complicated! I have until May to submit, so I ought to make it. The best time for working on this seems to be in the morning when we have an afternoon and evening rehearsal - that way I remain awake!

Xerxes is proving very exciting. It's partly because the cast is so great, and partly because the rehearsal method that has emerged from my collaboration with Will Lacey is really allowing us to integrate music, text and drama in a much fuller way than is usual in opera. The virtuosity of singers like Susan Graham isn't just showy for the sake of it (though it's certainly very impressive!) - we are also making ornamentation which is about the character's intention and emotional state. Very inspiring.

Xerxes in Houston

This has nothing at all to do with Border Crossings: it's completely a freelance job. I'm in Houston, Texas, directing Xerxes for the opera company here. It's the old Hytner production, which I've revived several times in London - but here it doesn't have the status of something from the company's stable, so we are able to be much more free and inventive. I also have the most amazing cast of opera singers I've ever been lucky enough to work with. Susan Graham is Xerxes, and David Daniels is Arsamenes. Probably the greatest mezzo and certainly the greatest counter-tenor in the world. Then there's Laura Claycomb, Heidi Stober and Sonia Prina - every single one of them world-class voices. And nice people with it. Mind-blowing.

I'm enjoying the working relationship with Will Lacey, the conductor. He's very open to a proper creative dialogue, so we can make the music work dramatically, and make the drama work musically. It's a rare privilege to be allowed in to discussions about ornamentations, and to work so closely on the musical, as well as textual, considerations in the Recits. And, in Handel, Recit is the key to everything.

Houston itself is also mind-blowing, but in a very different way. There's little that's picturesque or culturally elegant about the city - it exists because there's oil in Texas, and money all around it. Every day I walk past the old Enron building. Halliburton is here (although the official headquarters moved to Kuwait just as Obama came into office...). The airport is called George Bush International. You get the picture? I do feel quite foreign here!

Witi Ihimaera

I'm writing this in Houston, Texas. I arrived here yesterday, grabbing just a week at home between New Zealand and the States! A very busy week it was too - with a board meeting by conference call, briefings for the publicity designers (Eureka!), and the inevitable work on funding applications. So it's only now I've got a moment to cast my mind back to the flight from New Zealand back to London (with an overnight stopover in Korea, would you believe?), and the Maori texts I was reading.

One of these was The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. I knew about this novel because of the film - but I had no idea just how brilliant it would be as a piece of writing. The blend of contemporary "reality" (in the conventional, Western sense) with the mythic and spiritual realities of Maori culture is astonishing. It's more than a claim to post-colonial specificity - it's about a whole different way of looking at the world and being in the world, which allows human beings to relate directly to the environment and to an historical and spiritual continuum of being. Really inspiring. So I was very excited that James from Taki Rua had given me a script by Witi Ihimaera to read. It's called Woman far Walking, and it was commissioned by the company, and performed by them some years ago. They are thinking about reviving it, and wondered whether I'd be interested for Origins. Sadly, the greta novelist doesn't always make the great playwright - and this piece seemed to me to lack drama and conflict. It's about a very old Maori woman - the age of the Treaty of Waitangi - which is a quirky idea in itself, but has the effect in this play of turning her into a symbol of the Maori people, with the entire history since the treaty being re-told in the play. It becomes didactic, lecturing.

We saw Cheek by Jowl's Macbeth on Friday night. Nisha and I have a special relationship to the play - we met while working on it together. This production had lots of similarities to the one we did in Mauritius: a very fast pace, with no gaps between scenes, the presence of observers to witness even private moments, the text of the witches echoed by a surrounding ensemble, Duncan played as a blind man.... Of course, there are lots of differences too - but it was exciting to see the play being delivered with the raw energy we identified as its key!

Time to think about the Houston Xerxes now!

Taki Rua

I've been doing some exploratory workshopping with Taki Rua. Very nice to be back in a rehearsal room, working with actors. One of them is Maaka, who I already know from Strange Resting Places. There's also Aaron, who stage managed that show and is now acting in Twain, a terrific Maori woman called Ngapaki, and two other guys, Alan and James.

In the very limited time available to us, we can only really scratch the surface a bit. We manage to create a few intriguing little scenarios, and we also get to talk about Maori theatre and its place in relation to Maori people, New Zealand and the world. It's intriguing that so much Maori theatre is historical - it's to do with the ghosts, I suppose. But Maori film tends to be very contemporary. We talk about the possibility of bringing the ghosts directly into the contemporary world - but we don't really manage to do it practically. It would take some weeks to manage that!

I go to a show called 360, which involves sitting on a swivel chair while the action moves around on a circular stage. Then on to the Festival Club, where I get to meet Lissa, the Festival director, as well as the Chair of her board - a former Minister - and some key decision makers from Perth and Auckland. Very pleasing to hear that they all know about Border Crossings, and are interested in our work. Lots of DVDs to send out when I get home!

Spent the morning at the NZ Film Archive, watching a film called Patu! It's about the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand, the protests against it, and the extreme violence through which they were put down. The film-maker is Maori, but specifically Maori resistance is only a small part of the film - though an important one. It's very interesting to see the links that were made between them and the anti-apartheid struggle. Of course, it was Australia's approach to the Aboriginal people that gave the South Africans the model for apartheid.

Back to Wellington

Some real treats at Womad on Saturday: a bit surprisingly, mostly from Islamic cultures, which for some reason I didn’t expect in New Zealand! Mariem Hassan, the Saharawi singer, whose music brings the plight of her colonised people to a wider audience. Amal Murkus, from Palestine – less need to tell the world what’s going on, but she makes the most wonderful emotional connection. Gochag Askarov from Azerbaijan – a high and powerful meditational voice, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I’ve no experience at all of this area – and some of the conversations with my fellow international guests fill me with fear about the costs – but I do really want to bring music into the next Origins.

I flew back down to Wellington yesterday morning, but not before snatching a glimpse at New Plymouth’s contemporary art gallery: the Govett-Brewster. They’re showing some work by a Chinese artist called Zhang Peili, who works with video. Catapulted back into the world of the Trilogy. One piece, Actor’s Lines, is particularly resonant for me. It’s made by re-cutting a Maoist film from the early 60s. The original shows a party leader explaining to a younger man how patriotic love is superior to romantic love. Zhang’s version repeats shots and slows the scene, so that you start to see a gay sub-text. Remarkable.

Two performances in the Festival in Wellington. The first is called The Arrival, and is based on the picture book by Shaun Tan. Lots of puppetry and big visuals. The second piece is Taki Rua’s new creation, Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland. Maaka Pohatu, the gentle giant from Strange Resting Places, is in it, as is Aaron Cortesi, who came to London as their Stage Manager. The other Maori actor is Ngapaki Emery, who I saw in Vula at the Barbican. The play is based on Twain’s visit to Whanganui in 1895, and his remarks about a statue which commemorated Maori who had fought against their compatriots on the side of the colonisers. Twain condemned the statue, and sided with the rebellious Maori. The difficulty is that the play wants to explore the issue of being written about, inscribed, by the foreigner – but since Twain was sympathetic, it’s tricky to use him as a way in. The piece looks beautiful, and there are moments of magic: it’s at an early stage of development, and has a bit of a way to go! But then, that’s what these new approaches to making theatre are all about. We need to be able to experiment and to grow – and sometimes that happens in front of an audience.

Womad

Yesterday and today are my days at New Zealand's Womad, in a big park in Taranaki. Lots of Glastonbury-like standing around in vast open-air crowds, with big bands on big stages, and more esoteric fare in smaller spaces. Lots of the management-type people here still seem to be under the impression that Origins is a rock festival on similar lines - and that I'm here as a "buyer". I've been trying to explain that it's more specific, vaguer, and that, while there will be definite outcomes from this trip, we won't know exactly what they are for some time. I do very much want to increase the music element in the next festival - but we need to sort out venues and scale before we can be clear what we book. One thing I'm sure about is that the rock music, which may be in Maori but sounds like rock anywhere in the world, is not for us. On the other hand, there are some really interesting bands who are bringing the traditions of First Nations into a more contemporary medium, and dialoguing with the globalised world. One such, who I heard last night, is Pacific Curls - one Maori, one Scot, one Rotuman - who achieve a level of "fusion" I've not encountered before, and still retain clear integrity. They also sing about things that matter.

OK - off to the party I go....

Sounds Aotearoa

I saw Miria George's new play, He Reo Aroha, in Wellington on Tuesday night, with Hone directing. It's a big change after her intensely political And what remains?. This play is a love story and a comedy, with lots of Maori song. It's very charming, particularly for the large Maori audience at Te Papa, who got all the jokes about their community, and joined in the well-known songs. Great to be in the theatre and have a sense of celebration.

During the day, CNZ had given us a showcase of some work in development, both theatre and dance. I always find it tricky to work out what a show is like from an extract performed out of context, but at least I got the chance to see Atamira Dance Company, and to have lunch with Moss and Dolina, who run it. Dolina is pregnant - and tells me about Richard Nunns playing traditional instruments onto the bump. Music is very much related to healing and nurturing in Maori culture.

Wednesday morning saw me get on the plane to Taranaki, in the West. Incredible views of the volcano as we came in to New Plymouth, where Sounds Aotearoa is happening for two days, followed by Womad. Sounds is a combination of more showcasing - this time for music - with a conference about how to develop the NZ music industry. My interest in it is the indigenous work, of course. Richard Nunns played again last night, this time with a singer called Whirimako Black. The dialogue between her voice, singing traditional songs, and his solo instruments, was wonderful. It's also great to be here because there are so many other Festival directors and the like around. It's especially great to see Rhoda Roberts, who until very recently ran The Dreaming. I'm able to give her a copy of the Origins programme, with the article I wrote about her, the festival, and her film. She says it made her cry. I tell her that she'd done the same for me.

I was asked to speak on a panel about touring music to the UK and Europe. Of course, I know nothing about this, so instead I speak about Origins, about the need to hear First Nations cultures in London, and about what music can do in the global space. It seems to go down very well, if only as a break from all the "get your marketing plan right" sessions. As the conference closes, we are taken to a powhiri, where we, and all the artists who've come for Womad, are welcomed onto the marae. It's even more moving than in Wellington, particularly because so many of the international artists reply to the Maori speeches with their own words and songs. Especially, I love what one young black American performer says. His people lost their past in the time of slavery, and could not use their language or sing their songs. Meeting the Maori, and being welcomed to the marae, he felt for the first time in his life that he had a real connection to an ancestry. That he was in a sense, at home.

Powhiri

I had Sunday brunch with James from Taki Rua. The first of many old friendships to be rekindled here (and new ones to be made). James got married last week - so I feel a bit guilty at bringing him out on a Sunday morning, until I listen in on the rush of phone calls he gets. Taki Rua have a new show opening at the Festival, which I'm seeing on the 14th. It's called Mark Twain and Me in Maoriland. James is very open about it being at a comparatively early stage of its development- and that's certainly something I know about! Work which is created collectively - and that can include work with a writer - inevitably takes longer than work which is "finished", at least in terms of script, before rehearsals begin. We started Orientations in 2003, and I still wouldn't call it anywhere near "finished". But who wants a show to be finished anyway? That just means it's dead - and in theatre, the liveness is the point! I'm happy to say that Carla from Creative New Zealand is in total agreement. A rare thing from a funder...!

Today, with CNZ's other international guests, I was welcomed onto the marae at Victoria University. This welcoming ceremony, or powhiri, was familiar to me from the Opening Ceremony at Origins - but no less moving for that. Indeed, to be welcomed into a magnificent Maori house on the land itself with some knowledge of the protocols made it doubly moving.

After the ceremony, we were given lunch (a crucial part of the welcome), and then a series of talks about the meaning of Maori art in relation to its cultural context. Good to see the "buyers" being given a bit of context. If we just export the work without a sense of where its roots are, then it's just exotica. My old chums Hone Kouka and Miria George are there, and Hone talks about Maori theatre. I also get to meet Moss Patterson from Atamira, whose work I'll finally see in the flesh tomorrow, and the legendary Richard Nunns, who has almost single-handedly rediscovered the traditions of Maori music. Te Papa has some of his instruments on display, as well as an incredible sound installation to accompany its exhibition of green-stone carving. Today Richard performed a piece for traditional Maori instruments and string quartet. The NZ Quartet played music which was influenced by the sound of whales - while Richard played a series of instruments carved from whale-bone. In the marae, this was an incredible experience.

Festival Days

Wellington is tiny for a capital city - you can walk everywhere. And you bump into people you know - like in Hereford or something. I was passing the Te Papa museum, and saw Helen, who used to be the NZ Cultural Attache in London. We reminisced about our House of Commons lunch, and she told me that my comparative lack of jet lag was a sign that I was meant to stay here... I suspect it's got more to do with Melatonin, which you can't buy over the counter in England or New Zealand (not sure why), but which is freely available when changing planes in South Korea!

Creative New Zealand have booked me in to see lots of home-grown work. The most extraordinary so far is a play called Apollo 13: Mission Control, in which the audience sit at the ranks of 70s computer desks remembered from the lunar era, and participate in a cleverly constructed comic recreation of the crisis. It's all engineered so that the audience are actually just vehicles to relay information - but it's managed in such a way that it all feels very spontaneous. At one point, the phone on my desk went.

Me: Hello.
Voice: This is President Nixon. Can I speak with Gene Kranz, please?
Gene Kranz actor: Who is it?
Me: It's the President.
Gene: I'm not here....
Me: Sorry - he's just popped out....
Voice: I'm the President of the United States, and I demand to speak with him!
Me: It's President Nixon on the phone!
(Gene writes "Hang up" on the blackboard. I hang up. Laughter all around)

You get the idea.

I also saw a solo show with music called Ship Songs, with an actor called Ian Hughes telling the story of how his parents met (amongst other things). It sounds sentimental, but it wasn't. This afternoon I was at a concert by the NZ Trio. Alongside some extraordinary premieres of Piano Trios with video enhancement (close-ups of golf balls being rolled across the piano strings), they played Beethoven's Trio "The Ghost", which we use in Re-Orientations. Except they only played the first movement - which isn't very ghostly at all. We use the second.

It's actually been an eventful couple of days on the Trilogy project too, even though I'm out here. Funding confirmed from the Commonwealth Foundation and from the Swedish Consulate in China. Very festive....

Land of the Long White Cloud

I arrived in Aotearoa / New Zealand yesterday: I'm a guest of Creative New Zealand at the International Arts Festival in Wellington. The flight into the city was amazing: a clear summer's day, with a view over the South Island, complete with the Southern Alps stretching into the distance. The city doesn't feel like a capital - it's a sunny, relaxed space by a harbour, with virtually everything within walking distance. The perfect Festival city, in fact.

I'm typing this at the Te Papa Museum, where I've just met up with the Maori Director Arapata Hakiwai. He's very excited about Origins, and we talk about ways of collaborating in the future. This museum is built on Maori ideas - there's a marae, which is used very frequently, with ceremony being integrated into the use of the building. Some of the artists I already know, like Lisa, have their own contemporary readings of traditional architecture built into the fabric of the space. It even has holy stones buried in its foundations, and is lined up to the sea in an appropriate way for welcoming guests and the dawn ceremony of Matariki. Arapata tells me he's been in Chicago recently, advising on the placing of a marae in the museum there, and that this space is now being used for tribal councils by Native American groups!