The Tree of Life

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

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

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

Two days in Germany

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

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

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

Back to Toufann

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

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

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

Things fall apart. There is a storm.

Talking Circle

Origins closed on Saturday. It was a beautiful event, led by Bruce Sinclair, from Canada - who has been present throughout the Festival and clearly enjoying himself! We began with a smudging ceremony - burning sage and bathing in its smoke - which we had to do out in the car park because of the smoke alarms. Probably the first ever smudging ceremony to happen in a car park in Bethnal Green, I would think. As Bruce took the smoke around the circle, Robert Greygrass sang a song - and there were responses in Maori and Aboriginal prayers too.

Then there was the talking circle. It's an incredibly simple idea, which is followed in the tribal councils of North America, and which has a lot to teach us about real democracy. You all sit in a circle, and pass around the talking stick - or eagle feather. Whoever is holding the stick speaks. You can say as much or as little as you want - or just pass it on - and whoever is speaking is not interrupted but is listened to with respect. It's definitely the best approach to "Evaluation" I've ever experienced. It's totally equal, it's very open, and it lets the emotional into the public space.

I won't tell you what was said. Just that it was very moving, and that this Festival has clearly touched people far more deeply than I ever dared to imagine.

Responses to Robert

I thought I should post some of the audience responses to Walking on Turtle Island, because they have been so positive, and it really is a very important piece of work. So - here we go:

"Turtle Island was wonderful. Simple, deft, finely-tuned storytelling, told by a storyteller with a twinkle in one eye and a tear in the other. Please extend my congratulations and gratitude to Robert Greygrass and thanks to the Border Crossings team for making it happen."

"Easily the best one-man show I have ever seen. The subtlety and deftness of the performance is mesmerising and moving."

"Thought it was really fantastic -really thoughtful, interesting and made me think about things not much discussed here. Also brilliantly performed."

"Excellent - amazing - enjoyable and I learned a lot."

One more performance tonight.

Origins Special Offers

Origins Special Offers

The Great Robert Greygrass

Last night, Robert Greygrass's production Walking on Turtle Island opened as part of our Origins Festival at the Rich Mix. It's an incredible piece of work: Variety wasn't wrong to call it "a tour de force" of acting. In less than two hours, Robert embodies no fewer than 21 characters, suggesting the distinctions in subtle ways, but absolutely making you believe in an aging Native woman, a little girl, a drunk mixed-race man in a cell, a young boy whose dog dies, his grandfather... and binding them all together a spirit figure, who seems in many ways to be remarkably similar to Robert himself. Why? Well, both are shape-changers. The spirit, like Robert, passes into the bodies of all these people through several centuries. It's a beautiful metaphor to link the acting to its meaning, and to suggest the cultural resonance which underlies the entire performance.

This is theatre which gives an alternative history - the native view of what has happened on Turtle Island (North America) from the European invasion to the present day. There are scenes which deal with the first contact, scenes around transplantation, scenes about the reservations, scenes set around contemporary alcohol abuse and custody. So yes, it's a human rights show. But it's so far from being "worthy" - because the whole performance is suffused with Robert's characteristic native wit and humour. In spite of the subject matter, his energy and sheer talent makes it feel light and buoyant - the audience is constantly surprised, excited and thrilled by the virtuosity and human generosity of the whole thing.

Two more performances tonight and tomorrow. Don't miss it.

Festival and Politics

An amazing thing happened at Music in the Yard on Monday. The Lani Singers, our West Papuan performers, were playing on the open air stage at the Guildhall Yard in the City of London. On the other side of the Yard, separated from us by crash barriers, a man was putting out a red carpet. Then the limos swept in, and out got hoards of black-tied bankers and women in cocktail dresses. It was clearly a very posh banquet indeed. Meanwhile, Benny Wenda was speaking and singing about the illegal occupation of his country, and the way in which the Indonesian colonisation is upheld by US foreign policy, as a result of their commercial interests. And then the guest of honour showed up - Condoleeza Rice herself, fresh from unveiling a statue of Reagan.

You couldn't have scripted it better.

The First Week

I'd meant to blog daily through the Origins Festival. Fat chance. It's been the craziest, most exciting week for a very long time. Perhaps the craziest week in the company's entire history. No - that was Mexico in 2001... but we're close.

Noel Tovey's Little Black Bastard was the first week's theatre show, and it's got great reviews and responses across the web. Noel flies back to Australia this evening - hopefully with a sense of the job being really well done! He's shared his extraordinary life story with people hanging on every word.

The film festival kicked off on Saturday with a great screening of Our Generation, followed by discussions with Julian Burger and John Packer from the Human Rights Centre at Essex University. Tonight we move on to Inuit films, having taken in the Sahara along the way!

The main theme of the weekend has been music, with the Origins Concert on Saturday night and the Family Day on Hampstead Heath yesterday. The Heath event began with a Maori powhiri, or welcoming ceremony, led by Ngati Ranana, to welcome the First Nations people to London in an appropriate way. It was wonderful to do this in the very week that Sydney acknowledged the colonisation of Australia to have been an invasion. Somehow it felt as if we were a part of a real spirit of truth and reconciliation - and the amazing atmosphere at both events seemed to confirm that.

We've also been able to bring young people into the festival spirit in other ways - our education project had a really big moment on Friday when we had hundreds of schoolchildren parading through the City with model wakas, and dancing the haka on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. Wild.

Origins begins

The Festival opened on Tuesday with an incredible night at Rich Mix. Traditional blessings from Gloria Alcozer and Toi Maori (even though the latter had only just got off their 22 hour flight!), amazing Polynesian food from Joylene Fenikowski, a great series of talks and films - all punctuated with the haunting music of Kelvin Mockingbird.

A few responses: "a superb evening. I thought it was really beautifully put together, the format was really successful, delicious food, a lovely warm atmosphere and inspiring stuff to get everyone raring to go for the next two weeks!"

"I just wanted to drop a line this morning to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the evening last night at the opening of your festival and it made me realise to what extent this festival is beautiful. I am really impressed at all the First Nations that you have been able to gather and their professionalism. Their conversations were really interesting!"

"Great spirit last night."

And it was all filmed for BBC2!

Wednesday saw the start of Marie Clements' workshop, which is by all accounts totally amazing, and the Origins Lecture at Gresham College, which was packed out, and really got the debate going.

Tonight we open Noel Tovey's Little Black Bastard at Rich Mix. Can't wait!!

One more day to Origins!

The Festival starts tomorrow, and there's a lot of frantic activity around the company. In fact, I'm the only person left in the office, putting the final touches to the Lecture for Wednesday night, and thinking through how to introduce everybody tomorrow. Our opening event is intended to be a sort of taster menu for the Festival as a whole, so there will be bits of music, short films and a series of conversations - plus the traditional blessings. It's also the private view of Rosanna's exhibition, and it's going to be televised by Wall-to-Wall - so it's quite a night.

Noel Tovey arrived a week ago: when you're in your 70s it takes a bit longer to get through the jet-lag. Otherwise people have been pouring in over the last couple of days, from the States, Canada, New Zealand, the Pacific. I'm especially excited to see Kelvin Mockingbird (pictured) again - after the incredible experience of working with him at Tahoe in 2008, and finally to meet one of the heroines of the indigenous stage, Marie Clements (pictured).

The publicity is really building too - New Internationalist have posted a piece I wrote, and the Twittersphere is buzzing.... there was a plug in the Guardian Guide, and Chuquai and I did Inspirit on Radio London on Sunday! (If you want to listen, we're 2 hours 40 into the programme)!

See you at Rich Mix during the next couple of weeks.....

Origins is coming next week!

Lance, Shelagh and I were at a reception at New Zealand House last night. It brought home the fact that Origins is coming along rather soon!

Rosanna Raymond, who will be our commissioned visual artist for Rich Mix, was there, as was Jo Walsh from October Gallery, where the Current exhibition opens tomorrow. There were people from our partners at City of London Festival, and a performance by the London Maori, Ngati Ranana.

The Maori performance sat strangely in the penthouse of the High Commission. I was chatting to some of the artists afterwards, and they said that the energy of kapa-haka depends very much on a connection with the earth. And there we were on the 17th floor, staring out over serious London greyness. Hopefully by July 3rd the weather will be glorious and we can all enjoy Maori ceremony and performance in the open air on Hampstead Heath!

I met Noel Tovey at the airport on Sunday morning. What a remarkable man. He lived in London for 30 years, not really acknowledging his Aboriginality, but slowly came to a realisation of the importance of his identity, which took him back to Australia, back to his own people, and into a new life of arts for social good, including scholarships for young Aboriginal performers and work with Aboriginal young offenders. His production of Midsummer Night's Dream for the Dreaming Festival is legendary. It's a great privilege to collaborate with him as he returns to London to tell his life-story. He tells me that it was something he had to do. Part of a homecoming process that works in both directions.

Amnesty at 50

It was my birthday on Saturday - thanks to everybody who left messages on Facebook! It was also an important birthday for Amnesty International - and I've been reading the special issue of their magazine.

It's very striking just how much of this magazine deals with theatre. There's a discussion of a play which was made from an exchange of letters between activists and a political prisoner. There's an interview with Daves Guzha, who I met in Zimbabwe as long ago as 1998, and who is still using performance to work against Mugabe. There's a piece on the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. And there's a very strong piece on Henning Mankel and his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique.

Mankel talks about the importance of theatre in illiterate communities - he's very clear that literacy is a way to improve health conditions in a very direct way. And he says something else which could almost be a description of our work at Border Crossings:

"Living theatre is one of the few meeting points in the world where all the false borders, like language and race, come down. Actors, white or brown or yellow, even if they don't speak the same language, can start working together and create art immediately."

Brussels day 2

Today we moved from the threadbare-friendly surroundings of La Maison des Cultures and into the European Commission's Albert Borschette conference centre, complete with numerous translators in booths relaying our every word. In this more formal space, we have the chance to dialogue with people from the Commission itself - Vladimir Sucha, who is the Director of Culture and Media, and Giulia Amaducci, who works in immigration and integration. She's Italian, and speaks English at Italian speed and in Italian tunes, which made me wish she could be translated into English.

Vladimir had some very heartening things to say. In particular, he talked about some theatre he had seen in his native Slovakia, which engaged with the Roma community, and with the huge local prejudice against them. "Twenty minutes of theatre", he said, "has a life-long impact. This is the way to change perceptions profoundly and to involve people actively in intercultural dialogue." I wrote it down so that I can quote it everywhere!

I was also very impressed by a man called Ahmed Ahkim, who runs an organisation for Roma and traveller people in Belgium. Ahmed talked about the importance of imagination in overcoming prejudice: when people look at a traveller, they imagine them to be something. We need engineers of the imagination to suggest other possibilities. "In order to establish cultural dialogue you have to dream - and artists are the professional dreamers." I wrote this one down because it's true.

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!