Two days in Karlsruhe

Refugees in performance at Karlsruhe's Volkstheater

I've been in South Germany for the last couple of days, at the invitation of the Karlsruhe Staatstheater.  It's an incredible institution to run up against if you are part of the British theatre scene.  Karlsruhe isn't a huge city by any means - but the theatre (typically for the main theatre in any fair-sized German town) is on the scale of our national companies.  It has three auditoria, and employs over 800 people in its full-time theatre, opera and ballet companies.  It also has a thriving community theatre programme, the Volkstheater, whose participants perform on the main stages in the building, under the guidance of professional creative teams.  It was this part of the organisation that put together a three-day conference on how theatre can respond to the refugee crisis, and I was asked to speak as part of a series of presentations on "International Positions".

It's interesting to see just how sudden the shift to a multicultural or intercultural mode of being has had to be in Germany.  I'd been in Berlin a couple of times in the last few years and thought it very cosmopolitan - but that's not been the case in much of the rest of the country.  Angela Merkel's decision to open the borders to refugees has had far-reaching effects.  Some of the people I met said that it was unprecedented, uncharacteristic of this most pragmatic politician, and morally essential.  Others wondered whether there might not be a different agenda: Germany's population is ageing rapidly, and needs an influx of younger workers to sustain it.  Either way, the demographics of the country are changing very quickly.  Much of the the work we have been doing in Britain for decades, slowly and meticulously with many a setback, they are trying to do very quickly indeed.

Partly for this reason, and partly because of the better funded, more institutionalised  nature of German theatre, the bulk of this cultural work is emanating from large public organisations like the Staatstheater.  This has many plus points - for a start, the salaries of the professional people involved are there as a given, and they have solid and experienced administrative back-up in place.  But there are negative sides to it too: the work feels very top-down, with the projects (many of which are very engaging on their own terms) fitting a pre-conceived agenda.  You can see it in the conference plan: Day 1 discussion of policy, day 2 presentations of theatre projects, day 3 seminar on how to get refugees into the German jobs market.  Of course there's much about this that is practical and positive - but the role of theatre as a democratic space to re-imagine the city and the nation in dialogue with its "new citizens" (as they are pleasingly known) doesn't get much of a look-in.

The most exciting conversations are with two men from refugee backgrounds.  One of them, Ali Kareem, is another of the international presenters.  The organisation he represents, Teatro di Nascoto (Hidden Theatre) is a Boalean organisation from Italy, with a long track record of refugee work and a very direct engagement with political institutions.  He shows us images of performances in front of the Commission building in Brussels.  And he tells us a little of his own life - about his childhood in Iraq and the loss of his best friend in a car bomb attack.  This is what he does in performance, and it is deeply affecting.

The other refugee is Ahmed Shah, originally from Iran, who has founded both the Jugendtheaterbüro (JTB) and the Refugee Club Impluse in Berlin.  He's very excited that we have been working in Palestine.  In Germany, he tells me, everyone is very frightened to approach the Palestinian question, because the paranoia over being thought in any way anti-Semitic is (for obvious reasons) even more extreme than in Britain.  "While you were talking" he says, "I wanted to say: 'Can you hear this?  Can you hear this?'"

Voices of Culture - Statement on the EU-Turkey deal

Border Crossings strongly supports the following statement:

“We the undersigned join the Council of Europe and other international human rights NGOs in denouncing the EU/Turkey Agreement of 18 March 2016, as illegal under European and international law.   We call on the EU, the EP but especially our own Member State governments to make the strongest active efforts in the shortest possible time frame to honour the values that the EU upholds and to construct a policy and programme that can make Europeans proud rather than ashamed.”

The following members of the Voices of Culture Platform have co-signed this statement:

- ArtReach Consultants Ltd, ArtReach Events Ltd

- Border Crossings

- Cirkor/Cirkus Sweden

- Culture Action Europe

- European Music Council

- IETM

- Teatro dell’Argine

- Vooruit Arts Center in Ghent

- Arts Rights Justice, represented by the following members:

Arterial Network

European Off Networks EON

Siyah Bant

ITI Action Committee for Artists Rights

Center for Art and Politics

LA Network for Social Transformation

Herwig Lewy

Thanasis Bagatzounis

Sabine Kock

Ann Mari Engel

MaryAnn DeVlieg

Hidden Histories - the first screening

Hidden Histories

Wednesday night saw the first screening of our film - Hidden Histories, Discovering Indigenous London.  There's a lot more to come on this - but I thought I'd just share a few audience reactions to whet the appetite.

“I think it was brave and extremely thought provoking. Asking us to acknowledge and play with difference in our work rather than ignore it and hold the "other" far away - masterful. I think the film says more about where we are not rather than where we are in our relations with Indigenous peoples. A lot of charity and not enough justice as one of the panel members so aptly said.” (Email from audience member)

“Excellent film… moving, cogent and necessary.” (Audience Feedback form)

“Incredibly thoughtful well put together and insightful programme. I learned a lot and think this will influence my perspective for a long time to come. Thank you!” (Audience Feedback form)

“It moved me as a person with indigenous heritage.  I would like to be even more involved.  Fantastic film.  I would love to show the film.” (Audience feedback form)

“Well shot, beautifully edited, strong interviews, and with a great narrative (the Rylance voice was just perfect).”  (Email from audience member)

More screenings soon....

Guest blog from Lesbos

Björn Dahlman, Artistic Director of our Swedish partner organisation Banateater, reports on his recent work among newly arrived refugees on the island of Lesbos.

Björn clowning in Lesbos

Clowns without Borders (Sweden) got funding from Sweden to make a series of so-called Emergency programmes. We went to Lesbos for four days of performances. The Lesbos Project was quite unusual: normally there is an organisation in the country we visit that welcomes us and have prepared a programme, but for Lesbos we just went there, checked in at a hotel, and took every day as it came. We had apps on the phone telling us where boats had arrived the previous nights and where there could be lots of new people. Refugees usually stay only 1 or 2 days on Lesbos before they are moved on.

Mainly, there were four big camps we visited. The biggest one, Moria, is where everyone has to go to register. When we were there we used to do big shows for 4-500 people. Also in some other camps we managed to arrange shows, but sometimes we only did mingle gigs, walking around as clowns and playing with the children that came up to us.

We had to find friends in each new camp that could help us, for example in Moria Save the Children, who had some kind of permission to be in the camp, told us that we could say that we were collaborating with them when the guards asked.

In the camps we just defined a performance space using a rope. We walked around the camp in clown characters inviting people to come and see the show. Walking around was very difficult: we wanted to be happy and joyful and tempt the kids and the parents, who often felt a need to protect their children, to actually come. At the same time many families were gathering to mourn family members that had drowned just the night before and of course we did not want to disturb them. Being thrown between sorrow and despair in one second and joy and happiness the other was a totally bizarre experience.

We also visited a hotel where some rich dude just rented the whole hotel and let families who had special needs or great grief use them for a couple of nights to recover. Since many families were in grief the staff there didn´t want us to perform, but finally they agreed to let us sneak down in the basement where no-one who didn’t go there on purpose could see. About 50 people, mostly children, came to see the show and it was a huge success - the hotel asked us to come back regularly.

The one experience I bring along is meeting the parents. Children are children; sometimes I think that they don´t understand what they have just been through, and just like all the other children I meet they are a bit shy at first and then they just crack up with laughter. But the parents, who just one day earlier took the decision to put their children in a small boat that would cross the stormy Mediterranean in the night - a journey that should take only two hours but usually lasts for 10-12 hours because the boats are so full - were amazing to watch. They look scared at first, but when they see their children laugh again I see them smiling, having tears in their eyes, and dancing with us in the final number in a way that I never seen anyone dance before.

Sharing Stages with Chickenshed

The Red Balloon

In our home borough of Enfield, there's an unusual, and very successful, theatre for young people called Chickenshed.  It's a place with some very interesting ideas about diversity, especially in relation to disability, and an interest in theatre that is open and inclusive.  We've had a relationship for some time - curating events there and even touring Consumed into the Studio, as well as complementing that with a youth project led by Lucy.   Dave Carey, their remarkable Director of Creative Development, has written music for two of our shows now.

So it was great to be asked by Dave to become directly involved with the company for a few weeks, as part of their new project Sharing Stages.  The clue's in the name - this is a project about the company's partnerships - although actually very few of these are purely theatrical.  There are partners like Amnesty and Barnado's in the mix.  One other director who has been involved is Lou Stein - famous for founding the Gate - and he's just been announced as the holder of a new post in the theatre, which is its Artistic Directorship.  Interesting times in Enfield....

Our piece, devised with 12 young people (a tiny cast by Chickenshed's standards, and a huge one by ours) is about what it feels like to be a teenager today.  We approached it through their own stories, refracted through one another's telling processes; short scenes written in response to the theme; movement based on statistics we found online.  The result, called The Red Balloon, is a rather beautiful and very intense 10-minute play in three short "movements" - and is very musical.  It's not "about" disability or ethnicity in any overt way - but the presence of disabled and diverse young people within it is key to the way it works.  They don't operate on stage in spite of who they are - what they do and what they mean there is very much about who they are.

It's on till this weekend.

A welcome to APAM

Mana Wahine - from Okareka

I've been in Brisbane for the biennial APAM, which - while the "M" does indeed stand for "Market" - is an extraordinary opportunity to meet up with indigenous Australian performers and producers, see some of their work, hear what they are planning, and generally breathe in the atmosphere so crucial to programming Origins.  This year was particularly rich for me, as APAM had reached out to other groups of indigenous people around the world, creating links with Maori, Canadian First Nations and Inuit, and Melanesia.  It was wonderful to meet people from Canada who were new to me - Ryan Cunningham from Native Earth, Starr Muranko from Raven Spirit, Kathleen Merritt from Ivaluarjuk - and to see Maori work alongside the Australian, particularly the wonderful Mana Wahine by Okareka (pictured).   The opening ceremony was an exchange between different indigenous groups - not unlike what we do at Origins, but given a different resonance because it took place on the lands of indigenous Australians.  At its start, there was what I have come to think of as a traditional Welcome to Country.

But apparently the Welcome to Country isn't so traditional after all.  In the week of APAM, there was a Guardian article which talked about how this "tradition" was created, some 40 years ago.  At the time, this must have been incredibly important.  Indigenous people had not long moved out of the category of "flora and fauna" in Australia, so anything that went even a small way towards acknowledging their traditional custodianship of the land was a huge step.  But, I was told by indigenous producer Nadine McDonald-Dowd, the format that this has now taken is a long way from what in fact happened between indigenous groups historically.  "We didn't welcome people to our country until those people had asked permission to be on our country", she says.  Put like that, you begin to see that there is still a long way to go.  The Welcome to Country may acknowledge traditional ownership, but it places the responsibility on the indigenous people to articulate that acknowledgment, and it assumes the right of other people to be welcomed to the land - even if they have done nothing to earn it.  Not even asked.  I'm not sure that we can do much to shift this paradigm from our space in London - we are welcoming indigenous people as visitors, rather than expecting them to be our hosts.  But something should be done to make non-indigenous people work within the framework of welcome - we can't just expect indigenous people to be nice to us because we happen to be present on their ancestral lands.

Spirit Festival

Natasha Wanganeen MCs

I'm in Adelaide for the Spirit Festival - South Australia's indigenous gathering - and was thrilled to find an old friend, Natasha Wanganeen, was the MC for the main concert event.  Natasha, who I first spotted in Rabbit-Proof Fence, played Doolie in our production of Bullie's House: the start of our indigenous work, way back in 2004.  There's previously unseen video material about that show online now - click here!

At the centre of the festival yesterday was a ceremonial mourning event for the Elder Auntie Josie Agius, who I was lucky enough to meet when I was last in Adelaide in 2012. Auntie Josie passed away in January - so I was very surprised to hear her name being spoken very openly throughout the ceremony, printed in the programme etc..  There is a strong tradition in indigenous Australian communities that the name of someone who has recently passed is not spoken - often for as long as eight years.  They are not talked about directly for a long time, and looking on their image is forbidden.  This is an anthropologist's nightmare - and also explains why, for example, there have been no productions of Uncle Jack Davis's plays since his death.  It also explains why Australian films, books and websites often feature warnings that they may contain images of people who have died in recent years.

During the evening, I find myself sitting next to Auntie Josie's son, and I ask him about this.  "We can do that now", he tells me, explaining that there is a video in the South Australia Museum's Aboriginal galleries (wonderful, by the way!) of Auntie Josie talking about her culture, and that special permission was sought to keep it.  It's clearly of comfort and value to him that his mother's memory is being valued so publicly - so the shift away from tradition is a positive one for him.  But at the same time, I can't help feeling a little disturbed that something so culturally specific and distinct should be ebbing away.   How we mourn tells us so much about who we are. 

The Encounter

Simon McBurney in The Encounter

I first saw Simon McBurney perform in Edinburgh, 30 years ago, in A Minute Too Late – Complicite’s smash-hit show about death.  He was amazing – I’ve followed his work ever since.  The Encounter is his most brilliant piece of work yet.

A Minute Too Late was largely a response to the death of Simon’s father – and in this new piece, his father is present again, as a ghostly trace surviving only on a solitary VHS tape.  His children are present too, particularly his six-year old daughter, whose recorded voice is so clear as Simon addresses an empty space that her presence is palpable.  His work often has this deeply personal element to it – like Robert Lepage, even maybe Yeats, he is happy to employ his art as a confessional, or perhaps a therapeutic space.  So, after 30 years, I feel that I know him intimately.  We have actually had two conversation – once when he came to see Nixon in China, and once on a tube, where we talked about working in Asia.  He is as shy, nervy and endearingly anxious in person as he seems on stage. 

For me, The Encounter was particularly powerful because it represents an encounter with indigenous people, the Mayoruna of the Amazon to be precise.  On one level, it’s the story of an encounter between them and the National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre.  On another, it’s Simon’s own encounter with the same people.  Always a believer in authenticity, he retraced McIntyre’s steps in making the show.  And, on another level, it is our encounter – with Simon, with McIntyre, with the story, and so with the Mayoruna too.  And that makes it an encounter with ourselves as well: as Simon says at the start of the show, we are defined by the stories that we tell, by the narratives into which we invest ourselves.  By immersing ourselves in this story, allowing ourselves on some level to experience the very different world of the Mayoruna, we become slightly different people.  I would say, better people.  People with an expanded and deepened humanity. 

Much of the discussion about this performance has centred on the technology, and it’s true that it is amazing.  Even for someone like me - whose hearing difficulty means he can’t use the binaural headphones and has to have the whole thing channelled into one ear – the quality of the sound experience is incredible.  In an epic space like the Barbican, the acting can be incredibly intimate and personal, as if Simon were inside your head.  Which, in a way, he is. 

Because The Encounter is also about the possibilities of human communication.  During his time with the Mayoruna, cut off from his own world, McIntyre was convinced that the Elder, whom he nicknamed Barnacle, was talking to him in a language he could understand.  He heard Barnacle speaking inside his head, telepathically, without any words being uttered or language being used.  The narrative would seem to suggest that this communication was real: what McIntyre heard Barnacle say was always true. 

This kind of strange experience is not all that uncommon in relation to indigenous cultures.  There are different ways of thinking, being and relating in other people’s worlds, which may well involve phenomena we do not yet know through science.  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.   When he talked about the piece on the radio, Simon said that he’d spoken to the Mayoruna about the idea of consciousness, asking them where they understood their sense of self to be.  Every time he asked this, in whatever way, they pointed to the forest.  If the self is not in the head but in the environment, then maybe it’s only a small step to communicate between two selves within that wider consciousness.

Is this a form of magic?  Certainly the show is magical – it has the alchemic quality of theatre, transforming things into other things.  At the start, Simon is very careful to explain how it’s all done, how the technology works.  Through the two hours, we watch him working it.  We can see how it’s done.  And that’s what is really magical about this piece – that the magic comes from our imaginative collusion, or complicity, in this transformative process.  It is an act of faith, just like that which McIntyre placed in Barnacle.  A faith that saved his life. 

And yes – I know it’s usually “your philosophy” – but the First Folio says “our” and I prefer it.  Hamlet counts himself amongst the ignorant – as any thinking person surely must.

Brook's Battlefield

Battlefield: Ezy Nzaramba

The late Pierre Boulez, David Attenborough and Peter Brook all seem to be proving it: 90 is the age to be.  Many cultures have known for a long time that we need to value our Elders - at last the West seems to be catching up.  And Brook's production Battlefield, created at the age of 90, is actually his finest work for some time.

It's a return to the territory of his famous Mahabharata production - although where that was epic and vast, this is intimate, brief and personal.  This seems to me to offset some of the criticisms Rustom Bharucha made of Mahabharata: unlike the earlier production, Battlefield does not turn the Hindu myth into a Hollywood blockbuster or a Shakespearean tragedy.  Rather, it makes it the occasion for contemplation, introspection, and a complex emotional journey.  The play begins after the climax of Mahabharata, the great war, and deals with the question Eliot asked of the contemporary age: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

It is an urgent, necessary question for an artist to be asking at the end of his life, in what may well be his last piece of work.  In many ways, the play embodies that sense of an unending quest, with older characters attempting to make sense of the world they are about to leave.  Bhishma, who can only die with his own agreement, clings to life in the face of a mortal wound, speaking of how a dying man can long for honey.  When at last he leaves his body, in a moment of extraordinary theatrical simplicity and  power, it is his mother, the River goddess Ganga, who expresses a terrifying, astonishing grief.

I'm making it all sound quite heavy - but actually the play is full of humour too, with Bhishma and other characters telling parables, which are winningly enacted using only cloths and sticks for set and props.  The story of the worm crossing the road who loves his life is at once endearing and provocative.

Being Brook, all of this leads towards a spiritual meaning; and, being Hindu, that meaning is essentially one of resignation.  Yudishtira, left to rule in the aftermath of the war, comes to accept the suffering that has gone before, recognising it as yet another "illusion" (the Sanskrit term is Maya).  Both Michael Billington and Aleks Sierz have challenged this in their reviews of the production, asking whether we can really accept (say) the suffering of the Syrian refugees as something of no real consequence.  This dismissal of human pain could seem particularly callous in relation to the play, given the presence of Rwandan performer Carole Karemera at its heart.  Hinduism can be criticised for its acquiescence in human suffering, partly the result of its cultural origins in India, and its role in the maintenance of power structures.  However, in absolute terms, the theology is right - human lives are tiny, inconsequential things in terms of the scale of space and time, of course they are.  But, as Sartre argued, that doesn't mean we should not care about them - it simply means we have to acknowledge that it is our own decision to choose morality, and that the compassion we feel for the Syrian child or the Rwandan widow is our own compassion, willed and active.  Strangely, this makes our humanity more significant, rather than less.  It is Carole Karemera who gives expression to this deep grief in our condition, through the prolonged wail of the bereaved mother-goddess.

The beneficence of Google

So - Google has offered £130m to the Chancellor as a token of the tax it owes.  This cosy deal has, rightly, been met with a great deal of scepticism.  An expert at the University of Essex, Prof. Prem Sikka, has estimated that the amount owed is in fact closer to £1.6bn.  But, if you are a huge corporation, it seems that you are taxed on the basis of what you decide to pay, rather than at a rate set by the state.

The response has generally been to say that the deal is absurd, and the amount preposterous.  £130m, people say, will make next to no difference to the deficit, and is a tiny drop in the ocean of government spending.  To pay tax at that level does not in any way reflect the presence that Google has in British society - where it makes 10% of its global revenues.  And yet - £130m is actually rather more than the size of the cut administered by the Chancellor to the Arts Council in 2010.  This was the horrific 30% moment, when the Arts Council's budget was slashed.

The effects of that cut have been immense.  For one thing, the Arts Council has cut administration back so far that it can barely administer grants any more.  The ability to take a genuine interest in the organisations receiving those grants, and to explore the work of those who have not yet received them, has dwindled.  But worse, the arts organisations themselves have been severely limited, and our cultural life has suffered.  I find the programming of the large organisations (except, oddly, the Royal Opera) to be much more conservative and bland than it was five years ago, and the possibility of developing new work or collaborating with communities outside "the mainstream" to be vanishing.  The emphasis in Arts Council application forms is more and more on financial viability and resilience, management and accounting processes - less and less on creativity, imagination, or even experience of making art.

In so far as this government has an arts policy, it is to encourage philanthropy - training arts organisations to solicit money from wealthy individuals.  Kind of like begging - but dressed up by consultants who tell you how to do it well, with champagne and canapés.  This is the American model - and in the States, where there is a well-developed tradition of charitable giving, many people regard such donations as being the equivalent of taxation.  Their donations afford them a tax break (the crucial element Osborne has missed out here), and they talk about their philanthropy as a form of tax that is better, because they are able to decide for themselves where it goes.

And that is the problem.  Everything which this government is doing is calculated to put even more power into the hands of the wealthy.  Why on earth should rich people decide what constitutes artistic quality, and have an exclusive power over the cultural life of a nation?  Isn't it obvious that the effect of this will be to concentrate what money is given into the high-profile large organisations with their development departments, and to push them to pander to the tastes of their funders, which tend to be more for "great art" presented in a traditional, often rather patriotic way, and less for anything that might dare to challenge.   If there were proper taxes - both on wealthier individuals, but more importantly on major corporations - then there would be adequate public funds to spend on things which contribute to the public good - things like health care, education and (yes) culture.  By which I mean an open, inclusive, dynamic and controversial culture. The sort of thing they had in the state-funded, forward-looking societies of Periclean Athens and Shakespearean London.  Or even modern Germany.

It doesn't even need very much.  A derisory offer once a year from Google would put us back where we were under Labour - which now seems like a bit of a golden age.

2015

The Voladores at the Origins Festival.  Photo: John Cobb.

The year that has just ended was in many ways a very depressing one for anybody involved in intercultural dialogue and progressive politics.  The institutionalised terror of Daesh, particularly as made manifest in the Paris attacks, underlined the total failure of the West to build bridges with the Islamic world.  The response has been simply to escalate the cycle of revenge and confrontation: anyone who seeks to understand why these things are happening is castigated as somehow sympathetic to mass murder.  At the same time, we are witnessing an ever-growing humanitarian crisis, and the British (and European) inability to respond in any but the most narrow-minded and divisive terms is pitiful to behold.  Nicholas Winton, who died in 2015, showed how a civilised society should respond to the spectacle of desperate people fleeing from persecution and death.

The other great crisis, Climate Change, was the subject of yet more self-interest and short-sightedness on the part of the governments of "developed" countries, in the Paris trade agreement that they claimed was an Environmental treaty.  In spite of a huge presence and intense lobbying by indigenous peoples, the voices of cultures with real environmental understanding were entirely ignored, passed over in the interests of capital.  Humanity's failings this year leave me wondering how many more years there will actually be.

And yet, during our work this year, I have time and again felt a renewed optimism and a sense of change in the air.  The Origins Festival during the summer was the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in London ever, with truly extraordinary work on show, and a real feeling that the time had come for these formerly oppressed cultures to reassert themselves in the global space.  The festival embedded itself into the city more deeply than ever before, with entire schools coming off timetable to take part, the British Museum being shaken by the ancient rhythms of Torres Strait dance, and open spaces being regenerated through the healing rituals of the Voladores de Papantla.  The Festival also included the two most important pieces of theatre I saw this year - hopefully I can say that without sounding too arrogant, as we didn't make them ourselves, but curated them!  Oxlajuj B’aqtun, by the Guatemalan Maya company Grupo Sotz'il, was actually about the change in the Mayan calendar, and their sense that a new period of history is slowing coming about, one that will see a more environmentally aware, just, and egalitarian society.  Beautiful One Day, by Australia's Ilbijerri,  placed current cross-cultural tensions into a longer historical perspective, and offered the long view of the Elders as a way of looking not backwards, but into the future.

That same spirit has been informing our Heritage work over the last few months, with the development of our Oral History archive around the indigenous presence in London.  2016 will see our first documentary film, on this same subject.  It's an exciting development in our work that we are collaborating so much with Museums and historians - many of our projects in development are about reclaiming forgotten histories and so re-imagining potential futures.  It's an approach close to the heart of everyone at Border Crossings, including our Patron Peter Sellars, whose talk at Rich Mix was a highlight early in the year.

2015 also saw us developing a new play with Brian Woolland - a sequel to This Flesh is Mine, which had a rehearsed reading at Salisbury Playhouse in the autumn.  Entitled When Nobody Returns, this play will be the Odyssey that follows our Iliad.  After the war, there come the stories of returning soldiers, of displaced people, of broken relationships, of lands occupied and peoples dispossessed.   Our plan is to work with our partners at ASHTAR Theatre in Palestine to present the two plays in rep during 2016 - so look out for an inspiring and important response to all that is happening in, and emanating from the Middle East.

2016 is also Border Crossings' 21st birthday - and there are some very exciting celebrations being planned.  Like all times of trouble - this change of year is also a time of hope.

Happy New Year.

Paris, Syria, and Ai Wewei

I have only provocations.  I have no answers.

Last night I was at a diplomatic party - and I met Hilary Benn.  I hadn't really expected to run up against the man who, less than 24 hours before, had won applause in the House of Commons for disagreeing with his party leader and voting to bomb Syria.  It seemed more than a little odd, given what he had said only two weeks before.  Click here and marvel.

The air strikes on Syria are a response of sorts to the killings in Paris, but they are a knee-jerk response.  Like everything David Cameron says or does, the decision to go to war was an unconsidered reaction to a short-term news agenda, playing for what he regards as immediate popularity, rather than looking towards any longer-term plan or future possibility.  I recognise, of course, that we must do something - but an intensification of the conflict Daesh desires is not it.  We are casting ourselves in exactly the Western crusader role they have given us in their apocalyptic narrative. The best analysis I have read of the ISIS / Daesh movement is by Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic.  If this article makes one thing clear, it is that the escalation of conflict is exactly what they desire.

So the current response is not only inadequate - it is dangerous.  And this begs the question -  if not by bombing, how should we respond?

On one level, as Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas articulated very clearly on last night's Question Time, there are diplomatic and economic measures that can be taken.  We could start by stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  You can watch the debate and consider for yourself...

For me, as an artist, the question of response is not so directly political - though of course I recognise that the directly political is central.  The contribution of artists is in the cultural arena, and is to do with interventions in public space that shift the quality of thought.  Cultural activity changes the emotional temperature, the atmosphere.  It allows certain things to become thinkable, and certain things to become unthinkable.  At the moment, the unthinkable is becoming policy - and so the need for cultural response is very real.

I'm not saying that art can "Stop the War".  I'm certainly not saying it can stop Daesh.  What I am saying is that a mature society responds to events on a variety of levels, and that the response of artists is often the most profound - the response that can help others think through matters on a more practical level.  In pre-colonial Ghana, the role of the seprewa player was to provide music in the chief's hut, as a way of enabling him to think through what to do.  In Ancient Greece, the Athenian populace watched the plays of Euripides as preparation for jury service and the legislative process.

So - what music, what theatre do we make at this moment?  How do we counter destruction with creativity?  How can we re-member what was blown apart?  How can we find any sort of beauty to set against the violence?

The day before the Paris massacre, I went to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy.  A great deal of this show seems to me to be grappling with precisely the questions that Paris has thrown at us.  His subjects are almost always to do with meaningless oppression, destruction and death.  He makes art from his own imprisonment, from the vandalistic inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, from the bones of Mao's nameless victims.  Most strikingly of all, he memorialises the children who died in the Szechuan earthquake.

Straight is an overwhelming artwork, particularly as shown at the RA, where it is framed by the collected and catalogued names of the children, placed on the walls like a war memorial.  The 150 tons of steel bars that constitute the artwork are taken from the wreckage of the schools where the children died.  The buildings collapsed because these bars buckled so easily - Ai's video in the same room explains the engineering failures, and the huge challenges of gathering the names, finding out what he could about the children, straightening the bent metal.  But it has been straightened, and lies in the RA as a testament to an intense and difficult dedication.  The bars have to be straightened, the artwork says, because their not being straight is the reason 5,000 children died.  To straighten them is a memorial, an act of reparation, a political gesture.

If we can begin to inject something of this depth and emotional intensity into our own cultural space, if we can begin truly to memorialise our lost youth, then perhaps we can begin to move beyond the current simplistic 'eye for an eye', revenge-driven militarism.  Perhaps we can begin to think, and feel, a little differently. We desperately need to.

The changing face of Ma Ubu

Ubu and the Truth Commission

Ubu and the Truth Commission, like Gielgud's Hamlet, is one of those theatrical legends that I thought I had missed.  Originally created in 1997, in the thick of the South African transition, it came to LIFT in 1999, but I somehow failed to get there.  Since then, I have read and heard so much about this extraordinary performance, and even taught students about it, that it was hugely exciting to hear that it was being revived, with the original two leading actors, and coming to the Print Room.  I was not disappointed. 

When William Kentridge's earlier piece with Handspring, Woyzeck on the Highveldt, came to the Barbican in 2011, a lot of people felt that it had "dated", that its style was somehow outmoded.  I didn't feel this - and Ubu seemed to me every bit as much of the now.  In some ways this may sound a bit odd - because the play is so very much about the specific political moment of the Truth Commission, and responds to the hugely challenging questions around justice, reparation, reconciliation and nation-building that it raised.  South Africa likes to tell us that it has moved on: it is rather in the nature of Truth and Reconciliation processes that they encourage a "moving on" once they are complete.  But, as Rustom argues in his book on Terror and Performance, without some kind of reparation, a Truth Commission may in fact have exactly the opposite effect - it can reveal the injustice without setting it right.  As William Kentridge himself has said of the South African TRC: "As people give more and more evidence of the things they have done, they get closer and closer to amnesty, and it gets more and more intolerable that these people should be given amnesty."

In the programme for this revival, the writer Jane Taylor discusses the question put to her and Kentridge by a South African artist after its early performances: "Why have you not updated the play?"  Her response, which I find persuasive, is that "The pragmatic reality of inventing a viable post-apartheid country have shifted us away from the almost allegorical textures of the Commission and its purposes....  The play and its textures arise from the immediacy of the events: the play was made somehow 'inside' the epoch of the Commission.  A rewriting would falsify the uncertain balancing that captures the particular moment of precarious anticipation."   So the revival becomes an opportunity to look back - a deliberate viewing of a specific moment from the perspective of the changed present. 

However, the production is not exactly as it was in 1997.  For one thing, the leading performers, Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa, are older than they were.  Like the audience, they are viewing the troubled birth of the new South Africa from a different, more distant perspective.  And, perhaps related to that, Busi Zokufa's Ma Ubu no longer has a white face.  

These two images, the top one of the current revival, the bottom one of the original show, make the point very clearly.  In the 2015 version, Ma Ubu wore white make-up only for the scene in which she appeared as a projected image, doing her TV interview.  In the original staging, the role was played entirely in white-face.  This was much discussed at the time - with many commentators saying she epitomised the Afrikaaner women who became obsessed by their own sensory comforts while their menfolk committed the worst crimes of apartheid.  If this was what the character signified, then her portrayal by a black actor in white-face made this performance an explicit commentary on such women from a black perspective.  However, to my mind the character was always more unstable than this: in the text, the very scene which retains the white-face even in 2015 sees her break into Xhosa as she turns on Pa Ubu from the screen.  So perhaps Ma Ubu is a more disturbing figure than a simple portrait of callow Afrikaaner women - perhaps she is also representative of how the black population could become complicit in its own oppression.  Seen like this, the decision of the 2015 production to take her out of white-face is a very bold, radical step.  

If, as Jane Taylor implies, the revival looks at 1997 from the perspective of 2015, and allows us to regard the events of that time (including the play) in the light of what has followed, then it needs to take on the emergence of a new black elite, massively wealthy and operating in close cahoots with the white plutocracy and global capitalism.  Alongside this, there persists a deep and enduring wealth gap, with the bulk of the South African population still living in poverty, their lot seemingly just the same as it was under apartheid.  The changing face of Ma Ubu confronts that appalling reality, and her voyage into the sunset with the exonerated white oppressor is all the more chilling as a result.

In a few weeks, I shall be going to South Africa myself, to begin working with Eugene Skeef on our new piece about the end of apartheid.  It feels very timely indeed.  

Egor Bulychev & the Others

Andy Burse as Egor Bulychev.  All photos by Robert Workman.

In Tuesday's Guardian, Mark Lawson writes about a perceived trend towards "German-style" re-imaginings of "modern classics", citing the National Theatre's new production conflating three plays by D.H. Lawrence, and Chichester's Young Chekhov Trilogy.  I suspect he would have been deeply shocked, although hopefully also stimulated, to see what we got up to with Gorky's late play Egor Bulychev and the Others at Rose Bruford last week.

I'm more than happy to admit the Teutonic influence.  After all, Bruford calls itself "London's international drama school", I'm a Visiting Professor and I run an intercultural theatre company - it would seem logical enough that we should look beyond the British approach to naturalism.  Thomas Ostermeier's re-workings of Ibsen were very much in my mind as I started to think through Gorky's text   - he deliberately creates a hyper-real contemporary world in which to locate these pieces, recovering the social and political radicalism that made them so controversial in the first place.  I was also thinking about Simon Stone's version of The Wild Duck for Belvoir (recently filmed as The Daughter), which, although its approach is psychological rather than social and political, is a lesson in how form can be altered as a way of giving a piece the feel of contemporary narrative.  However, I suspect that even these productions, and certainly the ones cited by Lawson, are much closer than our Gorky was to what the writer had expected to see on stage.  It is one thing to modernise a play, either through a change of context or through a structural shift.  It is quite another to do both, in a deliberate attempt to turn the original inside out.  We deliberately renounced what Lawson called "absolute fidelity to what a playwright's intentions are perceived to be."

Austin Caley as Stefan, Katie Trump as Varya

Or maybe not entirely…  That "perceived to be" is a very interesting phrase.  Perceived by whom?  Intentions, after all, are very slippery things.  People lie about their intentions - even to themselves.  As Nesta Jones said at our post-show discussion, sometimes a play can be found to contain a "secret play" that subverts and attacks the apparent meaning.  Sometimes that is the play that has to be produced, especially when, as 21st century people in dialogue with a classic, we find that there are aspects of "what a playwright's intentions are perceived to be" with which we find ourselves in profound disagreement.  Some of my student cast had just emerged from working on The Merchant of Venice: you cannot simply buy into that text, knowing what we now know.  No more, I think, can we buy into the apparent meaning of late Gorky - plays written after his return to Stalin's Russia…  My first night card from Michael Earley was a painting of Stalin sitting at Gorky's deathbed.  I do not want Stalin there at my side when I croak.

Gloria Obianyo as Nkolika, Andro Crespo as Pedro, Celeste Collier as Georgie

Naturalism has been sanitised.  It has been forgotten that, originally, naturalism was the avant-garde.  We have come to think of “realistic” performance as a default position.  We have diluted it into family drama and soap opera, psychological thriller and “reality” TV.  In this process, we have lost touch with the radical origins of the form.  The English tradition of naturalistic performance eschews the socio-political dimension in favour of psychological “character study”.  We dramatise Freud.  But Freud’s ideas are diametrically opposed to those of Zola, Ibsen and Gorky.  For Freud, if you are (say) depressed, then that is your own fault – it’s to do with some internal problem in your personal make-up.  Psychoanalytical performance denies our relationship to others – the social, political and spiritual links that underpin our lives.  Maybe your depression is actually to do with living in a massively unequal society that saddles its youth with enormous debts; with the failure of mainstream culture to engage with the complexity of modern Britain; with God having absented himself from our dialogue with our own mortality.  In the 21st century, we have to revisit naturalism in a way that reinvigorates this more radical agenda.

Gloria Obianyo as Nkolika

In an age dominated by filmic narratives, the structures of naturalism are a barrier, not an aid, to contacting what is realistic in Gorky.  Because he is bound into a three-act, single set structure, he has to put himself through incredible contortions to engineer people into Egor Bulychev’s dining room at appropriate moments to encounter one another.  Take that cumbersome scaffolding away, and a series of short, punchy scenes is revealed.  Re-order those scenes, and the play begins to reveal its extraordinary modernity.  So we found ourselves re-imagining Egor as a Russian oligarch running an investment management company in London, with a family of calculating super-rich eager to pounce on his wealth when cancer finally overcomes him in the Wellington Hospital.  The loyal maid Glasha became his PA and lover Georgie; and his sister-in-law's convent was re-located to Nigeria, where it was attacked by Boko Haram.  The deserting soldiers who roam across Russia in Gorky's text, striking fear into Egor's family, became the refugees fleeing into Europe - and the gamekeeper who supports them became the family chauffeur.  Cars make great locations for claustrophobic scenes of intense argument.

Kizzy Dunn as Shura

Above all, I felt that we had to move Egor's illegitimate daughter Shura to the centre of the play.  Gorky indicates that she somehow moves towards the Russian Revolution of 1917 - but her process of conversion all happens offstage and becomes difficult to understand or identify with.  By shifting some of the scenes from the first Act to a new position near the end of the play, we were able to show her being used and abused by the self-interested money-grabbers around Egor's death bed, and so made sense of her radicalisation.  The revolutionary character Pablo (Yakov in the original) only appeared towards the end, as the London society we had created tipped over into the British Revolution of 2017. At the same point, naturalism gave way to a more dream-like style: was this revolution real, or was it Egor's dying dream?  Was the stylistic shift in itself perhaps a symptom of leaving behind a culture that has been proved decadent and wanting?

Final scene - The Revolution

I love doing drama school productions.  It's where the future is made.

Salisbury Odysseys

At the beginning of this year, Brian Woolland and I led some workshops with members of the Youth Theatre at Salisbury Playhouse, as a way of kickstarting some ideas for a new play.  The play will be a sequel to This Flesh is Mine: after our Iliad will come our Odyssey.  You read it here first!  On October 24th, we were back there, accompanied by some of the actors from This Flesh is Mine, to give a reading of some scenes from the new piece, again involving the young people.

A youth theatre attached to a provincial rep may seem an odd place to start work on a play based on Greek myth and engaging with current issues in the Middle East - But Salisbury Playhouse is no ordinary provincial rep.  For one thing, since Gareth Machin arrived as Artistic Director, it has become very focussed on new writing, and exciting, engaged, experimental new writing at that.  And, even more importantly for us, Salisbury is a city surrounded by the military - so many of the young people in the youth theatre are from services families.  This meant that they were ideally placed to respond to one of the key figures in The Odyssey - Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, who dominates the first four books of Homer's poem, and remains central throughout.  Most people think that The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus' voyage home: in fact, the stories of the voyage are all told indirectly within the wider story of his family and his land - Penelope and Telemachus are waiting for his return to a space that is increasingly dominated by suitors for Penelope's hand.  Occupiers, if you like.  Why does Odysseus not come back?  When he does come back, what sort of man will he be?  How will he related to a son who he has never known - a son who is now an adult?

These sort of questions were very immediate for young people from military families - and many of them responded in fascinating and productive ways during our workshops early in the year.  Their presence in the reading was extraordinary too - it made us realise how much The Odyssey is about a drama between generations - how very young characters engage with, or turn their backs on, the middle aged.

Brian's new play is going to be extraordinary - a really worthy successor to This Flesh is Mine.  Now all we have to do is make it happen.

London Film Festival

Ixcanul (Volcano)

I was in rehearsals though October (more of which in another blog post), so I saw rather less at this year's London Film Festival than usual - but there was still a lot of excitement!  Our old friend Adil Hussain, who was in the first version of Orientations, and was central to its devising workshop, appeared in several films this year, particularly Sunrise and the rather strange Kothanodi.  It was also great to meet up with Atom Egoyan again, at the screening of his new film with Christopher Plummer, Remember.

Of the mainstream films, the one that most excited me was The Daughter - the film version of Simon Stone's Wild Duck for Belvoir, which was one of my theatre highlights of last year. Simon had already made Ibsen more filmic, and this seemed like a logical development of the piece.  It wasn't perhaps quite so emotionally intense as the play - and I think this was partly because the social realism, the physical landscape necessary for film dissipated some of the concentration of energy given by the enclosed glass box set of the theatre production.  It also, perhaps, pointed up the lack of social concern in Stone's treatment of the characters - his approach is more psychological than Ibsen's, and so actually not the sort of drama I usually warm to.  Certainly the film version made the character of Christian (played by Paul Schneider) seem more directly to blame for the tragedy, and his malevolence seemed rooted in his own psychological problems, his jealousy.  I always worry about the sort of psychologically-driven naturalism that makes it seem as if people with problems are somehow to blame for them - as if there were no underlying social, economic, political issues that lead to our psychological malfunctions.  Perhaps it's good that the film made this more apparent - but I missed the play's extraordinary intensity.

I was also, as always, on the lookout for films from indigenous cultures, with an eye to the next Origins.  There were two that particularly excited me this year.  Ixcanul (Volcano) is a film set among the Maya of Guatemala, and reminded me of the wonderful Grupo Sotz'il, whom we hosted in this year's festival.  The film delves under the surface of the culture with great integrity - and in its closing minutes becomes genuinely shocking and incredibly powerful in relation to how that culture is being maltreated by the West.

Tanna

The real revelation, however, was Tanna, a film from the island of the same name, in Vanuatu.  Like Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, which the filmmaker Bentley Dean showed the people of Tanna as the project began, this is a piece of and about an indigenous culture, made in deep partnership with the people of the land and based on their own histories and customs.  It is based on real events in the 1980s, when a young woman was offered in marriage to another tribe, in order to bring peace between them.  She and her boyfriend ran away, and finally took their own lives, rather than be lost to one another.  The island community's acceptance of love as a reason for marriage dates to these events - although the film itself is actually the first public statement of this fact, and so, quite literally, makes history.  What is quite wonderful about the film is its total authenticity and integrity, made manifest in both how immediate and real the performances of the community members feel, and in the strangeness of their world to Western eyes.

Of course, this is something that cuts both ways.  Bentley was at the screening, together with the film's cultural consultant, the only man on the island who speaks English.  During the Q&A, he was asked what he thought of London.  His reply was largely complimentary and polite - but then he said how very surprised he had been to see so many homeless people on the city's streets.  This is a rich country, he said - but there are people who have nothing.  Tanna is not a rich country, but there are no poor people, because there is no money and everything is held in common.  In Tanna, nobody would be left out in the cold in this way.  It was one of those extraordinary wake-up calls that indigenous cultures sound from time to time.  The cinema applauded him, with a deep sense of "What have we done?"

Brian Friel

Faith Healer (Finbar Lynch as Frank)

I first encountered Brian Friel's plays at University in the 80s.  A friend was in a student production of Translations.  It was not only the first Friel play I had seen, it was also the first post-colonial play.  I was studying history, and had an awareness of the context from with the ongoing Troubles sprang - but this was the first time I had seen theatre engage so powerfully and immediately with that complex shared past, leading its audience to re-assess the present.  At the centre of the play is the question of language, and Friel's theatrical device of delivering the whole text in English (the language of the audience) even when the characters are understood to be speaking Irish, was a glorious revelation.  Here was theatricality and comedy uniting stage and auditorium in an understanding of misunderstanding.  It was, I suppose, my Road to Damascus moment.  I have been travelling that rocky road ever since.

A few years later, I was in Dublin, doing a short period of study at Trinity, and was able to engage much more fully with Friel's work, coming to an understanding of his huge significance, not only as a dramatist, but as a cultural activist.  I read all his plays voraciously, and was lucky enough to see superb productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come (directed by Joe Dowling) and Faith Healer.  The latter would be one of the first plays Border Crossings ever presented, when in 1995-6, Richard Cave's production toured a series of overseas venues, acquiring new resonance and meaning as it responded to widely differing contexts.  The thought of it performing in Cairo seems extraordinary now, but Michael Keneally's review bears witness that, twenty years ago, it really did happen.

But for me, the most important influence of Brian Friel was in the form of the company he created with Stephen Rea, supported by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin - Field Day.  Inaugurated with Translations in 1980, Field Day was the first contemporary Irish company to operate through the entire island of Ireland: a statement made all the more powerful by the fact that its base, and first performances, were in Derry / Londonderry - a city which at that time was a by-word for The Troubles.  The programming saw the gradual emergence of a clear vision for cultural regeneration.  Productions of Chekov and Molière translated into an Irish idiom, new Irish-English versions of the Greek classics by Heaney and Paulin, new Irish plays and (perhaps most tellingly of all) Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena - all pointed up the centrality of language to meaningful political change.  The company went on to publish a series of pamphlets, starting with Paulin's A New Look at the Language Question, and a Dictionary of Irish English.  The entire project sought to regenerate the post-colonial space through the claiming of literary stature for Irish English, establishing a richer and more resonant language through the public practice of drama, enabling the possibility of new ideas and new expression within the emerging polity.  The heir of Synge and the ally of Fugard, Soyinka, Virahsawmy and Dattani - Brian Friel created a theatre that was genuinely transformative.  I believe that the current Northern Irish peace process owes far more to his endeavours than is acknowledged, and that the Irish future will be forged in the cultural revolution he began.

May he rest in peace.

Aboriginality on the London stage

Nicôle Lecky in This Heaven

In the past week, I have seen two very distinct representations of Aboriginal Australia on the London stage.  The first was a play by an indigenous Australian writer, Nakkiah Lui's This Heaven, which has just finished its run at the Finborough.  I was asked to take part in a post-show panel discussion, which, given the play's concern with the issue of deaths in custody, inevitably turned to Beautiful One Day, and also to Bullie's House (the latter ends with a death in custody, although here the implication is that the Aboriginal man dies because of his separation from land and community, rather than as a direct result of police brutality).  Like both of those plays (to a greater or lesser degree), This Heaven is the result of the Belvoir Theatre's sustained engagement with indigenous culture - and so it is perhaps all the more disturbing to hear in it the voice of discontented Aboriginal youth, in the character of the trainee lawyer Sissy, expressing fury that even her success as an indigenous person is measured in terms of a white world view.  But isn't this exactly the problem of the whole "development" agenda?  We measure "improvements" in the post-colonial space and the lot of indigenous peoples solely in terms of how close they can come to our way of living.  We praise them for becoming more like us, and lament our own failings when they refuse to do so.  We assume that economic prosperity is the only measure of human endeavour, and we impose this on those whom our ancestors once conquered.  Theatre may be as guilty as every other field of endeavour, and Lui is right to provoke.

Gary Wood in Our Country's Good

I was still thinking about these concerns when, the next night, I saw the National Theatre's production of Our Country's Good.  In spite of its "modern classic" status, I'd actually never seen the play before - though I knew Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, on which it is based.  Since Tom also wrote Bullie's House, I had expected another nuanced and provocative engagement with Aboriginal culture.  Indeed, The Playmaker is dedicated to "Arabanoo and his brethren, still dispossessed", in a direct acknowledgment of Aboriginal man who worked to build a relationship with Captain Arthur Philip, whose expedition to Australia forms the background to the story.  In Tom's novel, this relationship is central - but in the play, it has been abandoned.  There remains, however, the figure of "The Aborigine", whom the text shows as speaking four times in a direct audience address.  These moments have the potential to be powerful theatrical interventions in the colonial narrative: for example, the second scene of the play is titled "A lone Aboriginal Australian describes the arrival of the First Convict Fleet in Botany Bay on January 20, 1788", and the spoken text reads: "A giant canoe drifts onto the sea, clouds billowing from upright oars.  This is a dream which has lost its way.  Best to leave it alone."

This language is sparse, poetic and evocative.  It was also totally lost in the National production.  I'm not sure if it was even spoken, or, if it was, whether it was spoken in English.  Certainly there was no contact between the Aboriginal character and the audience.  Every production decision was calculated to make him distant and "Other" - exotic, and therefore of no concern to us.  Michael Billington's review talks of him "exerting some mysterious Puck-like power", as if the indigenous were literally another world.  The production brings him into the action whenever there is violence or cruelty between the white characters, as if he were the embodiment of their savagery.  This is about as far from the open spirit of Belvoir as it is possible to get - and it really saddens me to see it on Britain's national stage in the 21st century.