This is the beginning of the blog for our big new project. It would be good if it could start with a name, but at the moment it has only a working title, or several working titles, none of which actually ‘works’ as it were. This is the beginning of the real creative part of Futures, or the Mijeong Project. On Tuesday in Seoul , South Korea, a group of young people’s theatre workers from Japan, Korea and the UK will finally be in a room together, and we can start making up our new play. So a significant and hopefully fascinating two weeks lies ahead, and beyond that a year or two…
So, we are setting up this blog as one of the ways that journey will be charted, and we will be encouraging all those involved to contribute as we go, and we will hope to be joined along the way by interested observers, eavesdroppers, supporters or challenging voices. Please come on board the nameless vessel as she chugs out of port, or at any point along her journey. Here on the ships blog, we will welcome inputs from crew and passengers alike…. Alright, that’s enough…
The origins of our work here are complex, but they go back to 1999, and the beginning of a creative link between the UK and Korea. Much can be traced from the website http://www.hanyong.co.uk/ , and from my website, http://www.peterww.co.uk/ , about the early stages of the development of Hanyong Projects and about our major project, The Bridge, which has just been performed in Adelaide, from which I am heading as I write this now. But for anyone stumbling on this through some tragic misgoogle, or coming in some other way afresh, here is the basic…
The project we are now starting on will be producing a play for young people of maybe about 8-12, to be performed in 2009 in all three of our countries. The aim for this play is that it will have arisen from a creative collaboration between equal partners, and that like The Bridge before it, it will reflect in some way the special power it draws from that collaboration, that its audiences will feel as part of their response to our work, some sense of what is to be gained by reaching across the continents as artists and as human beings. [you can I am afraid expect more grand statements of this kind on this blog, because we will be aiming high…..but of course in the spirit of frank exchange that the word implies, please feel free to infect them with cynicism at any point, if you must.]
For me, the key word slipped into the above is ‘equal’. What we attempted in 2005 when we started the last project, was to go beyond the kind of collaboration that we had seen before. In the field of theatre for the young at least, these seemed to vary from being deeply imbalanced – a western director, doing his or her thing with or to eastern artists, as an extension of a masterclass, for example, to being a celebration of diversity by the putting together of artists of different cultures, maybe without the practise of any being altered. Many models of international collaboration exist, none between our countries, which at the time were just the UK and Korea, seemed to have quite the depth that we sought. Or the equality.
The process of The Bridge, is too complex to summarise here, but some of the emerging principles that I will be urging us to take into our new work may be worth committing to cyberspace… One is to take an organic approach…if the partners have a clear plan of what they want, fixed ideas of what constitutes the right result, then we may well find conflict and impasse. There are different ways of doing things, but if our assumption is always that what is different is to be respected, welcomed, leapt into, explored, embraced, then we will all find new ways of doing things. Ultimately some may suit us and some not, but the project will have room for more than one approach, and we do not necessarily need to decide the best..in fact we should actively fight any urge to pass judgment. This isn’t being sanctimonious, it is absolutely practical. I have lost count of the number of times since working in Korea that I have been glad that I went along with something against raging instincts which told me it was wrong…This is the hardest skill of all for many, and maybe particularly those of us brought up with such an effective sense of cultural confidence as Britain has. The propaganda that has told us so often of the strange ways of those little foreign people, and their great need for our kindly wisdom is so strong, that the cultivation of a really open mind is hard. But this project will demand it, from everyone. The dividends to be gained are huge, too.
I have ringing in my ears the responses that people had to The Bridge in Adelaide, where it was seen by more than 300 delegates from around the world at the ASSITEJ Congress, and a larger number of young Australians. The project is more than just a play, and those responses strayed into so many areas that you could not fail to feel this is the point…. Some discussion was in the usual area of theatre criticism, was the play too long, or too slow, or were the motivations of the characters sufficiently clear, or how was it affected by the lack of set [but that is another long complicated story], but much more was about the planet..about language, about children, about war, about emotion, about our nations, about subjects well beyond our intentions. The
piece breaks western theatre rules – it rambles and repeats, it overstates, it is unfashionably realistic, all of those can be seen as signs of not having been controlled properly. But in all of that is its strength too, and I think a challenge back to the often self-regarding world of theatre, because in Korea in England and again in Australia, it was responded to unanimously positively by all of the young people who saw it, and by all that I can think of of the non-theatre people too. We have a new stream of responses from those people, many extremely strong reactions, some of whom talk in terms of it being life-changing. It certainly has been for those of us involved in making it. That comes from the process, of course, but so I believe does the extreme response of audiences. They are present at an event which they can feel has been arrived at though something different and good, and maybe even important. I think our new project will be very different in style from The Bridge, but I really hope it shares that – that when people see it they can on some level feel that it is the expression of a coming-together in real openness, and that there is hope for our world when we do that. You see I warned you there would be more grand statements…..
So…contributions to this blog do not all need to be this long – it is not every day that we will have a 10 hour flight to while away – but I hope they will come from many corners of the process, and do some work in opening it up to others. I will try and keep up my own contributions where possible… I can’t believe I am heading back again to Seoul to start on this next chapter…..
So, we are setting up this blog as one of the ways that journey will be charted, and we will be encouraging all those involved to contribute as we go, and we will hope to be joined along the way by interested observers, eavesdroppers, supporters or challenging voices. Please come on board the nameless vessel as she chugs out of port, or at any point along her journey. Here on the ships blog, we will welcome inputs from crew and passengers alike…. Alright, that’s enough…
The origins of our work here are complex, but they go back to 1999, and the beginning of a creative link between the UK and Korea. Much can be traced from the website http://www.hanyong.co.uk/ , and from my website, http://www.peterww.co.uk/ , about the early stages of the development of Hanyong Projects and about our major project, The Bridge, which has just been performed in Adelaide, from which I am heading as I write this now. But for anyone stumbling on this through some tragic misgoogle, or coming in some other way afresh, here is the basic…
The project we are now starting on will be producing a play for young people of maybe about 8-12, to be performed in 2009 in all three of our countries. The aim for this play is that it will have arisen from a creative collaboration between equal partners, and that like The Bridge before it, it will reflect in some way the special power it draws from that collaboration, that its audiences will feel as part of their response to our work, some sense of what is to be gained by reaching across the continents as artists and as human beings. [you can I am afraid expect more grand statements of this kind on this blog, because we will be aiming high…..but of course in the spirit of frank exchange that the word implies, please feel free to infect them with cynicism at any point, if you must.]
For me, the key word slipped into the above is ‘equal’. What we attempted in 2005 when we started the last project, was to go beyond the kind of collaboration that we had seen before. In the field of theatre for the young at least, these seemed to vary from being deeply imbalanced – a western director, doing his or her thing with or to eastern artists, as an extension of a masterclass, for example, to being a celebration of diversity by the putting together of artists of different cultures, maybe without the practise of any being altered. Many models of international collaboration exist, none between our countries, which at the time were just the UK and Korea, seemed to have quite the depth that we sought. Or the equality.
The process of The Bridge, is too complex to summarise here, but some of the emerging principles that I will be urging us to take into our new work may be worth committing to cyberspace… One is to take an organic approach…if the partners have a clear plan of what they want, fixed ideas of what constitutes the right result, then we may well find conflict and impasse. There are different ways of doing things, but if our assumption is always that what is different is to be respected, welcomed, leapt into, explored, embraced, then we will all find new ways of doing things. Ultimately some may suit us and some not, but the project will have room for more than one approach, and we do not necessarily need to decide the best..in fact we should actively fight any urge to pass judgment. This isn’t being sanctimonious, it is absolutely practical. I have lost count of the number of times since working in Korea that I have been glad that I went along with something against raging instincts which told me it was wrong…This is the hardest skill of all for many, and maybe particularly those of us brought up with such an effective sense of cultural confidence as Britain has. The propaganda that has told us so often of the strange ways of those little foreign people, and their great need for our kindly wisdom is so strong, that the cultivation of a really open mind is hard. But this project will demand it, from everyone. The dividends to be gained are huge, too.
I have ringing in my ears the responses that people had to The Bridge in Adelaide, where it was seen by more than 300 delegates from around the world at the ASSITEJ Congress, and a larger number of young Australians. The project is more than just a play, and those responses strayed into so many areas that you could not fail to feel this is the point…. Some discussion was in the usual area of theatre criticism, was the play too long, or too slow, or were the motivations of the characters sufficiently clear, or how was it affected by the lack of set [but that is another long complicated story], but much more was about the planet..about language, about children, about war, about emotion, about our nations, about subjects well beyond our intentions. The
piece breaks western theatre rules – it rambles and repeats, it overstates, it is unfashionably realistic, all of those can be seen as signs of not having been controlled properly. But in all of that is its strength too, and I think a challenge back to the often self-regarding world of theatre, because in Korea in England and again in Australia, it was responded to unanimously positively by all of the young people who saw it, and by all that I can think of of the non-theatre people too. We have a new stream of responses from those people, many extremely strong reactions, some of whom talk in terms of it being life-changing. It certainly has been for those of us involved in making it. That comes from the process, of course, but so I believe does the extreme response of audiences. They are present at an event which they can feel has been arrived at though something different and good, and maybe even important. I think our new project will be very different in style from The Bridge, but I really hope it shares that – that when people see it they can on some level feel that it is the expression of a coming-together in real openness, and that there is hope for our world when we do that. You see I warned you there would be more grand statements…..So…contributions to this blog do not all need to be this long – it is not every day that we will have a 10 hour flight to while away – but I hope they will come from many corners of the process, and do some work in opening it up to others. I will try and keep up my own contributions where possible… I can’t believe I am heading back again to Seoul to start on this next chapter…..
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