In Brussels

I'm in the default EU capital for the annual gathering of the Platform for Intercultural Europe (which really does abbreviate to pie...). It's a two day event this year, so one overnight stay is unavoidable, though I still managed to make yesterday a very long one, getting up at 4 to catch the Eurostar and be here for 9.30 (and don't forget Belgium is an hour ahead!).

I sang for my supper in the morning, reporting back to the Platform on the Practice Exchange we hosted late last year. The report on the website is so exhaustive that I didn't have to go through everything that happened, but was able instead to talk about some of the key issues which emerged. The crucial one, which led to lots of discussion yesterday, was whether we could find a common language between people working in cross-cultural dialogue (be that in the arts, education or advocacy) and the politicians who increasingly conceived of "value" not in moral or cultural terms, but solely as something quantifiable and monetary.

The afternoon session was brilliantly done, with a series of discussions at tables around projects which members were developing in their own countries. I talked to an Italian trade unionist about his work to help Somali refugees into the labour market, a Jewish woman from Belgium about work with religious groups on gender and sexual orientation, and a woman from Cyprus who was doing cross-cultural theatre work in primary schools. There's clearly huge potential for future collaborations in this network.

The footprints of creation

The workshop over, I had a weekend in Botswana with David and Adala, before a "planning for the future" meeting on Monday morning, and the long flight home. Currently blogging in Johannesburg airport, which is not such a terrible place as airports go, but hardly the most inspiring place to be for five hours. They charge colossal sums for internet access, so I'm determined to use every minute I paid for!

On Saturday night, we were back at Maitisong, where the workshop took place. This time we were in the audience for a Punjabi community event. I had no idea there could be so many Sikhs in Gabarone. All ages too - from babies to grandmothers. They had brought over a performance group from India (via South Africa), who were very good. The first half of the show involved martial arts - the highlight being the smashing of a coconut on a man's head by a blindfolded performer armed with a club. "Don't try this at home", they told us. The second half was bangra, with lots of noise and bling - and this was the part of the show which led to the spontaneous audience participation. Young men whooped and leapt on one side of the stage, and little girls on the other. As the local women started to dance, the little girls, who seemed to have learnt the moves while their mummies practiced, invaded the stage, only to be shooed away by an irate professional. It was all totally anarchic and wonderfully affirmative of community. We even got curry included in the ticket price.

Sunday morning saw a tour of the touristy sites in the area of Gabarone. Most exciting of these was probably the ancient rock art at Matsieng - where there are footprints which the Tswana say are those of the first man. Given that humanity did indeed originate not far from here, and that this is a very beautiful place, I was happy to credit it as the Garden of Eden.

I've really valued David's friendship during my time in Botswana. It's rare to find somebody you "click" with quite so instantly, and who has such a wealth of life experience and theatre knowledge that he is so willing to share. His stories of life in Malawi during the last days of the dictatorship are at once thrilling and terrifying.

Before the airport this morning, we sit down with Jane and talk about what we can do to develop links further. I'd be very excited to work in Botswana again, of course - and I think we can be of use to them in terms of developing the infrastructure for a company that Jane is so keen to create. There are certainly lots of possibilities in these new links!

Praise Singing

We had our sharing session for the workshop this morning. David, and Jane from the Botswana Society for the Arts, pulled in a reasonable crowd of interested people, with the actors' friends and families (including one rather embarassed mother) making up the rest of the audience. I had been feeling a bit nervous about this event - it's always a bit strange to show work which isn't made with the purpose of performance - but in fact the audience was incredibly responsive. We showed a number of the movement-based exercises we'd been working on, including a lovely performance of posed tableaux, and some of the mini-plays that had been made in response to various creative stimuli. As when they were first formed, I was surprised and delighted by the specifically Botswanan feel of these - the sense that we'd managed to tap into the psyche of the place. The cumulative effect reminded me a bit of Third World Bunfight - the rapid shifts between the spiritual, the farcical, the political and the personal is very exciting in this environment. As so often at the end of a workshop, I was left wanting to carry on, and to see whether this work might become a piece of theatre. David, Jane and I are having a meeting on Monday morning to see what we can plan... who knows? The British Council people, who paid for my flight here, came in during the week, and the director of the Alliance Francaise was here this morning, and seemed to enjoy herself.

At the end of the showing, Jane got me to present certificates in a slightly headmaster-ish way - they looked nice with lots of logos on them and everybody seemed happy. One of the actors, Emmanuel, made a speech about how they could go on to develop what they had learnt. And then came the moving moment. Kagosi, who seems to be one of the shyer members of the group, began to show his real talent as a Praise Singer, improvising in Setwana as the others ululated and danced around him. In spite of not understanding a word of it, I realised that this was a very rare and special honour - that I was being praised by a Praise Singer. They certainly know how to make you feel wanted here. Later, David told me the poem included jokes about Kagosi's limited English, and his desire to be cast in a production in London (there was lots of laughter from the other actors and the audience).

Beautiful and humbling. Thank you fabulous artists.

More from Gabarone

Another fantastic day in the workshop. The morning was spent on Lecoq's Seven Levels of Tension, which is always a great way to energise inexperienced actors and move them towards spontaneous and original work. That led on to an exercise called "walking into the wrong room", which is self-explanatory and very funny.

In the afternoon, we made use of pieces of clothing that I'd asked the actors to bring in - each had an item with a particular emotional meaning for them. The exercise was deceptively simple - they just had to find a way of presenting that piece of clothing to the whole group. It was truly extraordinary. One young man beat the drum while wearing feathers on his head and a leopard-patterned vest. Another put on shorts, took off his shirt and became a Praise Singer. A mixed-race woman acted her journeys between Africa and Europe, and her decision to buy a traditional German dress so as to embrace that part of her identity. It was all intensely moving, deeply honest, almost shocking in the complexity of its identity politics.

Long talk with David about theatre for development. He's been involved in the form since the 70s, and knows everybody. He's also full of amazing stories about work with Zapu PF during the guerilla war, workshops in Bangladesh which landlords tried to sabotage, theatre workers being imprisoned in or deported from Malawi. We discuss the fact that theatre for development seems to have lost its radical edge these days, has become a little "worthy", and very westernised. In part, he blames the shifting agendas of funders, and in part the more rigorous accounting procedures they are following. In the old days, you used to be able to sneak in revolution under the counter.

Wonderful Batswana

The third day of the workshop has been the strongest so far - there's a real sense of growth in the room, as the artists come to trust one another and me. It's a very interesting bunch - three of David's students from the Performing Arts course at University of Botswana, and ten young actors (not students) from Botswana Society for the Arts. The latter include a fascinating young woman called Mora, whose father was German and whose Matswana mother teaches at the university. She is also a painter, musician and most other things.... as so often, the polymath abilities of people from non-Western cultures stagger me. There's also a young man called Tommy with a real flair for comedy, people who can sing and dance.... and act.

But the really fascinating thing is the way in which the work is starting to reflect more and more on the internal drama of being young Batswana today. Scene after scene deals with real conflicts between the sense of standing in an ancient culture, and the power of modernity. Nor is this a simple old v new battle - sometimes the older generation stands accused of selling out or cashing in. It's fascinating that these profound dramas are emerging with very little language - most of the work is happening through movement and song. There's a great deal of fluidity between the spirit world and the "real" - something which I love, and which seems very current here.

And the sun is shining too.

Botswana workshop

Typing this in a very slow internet cafe in Gabarone, so there won't be a full report on the last two days! I've been in a workshop, hosted jointly by University of Botswana and Botswana Society for the Arts. I'm working with a group of young performers, most of whom have very limited experience (there is no professional theatre in the country), but all of whom have energy and enthusiasm in buckets. As often in Africa, the plus side of the process is music and dance. Rhythm games which would take ages anywhere else in the world simply materialise here. You don't have to ask for songs or dances - the moment they are on stage, that is what they do.

On the other hand, there's not much awareness of theatre language, and so anything spoken requires a lot of work. It's interesting to see how colloquial and poetic registers don't seem different to them. This may be a language issue - but I'm deliberately working as much as possible with African texts. They are certainly open to direction, and don't have any inhibitions whatsoever. We saw some sexually explicit material within minutes of starting, and with no prompting in that direction.

I don't know if we'll have any great art to show at the end of the week, but I do know that both they and I will have learnt a huge amount.

More to follow when the typing is easier!

Arrival in Botswana

I'm typing this in Prof. David Kerr's office at the University of Botswana. I arrived here yesterday, via Jo'berg, to run a workshop for a mixed group of David's students and the Botswana Society for the Arts. It's an initial dipping of toes in Botswanan waters - and I'm feeling very excited about it!

David is an extraordinary man: an academic, a director and an activist, who has devoted his life to working in Southern Africa. He's spent two long periods in Malawi, where he met Kate Stafford, and she introduced us when he visited London a while ago. Since then he's been on our mailing list, and when he saw the level of intercultural engagement we were making with Re-Orientations, along came an invitation to come here and see what could be done. Thanks to the British Council for the funding!

David and his Zambian wife Adela met me at the airport, and took me straight to an arts and crafts centre called Batswanacrafts, where there was a schools competition going on in traditional dance. There's less drumming here than in many other parts of Africa - the rhythms come from clapping and rattles on the feet. It's very mesmerising, all the same. David tells me about a time he was working on a scene about traditional healing with a student group, and one student really did go into the trance state that the rhythms are designed to induce. It reminds me of Brett's work with Third World Bunfight - the emphasis on altered states of consciousness.

Much of the theatre which is done here is issue-based, particularly TfD work and HIV /AIDS awareness (with a 25% infection rate, that's no big surprise). I read a couple of the devised pieces David has made with his students - one of which is in the African Theatre volume on Youth, and the other is a recent piece about homophobia, called Straight and Narrow. It's not illegal to be gay here, but homosexual acts are... which must be pretty tricky. David says that even five years ago, it would have been impossible to do this play, but that now it seemed easy: even the straight actors were willing to play gay characters. On the other hand, there are negative aspects to this new distance which younger Batswana are acquiring from tradition - they don't, for example, know the traditional songs, there's a cultural limbo. All of which could make for a fascinating workshop. And I start tomorrow....

The Search for the Throat Singers

We've known for some time that we wanted the Inuit presence to be a strong one in this year's Origins Festival. We've programmed two films from Nunavik, and Simon Lynge, from Greenland, will be playing at the concert - but we also wanted a real sense of the traditional culture. Which really meant drum dance and throat singing.

When I was in Montreal in 2008, I was lucky enough to meet Taqralik Partridge and Evie Mark (pictured), both of whom seemed keen to come to London. But neither was available this time. Evie, however, had a friend called Beatrice Deer.... who also turned out not to be available.... but Beatrice had a friend called Leah May - and she and her partner (throat singers work in pairs) could come. The only problem was that Leah doesn't live in Montreal. She lives in Kuujjuaq, which is a very long way from Montreal. In fact, it's a very long way from anywhere. And so the transport costs are astronomical. Luckily, the wonderful Inuit airline First Air (run by the amazing Pita Atami and his Makivik Corporation - www.makivik.org) stepped in with a pair of tickets to Montreal, and we're off! They will be performing at the Origins Concert at Rich Mix on July 2nd, as well as in Trafalgar Square for Canada Day.

Last night, I went to Soho to see Chekhov in Hell by Dan Rebellato, who spoke at our event with the Platform for Intercultural Europe last year. The play was very characteristic of Dan - a series of snapshots from contemporary urban life, full of sharp comic observation. It was also very well performed - especially by Ruth Everett, whose string of grotesques were all horribly credible.

Drum

We saw Oily Cart's show Drum over the Easter weekend. It's very remarkable to watch, or perhaps I should say, experience a piece of theatre which is as inter-cultural as this. I use the term with reservations, of course, but also as a deliberate choice, because this was theatre that was able to do what very little of our work can - to reach beyond the bounds of language and to communicate with people we think we can't talk to - in this case children with autism.

The show didn't have a story, or at least not in the conventional sense. It did, however, have a very powerful emotional journey, from the comparative calm of finding a cushion with a particular design to the mayhem of wildly beating drums, on which the children sat or lay. The emphasis was on the sensory experience - whether that was bright colour, the touch of bubbles and foam, or the sensation of rolling in a drum. There were games with light and music.

It's very beautiful, very thought-through, and very theatrical theatre. And it reaches out in the fullest sense of that much overused term.

Love but no money

The Arts Council came to see us on Friday. Yes - they actually came to our Wood Green office, which is less shabby than once it was since Lance took the broom to it, but remains a world away from the hallowed halls of high policy. Very nice to see.

Pete Staves, who is now our ACE contact, was at pains to say that we very nearly got National Portfolio funding, and that he was very sorry we didn't! So the agenda of the meeting was largely about how we can best survive, with their help in whatever way it comes, until the next round of NP bids in about three years' time (which is also, rather frighteningly, when our Esmee funds run out). One of the key new areas which may help us build on the old round of GFA applications is the new "Strategic Funds". These replace the old managed funds, which used to sit in various ACE pockets and got allocated at will - now they will be open to application, which seems to me a positive step. Less positive is what some of them are for... there's one to match philanthropic donations / business sponsorship, on the old A&B model. On the other hand, there are some around Audience Development and Touring which could be very useful. We'll have to see. It's very early days for this.... but we felt encouraged.

Meeting the Maori

The last Origins had some very interesting links with London's Maori community - including the powhiri pictured here - and this year we're really developing these in a big way - thanks to our collaborations with the City of London Festival and Heritage Lottery Fund. Over the weekend, Gabrielle and I went to New Zealand House to meet the Maori youth group, Te Kohanga Reo, and today I was back to chat with Ngati Ranana. As well as holding another powhiri - this time on Hampstead Heath and with real hangi food - they will also be involved in plans to bring a Maori war canoe, or waka, up the Thames.

Even more exciting is the Participation and Learning project, which Gabrielle is heading up with Carissa. This will link the younger London Maori to elders, as well as giving kids in lots of London schools the chance to learn a lot more about Maori culture, learn haka, waiata and poi (various forms of music and dance, since you ask!), and to build their own model wakas. The intergenerational oral histories are going to lead to a new website and an archive of Maori presence in the UK, which actually goes back to 1800, no less.

The National Portfolio

After all the tension, the phone calls and emails started to fly around at 7.30 this morning. The Arts Council hasn't exactly had an easy task on its hands; and probably did quite a good job of cutting down the number of RFOs without simply slashing everybody in sight. The National Portfolio is published online, but of course this only says who got money (including all the usual suspects, with their varying levels of cuts). The headline figures are that 849 RFOs have been reduced to 695 - but 110 of these are new, which means that 264 organisations must have been axed completely. Well done the 110 new clients. We weren't one of them.

I've yet to talk to ACE about this, but I can predict from the written report what they will say. They reported that we were "Good" in every area - but "the budget is limited". Well, of course that's true - but it wasn't too limited to fund some other people, so we do need to know a bit more.... I'll let you know what they say!

On a nicer topic, I saw Peter Brook's A Magic Flute at the Barbican last week. It's had quite a mixed press - and you can see why, especially with regard to the singing. But it's an incredibly winning performance, especially if you happen to be sitting in the front row, which I was. All the bombast and vast scale of most opera has gone - this is a chamber show with a piano, and so becomes very subtle, human, and delicate. Brook doesn't look for "readings" or "interpretations" (which is something I probably would do). Instead, you get the sense of an elder of the theatre returning to a childlike delight in the simplicity of fable and fairytale. It is, in every sense, enchanting.

Brook has long been famous for his work on magical pieces, of course (A Midsummer Night's Dream is the stuff of legend). As in that production and his Tempest, the theatrical magic is in the hands of anonymous spirits, who employ circus tricks and the rough magic of theatrical honesty to make the performance happen and the story move forward. It's all about the audience investing totally in the show.

It's also one in a series of productions Brook has done of late, great works: The Tempest, The Cherry Orchard. As he's now 86 himself, you can't help feeling that this is in some way about signing off. So the fact that what may well be his last project is a late piece by somebody who dies aged 35 is very touching. As I said, it's childlike. Direct and simple magic.

Changing the World

Tuesday night saw the first Routledge / Stanislavski Centre Lecture at Rose Bruford. It was given by Anatoly Smeliansky, who is Dean of the Moscow Art Theatre School, and Associate Director of the MAT itself. So he has a bit of a direct line to Stanislavski - though he was at pains to point out that Stalin and Co. represent quite a gulf between modern Russia and the great man.

Anatoly is a dramaturg - that central figure of European theatre who you hardly ever encounter in Britain - and so he has been on the scene for many of the great events of Russian theatrical history, without taking part in them directly. It gives him the critical distance and ironic voice of the great raconteur. He seems genuinely to believe that all the main events in Russian history somehow happen in the MAT before they happen outside. The obvious case is Chekhov's prophecy of the Revolution in The Cherry Orchard - but his more recent anecdote is better. When Gorbachev came to power, he came to see Uncle Vanya. This in itself was odd, since most Soviet leaders only watched propaganda pieces. Gorbachev phoned the director the next day, and Anatoly was in the office. The discussion was about the actors, using their first names, about the play and how moving it was.... and at the end, the director put down the phone and said to Anatoly "Russia is about to change". And, as we know, it did.

Sometimes the world changes from below. I went yesterday to a workshop on Ethics in Participatory Theatre, run by Frances Rifkin for the Arts Council. Joel and Gabrielle from Polygon came too, and there were some very interesting and experienced people from other companies like Theatre Is... Spare Tyre and London Bubble. There seemed to be a bit of a movement towards establishing some sort of ethical code for practitioners - rather like nurses or therapists have. I'm not sure I'm convinced about that. The conversations through the day seemed to me to suggest that we live in an ethical minefield, and that every case has to be taken on its merits, with a huge awareness of political, social and cultural context.

Frankenstein

The National Theatre's production of Frankenstein has been given some of the best reviews I've seen in years, and is a massive sell-out hit. So I was a bit surprised to find that it's not really all it's cracked up to be.

Benedict Cumberbatch was the Creature on Saturday, and he was undoubtedly brilliant. The opening scene, in which he emerges from a womb-like drum into life, was a tour de force. But the world into which he emerged was basically a series of effects from the National's massive budget, with nods at Les Mis in the form of snarling 19th century prostitutes. There was even a train. Not that I'm one to object to visual flamboyance in the theatre - but it needs to be done with a sense of meaning, and not just for show.

The crux of Mary Shelley's novel is the character of Frankenstein himself, the Modern Prometheus, and the question as to why he should create life, only to abandon it. In this production, for all the gimmick of the leading actors swapping roles, the character became a cipher, only of interest to the director and playwright in so far as he encounters the Creature. But without Frankenstein's urge to create, there is no Creature - so why should we care?

Heresy, I know.....

Barking

I've been on a semi-sabbatical from Border Crossings over the last few weeks (although I've still been having to do the financial reports for the EU through the evenings and weekends....), with Lance looking after the office and fundraising. I've been in rehearsals for Howard Barker's play The Europeans, which opened last night at the Unicorn. It's a final year student production for Rose Bruford - so it only plays four performances - two more today and one tomorrow afternoon. Which is a shame after five weeks of very intense rehearsals!

I've enjoyed working on the play very much - partly because the students are terrific, and partly because the text is fascinating. It's the second Barker I've done - the previous one was Victory, also at Bruford. In each case I've found that it feels horribly obscure when you first read it, but yields more and more depth, humour and energy as you go on. The Europeans is set against the background of the Siege of Vienna - so it's about a war between the Western powers and Islam... which is pretty relevant to us at the moment.... So we've found ways of setting the piece simultaneously in the 17th century and right now. Somehow it doesn't seem to jar at all.

The Unicorn is a wonderful space. The auditorium curves around a quite intimate downstage area, and then there is a huge open space behind. This means we can make some scenes very intense and others incredibly epic. It's as if the space breathes, moving between the public and the private. Like the Greek theatres.

Tony came last night, as did Carissa, and they both seemed to enjoy themselves! I also got to meet Gerrard McArthur, who is Associate Director of The Wrestling School. he said we had really found the style which Barker's work demands. So that was nice....

Blue Dragon

It was a pretty weird experience to watch Robert Lepage's The Blue Dragon at the Barbican on Monday. It begins with a short Prologue, which is followed by a dance sequence in front of projected titles. Then there is a multi-lingual scene set in Shanghai's Pudong Airport.... Sound familiar?

This is, of course, not plagiarism in either direction but synchronicity - there are certain subjects in the air which artists of particular outlooks feel drawn to. All the same, it was a bit of a surprise! After Pudong, the play moves onto a different route, although the centrality of foreign visitors in contemporary Shanghai kept Dis-Orientations and Re-Orientations very much in my mind. The Blue Dragon is an intimate, lyrical, surprisingly linear and naturalistic three-hander about mid-life crisis, the failure of art and love, parenthood, and China. All themes very close to our own. But the final result is very different as a theatrical experience.

On the way home, I found myself jotting down notes for our next co-production with SDAC. But, I'm happy to say, they were inspired more by the differences from Robert's work than by the similarities.

Rehearsal as refuge

I have spent the entire weekend doing accounts. And I mean the entire weekend. From 9am to 9pm Saturday and from 9am to 7pm today, with brief meal breaks and a quick trip to Tescos. This was not what attracted me to the theatre as a career. Last weekend was very similar, and next weekend promises to be even worse.

In my spare time, I am directing Howard Barker's The Europeans for Rose Bruford. It's a final-year production, so the actors and team are trained and ready for the profession, which means the quality of their work is very high. It feels like a holiday to go into the rehearsal room with them - though this is meant to be the real work. Bizarre.

On the train down to Sidcup on Friday, I had a long chat about this with Iain Reekie, the Head of Acting. He said he felt much the same, rehearsing another of the shows. For him, the tension is around the fact that the future of higher education generally, and drama schools in particular, is so uncertain right now. He, and the other Bruford staff, are all caught up in a web of politics and finance like the one that's dogging me. And, like me, he finds the rehearsal room to be a refuge. A safe haven in a storm.

The Antonioni Project

To the Barbican for a production by Ivo van Hove and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam. I had very high hopes for this work, after their extraordinary production of The Roman Tragedies, which I saw in 2009. Like that show, there's a lot of multi-media in The Antonioni Project - not totally surprising, given that the production is based on three films by Michelangelo Antonioni. In The Roman Tragedies, the film was to do with the constant exposure of political lives, both public and private, to the scrutiny of the media. Here, the film-making itself almost became the subject: the production's probably best described as a live film - every scene is shot and projected as it is being performed. At times this can be stunning - for example, when bluescreen is used to place actors who you can see on stage into a pre-recorded and totally "real" environment - but very often it feels as if the technology has been allowed to become the point. The narrative and the characters just aren't interesting enough to hold their own against all this, and so the production seems rather "New Labour" - all style and no substance.

At the same time, it's very fascinating and suggests lots of possibilities for a future project I'm currently mulling over. The characters are living in a world where everything is conceived in mediated terms, perhaps especially human relationships. So they can only operate through layers of media-tion: and the apparent distancing achieved by the technology is a powerful metaphor for the way they see their own lives.

All this made sense to me intellectually as I watched the piece - but it didn't work in terms of emotional engagement. There was no compelling narrative to pull you along, no character to draw you in. I want to treat these subjects in the new play I'm planning with Hui and Tony - but we've got to make sure we don't lose the humanity.

Susannah York

A funny new year. It's only mid-January, and the two most celebrated actors I know personally have both died: Pete Postlethwaite, and now Susannah York.

I knew Susannah very well in the 90s: she used to come to all our productions, even the solo piece Departures / Arrivals. When I directed The Great God Brown, she recorded a voice-over for the show, so she was kind of in it... and I also helped her out with her performance as Ranyevskaya when she didn't feel it was working. That was a lot of fun.

What Pete and Susannah had in common was that they didn't just act. They believed in theatre as a way of making the world better. They had celebrity, and so they made use of it. For charity, for campaigning, and just to generate a positive energy.

Miss them both.

Lance's baptism with fire

Our new General Manager, Lance Bourne, started work this week. Lance's appointment is one of two we're able to make thanks to a core costs grant from the wonderful Esmee Fairbairn Foundation - and he's a huge boost to us as an organisation. We'll post some details about him on the website soon - but suffice to say for now that he's got a wealth of experience in both the public and voluntary sectors, and he understands business. And funding.

It's just as well, because this is the month in which the Arts Council has opened its doors to every arts organisation in the country to apply for National Portfolio funding. The good side of this is that it was always an exclusive club before - you had to be invited to apply for the status of a Regularly Funded Organisation. The bad sides are: 1) the open application process comes at the same time as a 30% cut, so at a rough guess it's going to be more about some RFOs not succeeding than loads of new organisations coming on board, and 2) it may never happen again.

So - Lance and I are using his first days to write a business plan, make budgets, think through strategies and artistic plans... all before he's really hung his coat up. At least it's going to mean we have a plan! Happy New Year everybody....