Looking for Yoghurt

Performances

2009-06-20T23:43:00.001-07:00

So..Looking for Yoghurt finished its run of performances in England. There is currently a gap in the blog from towards the end of rehearsals, so there is a lot to fill in. Apologies, but it was just too busy during that time.

At some point I will fill in an account of the two weeks of performance in Birmingham, and our week at the SPARK Festival in Leicester, but for now it is enough to say that the play went really well - response was mostly fantastic, and it got tigher and tighter by the end of the UK run. There is now a pause, before the tour resumes in Seoul early in July....

World of Yoghurt

2009-05-29T15:39:00.000-07:00

World of Yoghurt….the Game

Background to the World of Yoghurt

LearnPlay Foundation and Looking For Yoghurt Director Peter Wynn-Willson of the Hanyong Theatre Company having been working in partnership with Reaside Junior School to develop a game level in Sony’s Little Big Planet on the PlayStation 3.

Game Designers of the Future!
The game development compliments the theatre production and has allowed the children at Reaside Junior School to become game developers for a term. The children developed a range of creative skills in a fun and engaging environment. They learned how to map out creative concepts, sharing and discussing their ideas and drill down to the chosen idea. They story-boarded their ideas and produced functionality specifications whilst letting their imaginations run wild with the design of crazy and treacherous puzzles within the game level. The result being a fully playable (be warned, it is not easy!) game level published to the Little Big Planet community. See access details further on.

Teachers on Board
If you are interested in developing a game within this environment in your school or to bring a subject to life, please contact us or send us an email.

Instructions for Getting to The World of Yoghurt

Firstly you will need the following

PlayStation 3

Little Big Planet game

Internet connection

Make sure you have signed up to the PlayStation Network and created your self a user account and that the PlayStation has been updated to the most current version, see PlayStation 3 manual for help.Once you have completed these steps then insert the Little Big Planet disk and allow it to load the game. If this is the first time you have loaded Little Big Planet you will be prompted to update the game. Upon loading Little Big Planet you will be required to play through the first story levels called ‘The Gardens’. By completing The Gardens you will unlock a wide range of new content which will be explained to you by the in game narrator. When you are in your Sack Person pod you will be able to navigate to the Little Big Planet main menu and have four options available to you.

Story

Quick Play

Community

Little Big Store

Using your controller navigate down to the ‘Community’ option and highlight it, then navigate to the ‘search’ option on the right.You will now be presented with ‘Search Options’, if you now select ‘Search Text’ and type in ‘WORLD OF YOGHURT’ and press select you will be taken to the level. By highlighting ‘World of Yoghurt’ and then selecting it you will enter the level.Upon successfully completing World of Yoghurt you will open up ‘World of Yoghurt: Curtain Call’ and get to see more about the play Looking for Yoghurt and the project.

We hope that you enjoy playing and please be sure to rate the map after playing.

Please keep checking for updated versions of the level for extra content coming soon.

Have fun and remember to play responsibly

In Performance

2009-05-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that the blog stopped just before performances started. Things got very very busy, and I just did not have the time. But now the run in Birmingham is coming to an end, and I will catch up with a few reflections on the performances soon. I hope some other people will also contribute their thoughts now, and please if you come and see the play, feel free to add comments here.

The teachers pack is now online at http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/participate/students-and-teachers/resources/looking-for-yoghurt/welcome/

The play is going really well...a long process is ending, and another we hope is beginning.....

Birmingham Post article

2009-05-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

This is Terry Grimley's Article in the Birmingham Post about the Looking for Yoghurt process.... click HERE

Anyone got a light?

2009-05-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

This was always going to be a long tough day, with technical rehearsals continuing, and a dress run in the evening. But events conspired against us today to make it longer and tougher. The main lighting board in the REP failed, and because there was a performance of Serious Money in the evening, they took our board, and although Simon struggled manfully with a replacement, w eended up doinbg a delayed run with only a skeleton lighting plan. Considering that, and the fact that they were tired, the performers produced a decent run, but it was hard not to feel a little flat at the end of the evening.

Minato has joined us, having been given an embarassingly hard time by the immigration department at Birmignham Airport. [If you are reading this blog, MI5, please bear in mind that Minato is a very nice man, and a professional musician, we are not paying him for his presence here, he is visiting the play on which he has worked, and he is not out to steal our womenfolk or blow up our buildings.] He has given the OK to the radio mike, and he got straight to work polishing up elements of the music. Aline too returned, and watched the tech run, with both of them chipping in to work on sections.

We got rid of the troublesome 'clearing up' section at the beginning of the Brazil scene, and that left us with the need for something to replace it, which Aline worked on a little, but will need more tomorrow.

After the run we sat and discussed what is left to do. Even through the tiredness this was ultimately encouraging.

Our sound effects sound great through the system, and I am feeling now that almost every moment of the play has worked well at some point. If we can string them all together, the whole play will work...but this was a slightly nervous day, as might be expected, with our technical hitches..... Two days to go.

Getting all Technical

2009-05-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Technical rehearsal Tuesday came and went pretty painlessly. Simon, the LD is so calm that it is hard to know whether everything is going as smoothly as it seems. Generally, each day we have ticked off another section that has been an obstacle, and today we seemed to notch up a couple more. Yesterday it was the ending song. Today, the machine-monster. This section, where Blue disappears, and comes back with a machine to help dig to Brazil, had never been right. But today during the tech runs, we seemed to crack it.

We also made some real progress on the remaining issues with the Brazil scene. Part of this was giving Ayako a radio mike, which is very subtle, but just gives a little extra support to her voice, so that she can rise above the three actors charging around as they do. Aline will be back tomorrow, and there will be a few issues she can contribute to.

Overall, to see the play with theatre lights for the first time was a real excitement. The backcloths take the light very well, and although Yeon is offended by the creases, everyone else loves the slightly eccentric way they look. The sound effects are nearly finished too, and Clive, who has been doing those has found some very convincing machine-monsters.

We made good progress through the technical rehearsals, and although Simon has a lot to do, we were able to release the actors at 6.00, having booked them until 10.00. I am really relieved, because preserving their energy is one of my main priorities this week.

Minato was due to arrive this evening, but missed his connection in Paris, so he will be coming late tonight. I am looking forward to him seeing the play - I think he will be pleased with the way it has progressed.

Yoghurt Unplugged

2009-05-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

After a rare day off, the performing team assembled in the rehearsal room on Monday morning, while Simon started the main rigging and focusing of lights in the studio.

Free from all of the paraphernalia and complication of the props and scenery, the company had a really good run-through in the morning, watched by Caroline Jester, the REP's Dramaturg, and Ali, my partner. Maybe it was something to do with the weekend, or the freedom of being back in the rehearsal room we had done so much in during October, but there was certainly a spirit of fun in the air, particularly during the afternoon.

We finally tackled the ending song, which will happen during the curtain call in effect. I had not been sure about this up to today, but it suddenly seemed clear that the simplicity and catchiness of the song would work very well in this context. Also, Young Ju, who loves working an audience, had been restrained all through the play, wanting to work the crowd, with me telling her that it is not right for this particular play. Giving her permission to play with the audience during this song at the end is unleashing a force of nature. Not that Yudai and Daniel won't hold their own, too. We all ended the day laughing.

Today may prove a key moment in tracing the meaning of this play. When scholars in years to come are reading this blog as part of their analysis of one of the great pieces of 21st century poetic drama, let them note that it was on this day that the team decided that Yoghurt will indeed be found at the end of the play....well, almost. We decided that there will be a tinkle of Yoghurt's bell, just as the lights are going out, suggesting at least that there will be a reunion soon. Ha ha... eat your heart out, Monsieur Godot.

At lunchtime, Terry Grimley of the Birmingham Post came to watch some rehearsal and interview the writers. It was interesting to hear how the different people described our project to him. Listening to Toyoko and Mijeong giving their views brought the play in even clearer focus for me, and emphasised the magic of the combination we have enjoyed. Toyoko said that she had found it very easy because usually she has to hold so many people in her head, but in this project they had all been shared. The actors had held the people, and I had provided a male perspective, while Mijeong had provided a young perspective. We also had an interesting discussion about acting style. We decided that in this production we are not interested in realism, only in truth. That is a litle deep for a Monday lunchtime.

The Weekend

2009-05-09T22:28:00.000-07:00

We worked a full day today even though it was Saturday, to make up for the Bank Holiday on Monday, which felt a little cruel considering the tough week the company has had. So in the end it became just a slighlty long morning for the actors, and the afternoon was taken up with a long writer's meeting.

In the morning we did a run, and Judy finally got to see the whole play, having missed one chance while in Casualty in Seoul! Nisha, the Programme Co-ordinator at the REP also watched, and Simon has set up his lighting desk in the auditorium, so he sat in on the run too.

The play still ran a little too long, [70 minutes] but it also ran quite smoothly, and we still look pretty much on course. The fence this time fell down when Yudai touched it, and there was a bit of a pause during the section where he clears everything up, while searching for monsters, and also while Young Ju built the tower to climb at the end, but except for those three bits we could begin to concentrate again on the acting.

Everyone seemed pleased with how it had gone, and we went together for a lunch at Woktastic, where they remembered us from October.

The writers meeting was also encouraging. We spent a long time discussing the beginning of the play, and the Brazil scene, but we were very much in agreement on most aspects, and we ahve a clear plan for what still needs doing. For me, in a project where much of the focus is often on the complication of holding all our different perspectives, what was very strong today was the other side of the eqaution. That is the fact that having Toyoko and Mijeong involved throughout the process is a fantastic resource. Anything I miss is picked up by them. Or if anything seems to be going in an unhelpful direction, they are there, watching, thinking all the time, so when there is a problem, there are many possible ideas to solve it.

It was a long meeting though, and by six o'clock we are all tired. Yudai and Young Ju have been prectising the fence business in the studio, and Yeon and Hye Jin are still painting crates and plastic when I leave for a day off which I will enjoy.

So, what do the children in Birmingham think?

2009-05-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

This was an important and very positive day. The children from Reaside and Chandos, who came to our sharing back in October, came to watch rehearsals again today, and we showed them most of the play, during a stopping run. Then we had a chance to talk with them during lunch time, as well as a first chance for most of the company to see the Yoghurt World level for Little Big Planet, the Playstation game which the Reaside children have designed.

The actors rose to the situation of having an audience, and the response was certainly encouraging. Obviously these children know the story already, so they are not a proper test of how easy it is to follow, but there were indications that the clarity is about right. They really enjoyed it too, and it was encouraging that one of their favourite bits was the Brazil section, which has provided us so much anxiety over the last few months.

Steve Hands, who has been working with the Reaside group, came in at lunchtime and spent time going through the most recent version of the game with the group. The actors anjoyed their first taste of the game too. Clive Chandler, who will be doing a puppet project with Chandos over the next week, watched the run too, and they did some planning for their project.

After the kids had gone, we ran the rest of the play, and then went over the Brazil scene. There was another run scheduled for the aftrenoon, but it felt like that would have constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and we just did some bits instead.

I'm Still Hungry

2009-05-07T22:27:00.000-07:00

The idea today was to finish the work on the Brazil scene, and then run through the rest of the play to look at improvements Aline could make. In the end we spent more time on Brazil than anticipated and we never got to going through the rest of the play, but this seemed like the right decision.

The silk cloths which are the centre of the Brazil scene have all needed re-sewing, because the treatment they get causes them to fray, so Yeon has been very busy with that, and looks as if she would be happy never to see another sewing machine right now. But the impact of that scene is growing.

The stress level has also been growing for me in the last couple of days, not because of the core process, but because of all the other stuff. Perhaps it is because Aline is leading the rehearsals, it frees up enough of my time to make me feel daunted by how much there is still to do. It is things like the notes for the programme, the sound effects, the organising of the school projects, the per diems etc. Today I had to fit in two sessions in Childrens Centres, and a visit to the bank around the rehearsals, so perhaps it was not surprising that it felt particularly stressed. Suddenly it felt as if there was too much to do aftre all. But I think it is only to be expected at this stage.

At the end of the day we say goodbye to Aline, or in fact 'au revoir' because she will be back for a day and a half next week, by which time the actors may have recovered from these two days!

Most of the company went off to a school at the end of the day, to watch the Moby Duck production of 'I'm Still Hungry', which is based on a famous Korean story. It was at St Mary's, the school in the Korean community in Birmingham, and by all accounts it was a wild nioght. Yerang leafleted the 300 people crammed into the school hall, and our audience should be swelling as a result. In fact the theatre is very happy with the level of sales.

Yoghurt, the musical

2009-05-06T22:27:00.000-07:00

A long hard physical day for the actors today, being put through their paces by Aline.

It was nicefor me, to sit back a little and watch her working with them, and she provided a fantastic input of different energy, which everyone responded to. Having seen the whole play, she got to work on the areeas which are most in need of this kind of injection, the machine-monster section, the ending and principally of course the almost legendarily problematic Brazil scene.

Toyoko has arrived in Birmingham, and it was truly great to see her. After missing her during the great debate about the opening song, it is very reassuring to have her calm positive presence back in the room.

Aline started with a session on the way the actors climb the tower at the end of the play, which by the end of the day had become very impressive, with them hanging off precariously, and helping each other up. The Machine-monster section has been improved by Daniel standing behind the fence panels, and 'operating' the machine with big elastic levers, while it alos now involves Hye Jin as a shadow machine behind the backdrops.

After the preview in Korea, Mijeomng had been in favour of cutting the fabrics that we were using in the Brazil scene, because they did not seem to work, but after Aline's input, the second half of the scene now seems to be getting to the kind of beauty and energy that we have been wanting for it. My role became to protect the meaning within the action, while she was suggesting movements. We made some important progress, and everyone was noticably energised by the end of the day.

Just what we need - un autre langue...

2009-05-05T19:57:00.000-07:00

So here we are, on the final leg of the begiinning of our long journey in search of a little white cat that we all know we may never find. Back in Birmingham.

It didn't seem likely a week or so ago, while we waited every day for news from Manila of everyopne's passports, but everyone has arrived safely in Birmingham, and rehearsals are underway for the play openeing on May 15th. There were very few drama at the airports, although personally I had to jettison a good chunk of my luggage at Incheon airport, and then lost my passport and wallet in the Duty Free shop - but they were returned to me quickly, and that is just par for the course for me.

On Bank Holiday Monday we all gathered at our house for a celebration of safe arrival, of Mayday, of Blues promotion - as predicted in these pages - and our wedding anniversary. No amount of jetlag can dent the exuberance of the company, and there is a feeling that the possible excuses for failure are disappearing one by one, and a dawning nervousness at the responsibilty that brings.

Tuesday morning starts with Ayako taking the actors through voice work, while the set up is finished in the Door. The backdrops are already hung. though my first irritating director act is to change their position. The stressful aspects of the production for me now are all coming from the 'usual suspects' - the fence, the machine-monster, the ending scene and of course 'Brazil'. The metal fence pieces are now made, and we spend time constructing what will be the final version, with the real materials. In the course of the morning we make the decision which perhaps has been inevitable all along - that we will not attempt to move the fence in the change around from outside to inside the building site. We still have to solve the remaining problems of getting the wire to be released when the fence breaks, and dealing with the quantity of plastic sheet.

In the rehearsal room, the actors ran through the first half of the play during the morning, and then at lunchtime we all gathered to meet and greet the staff at the REP. At this point we were also joined by Aline David, a dancer and choreographer who will be helping us in the next three crucial days, as we crack the final version of the Brazil scene. None of us has met her before, but she is excited about the project, and leaps straight into work. Judy is speaking with her in French, just to add another language, when we thought life could not get any more complicated!

In the afternoon we moved into the Door, and staggered throught the whole play, partly to get used to the space that will be our home for the next four weeks, and also to show the play to Aline. My focus is on just how much needs still to be done, but the actors manage to do a good run, in spite of tiredness after all the travelling. In the evening we had a long talk with Aline, who has enjoyed watching and we planned together the way she will work with us over the next two days.

Moving On

2009-04-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

Our final day in Seoul was spent first at our old friend the UK Immigration and Visa service office in Namdaemun, picking up the visas that cast their shadow over our rehearsals for a while, then after lunch we had a debrief on the run-through, followed by a meeting to plan the move on to Birmingham.

The set has been simplified here, and much of what there is is being made in Birmingham, so there is not too much for us to transport. What there is will be divided among the several routes to Birmingham. Daniel leaves at 5.00 tomorrow, direct to London, I am going to Manchester via Helsinki on Saturday morning, Young Ju, Mijeong and Hye Jin go to Amsterdam and then Birmingham on Saturday morning, and then Yudai and Azako go to Tokyo, Zurich and then Birmingham on Saturday evening. I don't think I will bother you with the routes for Toyoko, Minato, Hisashi, Su Young and Byung Ho!

Yeon and Simon have arrived safely in Birmingham, and are paving the way for the rest of us, so there was a production meeting in Birmingham, just as we were winding up our day with an evening in a tiny little bar in the very arty Samcheongung area near to Insadong.

In between, emails and skype chats have been flying between here and Birmingham and Tokyo about the song Ayako sings before the play starts, which is still causing quite a bit of angst. The schedule has been worked out, and there will be a bank holiday pause before the blog resumes, along with rehearsals, on Tuesday. Just enough time to settle into our new continent, and winess Birmingham City's triumphal return to the Premier League. On May 4th, we have a picnic planned, in our own tribute to Chon Sang Byeong [I hope you have been paying attention!] We will hope for good weather to welcome our happy group to Birmingham, and maybe we will see some of you there. In the meantime it is time to say goodbye to Seoul.

I will go back to the sky again
At the end of my picnic in this beautiful world
I will go back and I will say…it was beautiful

So, what did the kids in Korea think?

2009-04-29T18:36:00.001-07:00

In the end it has all come in a rush...suddenly we are at our 'preview' day. We did a run in the morning, aftre some work with the new fabrics for the Brazil scene. It is improving, but still looking a bit clumsy, to be honest. But all that is overshadowed by the news that the visas have come through, and so there is a lighter feeling around.

Even the news that the run-through has been mentioned to some people as 3.00 and others as 4 is taken well, and the time is brought forward by an hour. Then some others arrive at 2, having had an e-mail with that time on!

Anyway, in the end we showed the play to about 40 people, including a group of about ten elementary school children, and then there was a long period of small groups of discussion, almost all of which was gratifyingly positive. For me, the play still seems clumsy at times, and we need to get to the real version of the fences and things like that, and also we need to integrate the music more. But it was really exciting to watch the children watching the heart of the play. They like the characters, they followed what was happening, and there was a good feeling, even when I was busy being anxious about the remaining problems.

After the run, Byung Ho took us for another great traditional meal, and although both he and Ayako seemed to be closing their eyes at times, there was some sense perhaps mostly of relief. We are coming to Birmingham soon, all of us, armed with visas, and a play which looks as if it will work, in Korea at least!

The focus switches for a while to practical things now, getting everyone, and the few props and costumes which are travelling with us, on the right planes at the right time. The Yoghurt machine-monster is rolling on..

Getting closer

2009-04-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

I realised how tired I had been last night when I woke early this morning, and wanted to catch up with this blog. My computer was not in the room, and it dawned on me that I must have left it in the PC Room late last night. These places are all open 24 hours, so even though it was only 6, I put on my shorts and trainers and jogged over to Daehagno to see if it was still there. Just like my phone before it, it was of course still there ready for me to collect it. This is really a good place to be if you are prone to leaving expensive elctronic equipment in public places!

It was a beautiful morning once again, although still very cold, and later in the day the rain returned. Still no visas though, and we are beginning to think about what to do if they don't come through in time. Stuart has been in touch with the British Ambassador who is writing to enquire for us, which sounds promising.

We moved today into a bigger rehearsal room for the preview we are doing to an audience tomorrow. Today we did bits and pieces before a run. We got a little behind the time, because Yudai was untypically very late, which he said was down to not drinking the night before - hard for his system to take, I imagine.

The run was pretty good, and the time down to 69 minutes. Most of the main problems at the moment are with the set and props, or at least the rehearsal versions of these. Simon and Yeon leave tomorrow with the backdrops, and the rest of the stuff that is travelling will come with us on flights over the weekend. The rest is being made in Birmingham.

Minato left today, and we will see him next in Birmingham. His current plan for the opening is to find a folk song in whichever country we are in, for Iris to sing in the pre-play section. She is now singing in the Brazil section, a beautiful song which Minato wrote himself, and we at last had a little time to work on the ending today too.

No energy left today for any more detail. I need to get to bed to be ready for a big day tomorrow, when some people actually come and watch a run....

At the end of another long day, a message comes through from the British Ambassador in Seoul - the visas have been issued and should be available for collection tomorrow....never in doubt.

Checks and balances

2009-04-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

After a day off which involved most of the company seeing the spectacular and vast Buddha's Birthday parade up Jongno, and which for me had the real pleasure of an afternoon with three babies [Sun Duck, Ji Ok and Hye Jung all with their offspring] we set about the new week with some determination and focus. Still no sign of the visas, but I am under instruction to leave that to others, and concentrate on the play.

So we had a very full day indeed, working hard on the Brazil scene, trying to cut down the 25 minutes that the play overran on Friday. After that we worked on the Grandmother's Story, which is running well, but is a little long, and hard to follow for Japanese and English speakers. Cutting it down was a complex process, because making it clear in the other languages obviously involves some loss of subtlety form a korean perspective - if you understand the language, the emphasis can seem overdone. These are the kinds of balance that are so fascinating in this project.

Another tricky balance was the ongoing debate about the beginning of the play. Mijeong has been very clear that she thinks the song that Ayako sings at the beginning is wrong, because it is in Japanese, and Iris is not supposed to be from any country in particular. Minato is equally adamant that it is right, because it is an expression of a child folk song which could apply to anyone irrespective of language or culture. He has used the rythms from the song through the play too, which complicates matters. I tend to feel Mijeong is right about it, but have been waiting for the debate to find its conclusion. This seemed clearly not to be happening, so after a heated debate, I made the decision to cut the song, and look for soemthing that everyone could agree on. This triggered a very long and interesting conversation with Minato. In the end he went away to think about it. Ultimately, these are the things that make this work worth doing, but along the way it can often feel very ambitious, to try and create a unified and coherent piece from such a diverse group.

We made good progress today, but it also seemed as if we have a long way to go suddenly. This is partly because of the shadow of possible lost rehearsal time if the visa thing does not get solved, but it is also because of the complexity of the process, and the slowness of waiting fro translation.

The back cloths are now finished, and looking great. Costumes too arrived today, and particularly considering the especially complex process through which So Young arrived at a design, with her many advisers in many languages, they are looking great.

I finished today pretty exhausted, working through e-mails in a smoky PC-bang.

The Lady with Three Hats

2009-04-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

Today was officially a free day, although it started with a long meeting with Toyoko, where we talked through all her thoughts on the play. She is back off to Tokyo in the morning, and so I wanted to make sure I held onto her perspective on things while she is away. At the end of the day we had an even longer meeting with Mijeong too, with Yeon and Jakyoung translating.
In between was the company outing, or ‘Supong’, as we call it in these parts. It had been planned by Byung Ho and announced when we arrived, and turned out to involve us in joining a much bigger group of assorted artists and interesting people, on a day honouring the memory of the poet Chon Sang Byeong, who died 16 years ago today. He had a remarkable life, persecuted and severely tortured by the South Korean Regime, disappearing completely for several years at one time, and existing largely just on cigarettes and rice wine for chunks of his life. Never did him any harm, although he did die at 60 from liver disease…

His admirers are a really interesting group, and the bus trip to the graveyard outside Uijeongbu was a jolly one, involving most people on the bus, including me rather terrifyingly, having to make speeches of tribute and welcome over the PA. There were a number of poets present, plus theatre people and academics, and friends of Sang Byeong himself. I had my picnic with Brother Anthony, a professor at the Jesuit Sogang University, who is his translator, originally from Cornwall, attached to an ecumenical community in France, and resident in Korea for many years, as well as Mr Choi a friend of the poet who had originally run a theatre company, but had in the early 60s objected to it being used for propaganda work by the government, and left it to become a miner. I was also joined by a very friendly professor from another university, who wanted her photo taken with me on a big rock, and then appeared again later in the day in three different hats, but always with her loud, ‘Sexy Girl’ T-shirt.

In Uijeongbu we saw a play for children by Joyful Theatre about the poet, and two exhibitions, one by artists inspired by his work, and the other a wonderful collection of work by children. Then there was a long and impressive concert, agin focusing on settings of his work, several of which were versions of his most famous work. With apologies to rother Anthony this is my own translation of this, which is called Kwi Chon [usually translated as Back to Heaven].

I will go back to the sky again
With the morning dew that melts
At the touch of the dawning day, hand in hand

I will go back to the sky again
With the twilight together just we two
After playing on the hills, at a sign from a cloud,

I will go back to the sky again
At the end of my picnic in this beautiful world
I will go back and I will say…it was beautiful

The end of the day meeting was back at the Tous Les Jours coffee shop where it all started with our very first writers meeting in 2008. The symbolism of this seemed nice, it was a good moment to get back in touch with the soul of the project. There is now a tree growing in the centre of the upstairs room where we sat at the same table as before. OK, I expect it is a pretend tree, really, but I was feeling faintly tearful after the stress had built up a little this week, so was ready to believe that this tree was a sign. The centre of our project is strong, and really all the things that we have to crack next week are relatively superficial. I finished the day with a speech aimed mostly at myself, about keeping our eyes on the real task, and maintaining our confidence as we navigate the minefields of set props costumes, cuts, translation errors, visas visas and visas over the next week. We have a good play on our hands, and all the stuff is only what we need to get through to put it on.

We finished our meeting on our ‘day off’ at 11.00.

Hospital Visiting

2009-04-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

Another day gone not quite smoothly, but we wouldn’t want anything to get too simple would we?

Judy’s face had swelled up inexplicably in the night, and she woke up with her right eye totally closed up, looking like a still from Million Dollar Baby. So the morning was spent making a fascinating tour of the impressive facilities of the Seoul University Hospital, which involved emergency reception, foreign clinic, the Dermatology Resident, referral to the Professor of Dermatology, then across to Payments, before going to the Dispensary to get some drugs, and taking them to the Injections-in-the-Bottom department.

The main doctor had a rather unusual approach to diagnosis, which involved no touching, a long stare from some distance, and a period of inscrutability, looking slightly as if it involved suppressed laughter. Then he said, ‘very unusual’ rather meaningfully. But through this he did seem to arrive at the right diagnosis, because by the evening her eye was reopening and the swelling had gone down, although she has cancelled or shifted meetings in Tokyo, where she is due tomorrow. I shouldn’t make light of it, because it was really pretty horrible and worrying for Judy, and in fact the rest of the company were very concerned, but the whole process in the hospital actually only took a couple of hours, and it is hard to imagine that she would have got such efficient treatment at home. They did say they thought it was related to stress, tiredness and overwork, which on the surface sounds pretty plausible…..

The actors had continued music rehearsals and worked a little on the Brazil scene in the morning, instead of the planned run-through, which we did get to later in the day. It was an achievement to get to that point, and much of the run was very good, but we were a little taken aback by the timing, with it running at 85 minutes, as opposed to the target of 60. There was another very long discussion afterwards, and it is very clear to me that I have to adopt a different style next week, because we now have quite a bit of stuff to get through before our showcase on Wednesday, in front of an audience. I have asked Mijeong and Toyoko to give notes just to me, so that the actors are only hearing one voice [well, one voice translated a few times by others!]

Translation was again an issue today, because the level of skill involved in translating ‘notes’ for actors is so high. You choose words carefully and then when the response of the actors is not what you expect, you are left wondering if the nuance of what you have said has been lost. To get this right, the translator needs not just wonderful language skills, including theatre terminology, but also an understanding of the theatre process, and ideally a good reading of body language and tone too. We have been lucky to have that done really well through a lot of this project, but when it falls short it is frustrating… Ayako Funakawa, who is here now recording every session, is compiling a detailed account of this project, with particular reference to translation. It should be a really fascinating read – but of course it will be in Japanese, so it depends on the translation!

Everyone tired and a little subdued tonight, but Judy was feeling better, and days like today do put what we are attempting into some perspective. The weekend looms just at the right time, although we are also very aware of how much we need to do.

Now try it without the interpreter....

2009-04-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

The day started with a music rehearsal, which gave us a chance to go over the events of the last few days with Nishidasan, [the Japanese writer] who is back from Tokyo. She has to teach a class on Tuesdays, and can only miss so many, which is why she flew back on Sunday. It was good to have her back, and her perspective on some of the thorny issues of time she missed was wise and valuable.

There was no English translation today, because Deong Myon has a civil service exam on Saturday and needs to prepare. So the photocall was a little chaotic, with contradictory discussions in a range of languages. But we had the run of a theatre which gave Simon a chance to do his first lighting in Korea, and we posed the actors in a range of positions, which will be photoshopped onto images of building sites.

After lunch we had a costume discussion, which was also slow, but very valuable. When So Young spoke, she spoke in Italian, which Judy translated into English, which Nishida translated to Korean, and Jagyoung put into Korean This was the best way of getting English into the equation. You can see why it takes a while though. We had this meeting in the wonderful Mindellae Coffee House, which is like a collection of Wendy Houses for hire for meetings, with pastel-painted wood panel rooms and frilly curtains. In these eccentric circumstances we made further progress towards the costumes. So Young will I think be glad when Yoghurt rolls out of town, although she is resolutely cheerful through all the twists and turns of the evolution of the costumes.

While this was going on, Minato was working on the Brazil scene, and some suggestions for the end of the play. We were going to have a run, but the energy level was low after the translation free day, and we had a writers meeting instead, although the actors stayed and in fact did a walk-through which turned into a run.

Tonight Byung Ho took everyone for Ssam Gyeop Ssal , the famous Korean Barbecue. Even among many glorious evenings this was a good one, with the thought that we are very lucky to be working with such a great collection of people constantly coming back to mind.

The jigsaw is complete

2009-04-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

We had a late start today, and an evening rehearsal, which was fortunate for some of the company who had enjoyed themselves noticeably, late into the night on Tuesday.
We started at the beginning again this morning, looking in detail at Iris’s section before the play proper, which is lovely, and then working through Norang and Aka’s arrival, and then discovering Blue. This time through the plan is to block everything finally, although pinning these inventive actors down to doing things one way is very hard. I suspect they will still be making plenty up when we get to performances.

Ayako has a great engaging quality as a performer, and in spite of her reticence, I think she will start the performance very well. There was a fascinating argument about this scene though, with Mijeong not liking the fact that her first piece of music is Japanese, because it upsets the balance of the piece, and contradicts our idea of Iris as not being specifically attached to any part of the world. Minato felt that the arrangement of the music was not very Japanese, but the discussion remains unresolved while we see what we think when we have had a chance to see it all in context. It is an illustration of the complexity of our project, because this would not be seen as a problem by an English audience, who would not recognise the provenance of the song, or by a Japanese audience which would, but it would very likely be seen as quite a problem by a Korean audience with a very particular relationship with Japan historically. Ultimately these conversations are one of the reasons we do this project.

Half way through the afternoon we were joined by Simon, our lighting designer and production manager, who is really the final piece of the jigsaw. He is making his first visit to Korea, and was brought up to the rehearsal room by Daniel, who of course is now an old hand here. It was good to have the team complete, apart from Nishida, who arrives tonight.

After our supper break, there was a music rehearsal, which centred on the scene where the children explore the building site, which now has a strong drum accompaniment. Then So Young brought some costumes for the photocall in the morning.

After rehearsals we went for beer and met a locally based opera group…I don’t quite have the energy left, or the words to do justice to the quirkiness of this encounter. Ask us when you see us…

The beat goes on...

2009-04-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t had a chance to look for my phone before it was brought back to me in the rehearsal room. I told you so. By then we had already got the 8.00 producer’s meeting part 2 meeting out of the way, and Judy and I had shared a sneaky coffee on the way to rehearsals. This turned out to be a good move, because by the time I got there, Mijeong had reworked the whole grandmother’s story scene very effectively. Minato is now working hard with Ayako on the music, and every day while he is here the actors are doing a couple of hours of music work. His work since Birmingham has really paid off, and the music should end up as a well integrated and effective element in the play. Ayako gains in confidence every day, and also grows her pile of instruments. Minato wants to go shopping in the morning for more. Already we are stretching the credibility of her role as a travelling street musician, unless she is travelling with a horse and cart. But there is a real dividend in the range and interest of the music itself.

In the afternoon we worked on the ending scene, leaving some key decisions for a while, because it seems best to make them when we have pieced together the whole play and can get a stronger sense of exactly what the ending needs.

At lunchtime, I had a nice meeting with someone Byung Ho has lined up to take on the Playstation project, which I have been working on in Reaside School. This involves a group of Year 6 pupils who have created a level for the game Little Big Planet, which will be published online, and can then be played in Korea, and Japan, as well as everywhere else in the world. It was a little hard to explain what we wanted form him, but I am hoping that his role will be to involve children here in playing the game, and then communicating with those in Birmingham who have made it up, alongside seeing the play, and comparing notes.

At the end of rehearsals, So Young arrived with a costume update, and she had a long conversation with Judy in Italian, as if things weren’t complicated enough in terms of language. The costume is proving quite a complex process, because perceptions of the clothes of young people is so different across our nations, as well as attitudes to young people’s theatre. I feel some sympathy for So Young trying to find her way through the range of ideas being thrown at her. I feel guilty for not somehow being as decisive as is expected of a director in these parts, but everyone in the team knows by now that our route will be a long and slow one of talking things through until we achieve something which we can agree on from at least three perspectives. We will meet her again tomorrow, because she needs to bring some clothes to dress the actors for a photocall, creating an image for Mr Shimoyama’s brochure.

In Manila Envelopes

2009-04-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Well, the UK visa office lived down to expectations on Monday morning. The whole enterprise has been privatised, and the office is in an office block in downtown Namdaemun, on the fifth floor. We trooped there first thing, having been joined now by Minatosan, who is in very high spirits, to find a neat waiting room with rows of empty chairs and two people waiting for custom. The electronic queuing system was registering 0 and 1 respectively for the two lines, and although the office had been open for an hour it seemed that we were their first customers. Any thought that this might make it a quick process was short-lived though. It turns out that the passports will all be sent to Manila, and the time it takes was now stretched to a possible 15 days, which takes us a week into Birmingham rehearsals. So we have a nervous wait. It is frustrating, because it is hard to see what possible threat this wonderful group of artists pose to our shores [MI5, if you are reading this please note] but of course that is not really the way these things work….

Judy arrived this afternoon though, to take on the job of worrying about all that. She had to hit the ground running rather, after 48 hours travelling from Truro via Tokyo. Without even time for a shower, she was in the first of two producer’s meetings. Mr Shimoyama is also here on his even more flying visit, and I had a meeting with him in the morning about the next Hanyong Project – a “Babydrama” project planned for 2011.

Because his visit was so short, the meeting concentrated on arrangements for Japan, which are interesting, because they are the opposite extreme from the Seoul venue we are rehearsing in, being very small and non-theatrical venues [in Tokyo, at least – the Okinawa venue is bigger]. The schedule is fixed, and particularly considering Judy’s schedule, the meeting was very productive, and as goes nowadays without saying was also wonderfully positive, amicable and enjoyable.

In the evening Mr Shimoyama hosted a special party to celebrate the fact that Byung Ho has been elected the Chair of ASSITEJ Korea, which is causing him to look very smart these days, always in a sharp suit, and to be even more busy than usual, always with a phone to his ear.
Oh yes, rehearsals. We did fit a whole afternoon in at least, between bureaucracy and celebration. In that time we tackled the legendary Brazil scene, which is really the big gap in the play at the moment. It is in a different style from the rest of the play, and will be significantly assisted by music and light, but we did a good deal of work this afternoon deciding things about it, mapping it out in effect, and it was a good job that it was such a satisfying session in view of the frustrations of the morning.

For me the day was lengthened by leaving my phone in the restaurant, only realising back in my hotel room, and having to walk back. It was closed, so I will go again in the morning, but it is a tribute to this city that I am not for a moment concerned that it will not turn up. I was in bed by 1.30…getting too old for this.

Are you now or have you ever been...

2009-04-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

The first moderately major crisis hit late on Friday night, with a call from Stuart at the Rep and a potential obstacle to negotiate. It has emerged that all of the company working in the UK will need to go in person to get their visas here in Seoul, and there is a maximum turn around time of ten days, which is very tight. But Stuart has worked through the tortuous paperwork [or cyber-work] of the process, and sent everything we need to get through it. Eight people need photos, complex filled in forms, letters of invitation, proof of marital status, passports, photocopies of passports, notes from their mums [alright I lied about that one] and 260,000 won in cash, and we need to go to an office in Namdaemun at 8am on Monday.

Hye Jin took matters in hand this morning, after I had printed off the forms, and Byung Ho is organising the money, so it has not interfered with our process at all, and we are confident that we will get the visas processed - the only issues being whether they will really need to see Minato's wedding certificate! The company spent a happy hour after lunch answering questions like ,'have you ever expressed public support for any terrorist activity, if yes please give details', and 'is there any other way in which you might be considered not to be of good character, if yes please give details'. I suppose it is an indication of the times and countries in which we live, that everyone seemed to approach this with a shrug, and the forms are all filled. We will see what the British Foreign Office has in store for us on Monday. I am promising to avoid inappropriate jokes - always my potential downfall in those kind of situations.

Anyway, back to the important stuff..... Dong Myeon and Yeon were not in rehearsal today, so we were without english translation, and with Mijeong away at a wedding, and Hye Jin caught up in visa stuff, the rehearsal room was much more thinly populated [although nowhere in Seoul ever actually achieves much of the 'bliss of solitude'] Actually this was quite nice, and we got a great deal done, across our language barriers. Today it was the machine monster, and the digging for Brazil. There is a kind of rythmn exercise around the digging scene now, and Mijeong had suggested a nice linking moment, when Norang finds seeds as they scrape away the soil.

Toyoko is away for a few days now, and Milorad is back to Birmingham tomorrow. In the afternoon, we had a final production meeting with him, and went through all the elements of the set and so on. It does seem to be in hand. The final simplification has now happened, whereby there are two scaleable fence posts, with wire between them, which come together to form a ladder for the end of the play. Two posts and a pole [to be built in Birmingham] two sheets of plastic, 10 crates assorted, a danger sign, a length of wire, three silks and three patchwork backdrops, and that is our play.

After the production meeting, the UK lads [PWW and Daniel and Milorad] went via Dongdaemun, over to Yeon's studio, to see the backdrops being made. Then off out into the night for more barbecued pigs, more beer, and a descent into a Moroccan bar with rose petals and floor cushions and strange-smelling smoke, and the week disappeared into a hippyish haze. Tomorrow is Sunday [well today is Sunday, it being 2.30am and time for bed] There may be a brief pause in the blog, before I return to let you know who made it through the terrorist test.

The serious business of getting on a play

2009-04-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

Friday already..... The beautiful weather has returned, and it seems a shame to have a full day of rehearsals down in our basement room, but the game is afoot, and we have some real momentum, and plenty of work to do. There are now so many people in the rehearsal room, with all of the translation and production elements, that asking Ayako to practise her section before the play is putting her pretty much on the spot, but she rises to it, and we map out the way that her beginning will work. Iris, once she is established, remains outside the site, and watches the story unfold, along with the audience. She maintains her ability to communicate with the audience. Norang, who is looking for Yoghurt front of house before the play, can communicate with the audience then, but once she is inside the site, that line of communication is broken. We have come to the conclusion that we should think of the audience as the people of the city, and the characters view them in this way.

The morning rehearsal is working out the structure and shape of the first section of the play, and practising it. There is a slow rythmn inevitably, to which people are adjusting. It is a little like a film set, with every 'take' being followed by a number of simultaneous discussions, before being pulled together for the next one, so these gaps between are long. But the decisions being made feel right, and we are lucky that the level of agreement between the creative team members is generally very high.

The set gets nearer to finality bit by bit. In the afternoon, Yeon had arrived with the wooden mock-up version of the fence arrived, and there was a long discussion while the actors worked with Ayako on the Brazil song, and the digging songs. The idea gets simpler and simpler, which feels right. It is very clear that we don't need a whole fence panel now, because we have worked out a way of using just wire and posts and plastic for the beginning of the play. Every time we use something in place of the real version, the actors make the substitute work so well, we start doubting that we need the 'real' one. Today it was a danger sign, 'borrowed' from the entrance to the theatre, which Yudai made so funny, that it seemed wrong to lose it. But this keeps on happening, and we are all aware that we are in the narrowing down stage now...

Having decided another simplification, which involves the fence wire swinging round, so that the audience moves from outside the building site to inside, we rehearsed the first section of the play, which was looking in good shape. Ayako improvised along with the action, and that element of the play is evolving. The last section of rehearsal was a run of quite a chunk, taking us up to Brazil. So Young arrived to watch, and to update us on the newest costume designs. They are now much more everyday than the original designs, which were very beautiful but not quite right for our needs. There is still a quirkiness to them which we want to maintain.

After rehearsals the team divides for a range of events. Some are at a traditional performance, others at the concert for which Minato has come to Seoul. For me, it is off up into the mountains, to go to a party held by Buksetung Theatre, with a barbecue outside their new base - Jimin, In U and the newly-married Sori. They had taken the day out of rehearsals to climb Pukhansan, and welcome in the Spring. I am very jealous, maybe they made the right decision. AnywayI gatecrashed a truly wonderful evening with very special friends.

Iris is in the House

2009-04-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

The rain has gone, but the air is a little colder today. But downstairs, in the rehearsal room, all is warmth….
Yet another beginning, because we welcomed Iris into the story today, first by discussion around the reason for her presence, and then by exploration of the music itself.

The concept of the character is that she is a street musician, a young woman arrived newly in this part of the city from another part. Her spirit is worn down by the pressure of the city, and her music is too often drowned by the noise of the city. She is seeking somewhere that is right for her to play.
The building site is noisy and makes a bad place to play. Iris tries different places. When she comes upon the playing of the children, she watches along with the audience, suspiciously at first, then with interest, then she provides support, and becomes their musical guardian angel. Finally, through experiencing the children, she rediscovers her musical spirit.

Ayako was initially concerned about not being an actor, but she has at the same time jumped into our team impressively, and very soon today, the new dimension which will be brought to the play by her music was strongly evident. Together with the actors, she plotted briefly the Brazil section, and then in more depth the digging section. Finally there was time to work on the beginning of the play, when Iris plays in the street.

The writers meeting was one of those where the table top is full of improvised models – paper cups broken and sellotaped, pens and torn tissue paper simulating poles and silk cloths. The set is taking shape, and simplifying, and much of the paraphernalia is already assembled. Yeon returned today and is as I write shopping for fabric. There are complicated comings and goings over the next few days, and so scheduling has been tricky, but we are getting there….

Singing in the Rain

2009-04-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

After five days of beautiful spring sunshine, the weather broke at midday, and the glass walls of the Arko City Theatre flowed with rain. Yudai kicked Young Ju on the way down to Brazil, and needed a carefully applied melon ice lolly to reduce the swelling under her chin. Apart from that, it was a good day.

Certainly we worked hard. We got to the end of the play working fairly briskly through it, so that Ayako could get a sense of the whole. Tomorrow is really her day, when we introduce the character of Iris [pronounced 'ee rish'] the musician. We did have a sneak preview with the drums though, both with a dance to warm up, and a usk through the digging section.

We have identified four keywords for this stage in the production. We knew in October that we had created something good, but we want now to take it on to something, SIMPLE, BALANCED, BEAUTIFUL and SPECIAL. The words are up in three languages on our rehearsal wall. Much of this stage is about finding neat simple solutions to the issues that arise, and we have been trying to dispense with anything that has not got sufficient reason to be there. The balance is between the three cultures, and this needs constant vigilance. Also part of the mix is the constant search for clarity. Everything has to be clear enough to the speakers of each of the three languages. Sorting that out, while dealing in the three languages between us, can take some doing.

Lunch today was delivered on a motorbike, because of avoiding a walk through the torrential rain to our restaurant. We had an indoor picnic of chinese food, and then for the first time a full afternoon rehearsal session. The actors were wilting by the end of another highly concentrated day. But most of us still managed an evening visit to the Korean National University of the Arts, where I was doing a workshop, and a great late session in a well-known meeting place for artists and intellectuals called Ooh La La. Makkoli [rice wine] and egg rolls and fishballs, in the company of some old friends.

Now We Are Four

2009-04-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

It has felt like a real beginning today. For the first time we had our musician, Ayako with us, the fourth member of the performing team. At the same time we were joined by the Costume Designer, So Young and a new translator, Dong Myong, who is fluent in English and Japanese. This was his first experience of working within the theatre.

At the start of the day we played a wild game of Korean tag, just in case anyone had forgotten the level of energy of which this company is capable, and then got stuck into the play. Using the fact that Ayako is here for the first time, the three characters introduced themselves to her, in a long hot-seating session, and then we worked on the first three scenes of the play, getting used to the new mixture of working from the script. It was great to have Blue Aka and Norang back with us – we have somehow missed them since October. Having a script gives a different dynamic to the sessions, but there was as much fun and as much invention as ever, once we all shook off the rust a little.

For today and tomorrow, Ayako will be mostly watching, while we work thought the whole play, marking the script decisions, and fixing the exact production needs. She treated the company to a rundown of the instruments that she has with her at the end of the session, though, and by the end of a long day, including a barbecue in Insadong and a coffee and cakes, in Jongno, and she already feels part of the team.

In the afternoon, the writers meeting included So Young, who had new costume drawings to share, and we talked through the practicalities as well as ideas of detail with her. There was no time to plan the rest of the week’s sessions, before we lost Dong Myeong, so that conversation had to happen without translation – but then it is noticeable how much more we are managing across our language barriers these days.

Milorad flew off to Jeju Island for a few days today, he will be back for Friday. That night Minato gives a big concert in Seoul, before joining us at the weekend. We alos heard that Ayako [the other Ayako – assistant producer who was with us in Birmingham] will be here next week, when Judy and Shimoyama also make their visits and Simon arrives as well. So our lunchtime restaurant, which is proving a great success, will struggle to contain the company…..

The Story Continues....

2009-04-13T04:19:00.000-07:00

After what has seemed like a very long wait, we are all back together, this time in Seoul. The time has come for rehearsals, for three weeks here, before we come to Birmignham, and the play opens at the REP on May 15th.

In the meantime, the script has undergone one re-write, and music has been written, and there has been a good deal of discussion between producers about the tour, and amongthe creative team about the musician, the design, the costumes, the play.... but nothing compares to being in the same place at the same time, and it was great to get to that point.

We are rehearsing in the rehearsal room of the theatre in which the play will open in Korea - the Arko City Theatre. This is a brand new, and absoluitely huge venue, which took us all by surprise.

There are a few crucial additions to the team at this stage. Hye Jin is our Korean stage manager, who will come to Birmingham, and then run the show in Korea and Japan. Jakyoung is our Japanese-Korean translator here, and Ayako is the new member of the cast, our musician. She arrived later today, after a big concert in Tokyo, and will start work with us tomorrow. Also here, by happy chance is Milorad - the Production Manager who is here as a bonus, with the REP's production of The Snowman, which we all went to yesterday, and enjoyed very much.

Another surprise but very welcome guest today has been Yerang, our Birmingham-based translator, who is in Seoul for a family visit, but who joined by tralslating our production meeting today.

Today we read through the play, and learned the company rules - Hye Jin will run a tight ship. We had a gentle day of sorting things out, really, and remembering why we like each others creative company. The play sounded good at the read-through, and the actors were funny even in that context. Every day we will have lunch at a little reestaurant in DaeHagno [the theatre district] and today we started that tradition, which promises to be a strong element of our time here. This evening the company is mostly out experiencing Seoul, while those ultra=hard-working few are writing blogs before a late meeting about designing a fence...but more of that later.

The main thing is.....WE ARE OFF! The final crucial laps of the project are underway.

The Meaning of Brazil 2

2008-11-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Maybe we have cracked it now... Today was our 'bonus' meeting day in Seoul. Nishida and I are in the city for a symposium yesterday, celebrating ten years of the wonderful Acting Department at the Korean National University of the Arts. This gave the Yoghurt wri9ting team an extra chance to get together, for one day only, and that was today.

Despite being tired for obvious reasons, we have done a very full and fruitful day's work, going through the whole script and dicsuusing our various drafts and ideas. here were some long discussions, but we all felt, as we sat down for Samgyetang in a restaurant near the University, that we had made real progress. Nishida said she understood the story, the style and the philosophy of our play for the fisrt time completely, and I think we all felt something like that.

Now there is some serious homework being done. I am writing the english draft of the whole play, including the 'black hole' that until today was the Brazil scene. Ayako is translating Toyoko's drfat long into the night, and when they all come together, perhaps before I leave Seoul on Tuesday morning, there will be a full agreed draft. Reunification is complete in Korea, hold the front page!

Byung Ho took us for our ginseng chicken, and Young Ai fittingly was there too. Plans are taking shape for the performance end of this process, and the main work on Costume and Set design, and the composing of the music will be happening in the next month. Team Yoghurt is in fine shape......

Mijeong's Version

2008-10-30T01:43:00.001-07:00

Here is Mijeong's version of the script, translated back from Korean by Yeon. On Saturday the writers will be discussing these two drafts. I am struck by the similarity, and how interesting the little differences are... anyone with any thoughts, do feed them in to us, please...

Looking for Yoghurt

CAST
Norang
Blue
Aka

This play takes place in near future, modern city, in building site with fences.
Time of the play is from late afternoon when the sun begins to fall to dawn next day.

Scene 1. Outside of building site

Norang is looking for something between the audiences. She’s calling some signal, looking everywhere. She comes up on the stage, still looking. She finds a footmark on the floor.

Norang: Yoghurt…

Norang crouches herself and does a cat posture and follows the footmark. The footmark is also on the wall. She raises her head, following the trail, and is surprised with the view of enormous building site. There’s a sign written ‘Danger, No entry!’. Norang stands there, can’t make her mind whether to go in or not. She finally gathers herself and breaks in the site.
Aka jumps in. He’s posturing as if he’s a glorious hero who’s about to attack the enemy. He rolls, jumps, and kicks just like he’s fighting with the enemy. He comes to near the gate of the building site. He touches a rope and pretends some electric shock as if it was an electrified wire he touched. He rolls over and now he’s inside the building site.

Scene 2: Inside the building site

Norang appears behind stuff. From now Norang and Aka repeat showing and hiding themselves like a hide and seek.

Norang: Yoghurt.

Aka is shocked. He hides himself, sticks his head out.

Aka: Banana.

Norang is also shocked, looks around her surrounding.

Norang: Yoghurt…
Aka: Hamburger.

Norang searches for the sound. Aka also comes out and looks for the origin of the sound when he hears nothing. They both step backward cautiously and bump against each other. They both shout with surprise. Aka covers his mouth and waves his hand. Norang catches it’s meaning and covers her mouth too. Aka approaches her, Norang runs away. Aka chases her, pointing his sword as if he’s in a war game. They chase around and round holding both ends of a rolling screen. Aka changes his direction and gets near to Norang. Norang sits, covering her ears, frightened. Aka backs off realizing his intension was misunderstood. He goes back to the screen and does hand game. It relieves Norang a little. She watches it. The hand game is stopped suddenly. She doesn’t see it anymore. She wonders, goes behind a screen softly. Aka sneaks himself when Noranag comes to the back of the screen and now they are in opposite side. This time it’s Norang who does hand game. Aka holds his hand out through the screen. Norang hesitates a little and holds the hand. Aka pulls her.

Aka: Aka!
Norang: Huh?
Aka: Aka!
Norang: A…ka?
Aka: Aka.
Norang: I’m Norang.
Aka: Norang?
Aka: Aka, Norang, Norang, Aka, Aka, Yoghurt?

The word Yoghurt triggers Norang. She resumes her search.

Scene 3: Finding Blue

Aka continues his war game. Sometimes he mimics Norang.

Nornag: Yoghurt…
Aka: Monster…

Aka finds some light. He calls Norang.

Aka: Yoghurt?

Norang looks where the lights come from delightfully hoping she could find Yoghurt. But she is surprised.

Norang: (shakes her head) No, it’s not Yoghurt.
Aka: (shakes his head too) No? Yoghurt No? Monster?

Aka slowly approaches with sword where the lights come from. It eats Aka’s sword. Aka is frightened. Now he’s really convinced it’s a monster. He calls out every hero’s name, posturing hero’s action, then rush to the light. He takes off its cover. It becomes quite, no reaction. He looks into it and finds Blue hiding.

Blue: How come you are here? Get out! This is an off-limits place. It’s dangerous for children.

Aka shouts ‘Monster’, rushes to him again and takes Blue out from his hideout. Blue struggles and covers his face with a newspaper. Aka tears up the newspaper. Blue covers his eyes with what it’s left then returns to his hideout.

Aka: (rush to him again) Monster!
Norang: (stops Aka) Wait! Don’t.

Norang finds another newspaper around her and hands it to Blue. Blue snatches it quickly and covers his face again. Norang knocks to Blue’s hideout. Knock, knock. No response. Norang knocks again rhythmically. Aka reacts to it but Blue still doesn’t respond. Norang hushes to Aka. Blue throws Aka’s sword through the boxes of his hideout. Aka grabs it quickly.

Norang: You live here? What are you doing here? Do you know this place well? I’m looking for Yoghurt.
(she imitates searching motion.)

Blue throws a folded paper. Norang and Aka unfold it together.

Norang: It’s a map!
Aka: Map! (in Japanese)

They say ‘map’ in each other’s language and understand the word ‘map’.

Scene 4: Exploring the building site

Aka seems to get some ideas from the map. He nods. He starts to move, mumbling himself and pointing somewhere with his finger as if he’s trying to find a way. He points somewhere and tells Norang to follow him. Aka goes cross an obstacle narrowly like an adventure. Norang embraces his imagination, follows him mimicking but she’s not as good as him. They are stuck in a net, can’t move. Blue comes in and saves them.

Norang: I’m Norang. Norang!
Aka: Aka.
Norang: How about you? (pointing herself and Aka) Norang! Aka! You?
Blue: Blue.

Norang offers her hand to Blue but he doesn’t respond. Norang asks Blue to join. Aka’s on the lead, restarts his expedition. He jumps across a stone bridge with big steps. Norang follows, just like him. Blue just walks with small steps. Aka, jumps into the sea and swim with Norang. Blue pulls up his trousers then walks on tiptoe cautiously across a pool of water. Aka and Norang grasp a rope and go across a cliff. Blue lets go a rope that Aka sends from the other side of the cliff. He grasps it again when it comes back. Aka and Norang catch Blue with their whole body. They continue their exploration until Aka finds the place where his tree was.

Scene 5: Tree and grandmother’s story

Aka looks for his tree. He can’t find it. He gets upset. Then he finds a stump of a tree. He’s bewildered. Blue explains him that the tree has been cut down by machines. Aka stops Blue’s explanation and expresses his anger very strongly to him. Blue defends himself aggressively when Aka pushes him.

Blue: I didn’t do it. That’s just what I saw. Why are you angry at me?
Aka: The tree was my tree. It was my tree that I always climbed up and played with!

Aka, hugs hard the stump of the tree. Blue can’t understand Aka’s action. Blue just looks away. Norang looks at both Aka and the place where the tree used to be, then starts her grandmother’s story.
Norang: (sings) Once upon a time, there was a funny story.

Aka and Blue listen closely her singing.

Norang: (to Aka and Blue) This is a story from my grandmother, my mother’s mother! My grandmother.
Once upon a time, way back in the past, there was a village. There were little houses and a big
tree in the middle of the village. A really big tree!
Aka: A tree?
Blue: Tree?
Norang: Yes, a tree. And there was a blind old man in that village.

Aka and Blue follow actions of Norang and say ‘old man’ in their each language.

Norang: Then one day, the old man said,
‘Surisuri Masuri, I can see, I can see, I can hear, I can hear! The day when the sky opens up in
the middle of pitch black night, there will be a baby! Our Baby!’
Blue: A baby?
Aka: Baby!
Norang: Yes, Our Baby.
Aka: Our Baby.
Blue: Our Baby.
Norang: Then one night, (makes sounds of bird singing at night) in a dark night, when everybody is still in
a sleep…

Norang, Blue, Aka lie down and close their eyes.

Norang: All of a sudden it became really bright in the middle of the night. The sun was rising. Everyone in
the village woke up and looked up the sky.

Norang makes Aka and Blue stand up.

Norang: In that moment!

Norang hides and starts to make a sound of baby crying. Norang stands up and says ‘Our Baby’, holding a baby in her arms. Blue and Aka repeat the word. Three of them nod to each other then say it in one voice.

Three: Our Baby!

Norang describes ‘Our Baby’ that the baby walked by the age of 2, rode a horse by the age of 5, caught a flying bird with arrow by the age of 7. Aka and Blue show it with mime.

Norang: The words flew everywhere.

They whisper each other, spreading the rumor. Norang and Aka make Blue a king.

Norang: King!
Aka: King!
Blue: King!
Norang: Words finally reached to the king.
Blue: (as a king) No! Just like there’s only one sun, only one king in this world, which is me! Just me!
Get him right now!

Norang and Aka, ride horses.

Norang: (as a old man) I can hear, they are coming, we should hide Our Baby!

Norang hides Aka. King (Blue) threatens people of village (Norang) to bring ‘Our Baby’. King finally pulls out a sword when he hears nothing. Just at the moment when the king was about to cut someone’s head, ‘Our Baby’ appears. King carries off ‘Our Baby’. ‘Our Baby’ stops and tells something to people of village, that he hid something under the big tree. What he hid is for people and it will save the world. He explains it with mime. He asks people to keep a secret. King takes him away.

Norang: That’s how ‘Our Baby’ went to heaven.

Aka and Blue run to Norang

Aka: Then?
Blue: And?
Norang: What I mean is that this is where that big tree was!

All three of them gaze at the tree, slowly drawing the tree with their eyes.
Then suddenly pointing the stump and start to dig the ground.

Scene 6: First digging – looking for a secret

They dig the ground with their hands but it’s hard. It only makes their hands hurt. Blue takes his scissors out of his special case and cuts the stump. They pull up the stump together and dig again. They dig hard but only find some miscellaneous junks. Their digging starts to slow down and finally ends. Disappointed. They go back to their own things. Aka does sword fight, Blue reads a peace of paper, Norang collects something (seeds) and put them in her pocket.

아까: 누가 보물을 가져갔지? 누구야? 누가 나무를 잘라냈지? 누구야?
그래, 역시 이곳에 괴물이 있는 거야.
괴물이 나무도 베어 버리고 보물도 먹어버렸어! 괴물을 무찌르자!
노랑: 괴물? monster?
블루: 여기에 몬스터 없어.
아까: 몬스터, 있어. (시끄러운 소리, 천장과 벽에 어른거리는 그림자!)
블루: 없어!
아까: 있어!,..
Aka: Who took the secret? Who is it? Who cut off the tree? Who is it? Yeah, it is certain that the
monster lives here. The monster cut off the tree and ate the secret too! Let’s beat the monster!
Norang: Monster (in Korean)? Monster?
Blue: There’s no monster.
Aka: There is! (loud noises. Some big shadow over the fence!)
Blue: There’s no monster!
Aka: There is!

Blue and Aka persist.

Scene 7: Machine monster

Blue runs through the fence (screen). Aka stops him saying there’s a monster but Blue runs anyway. Norang and Aka hug Blue’s special case and shout out Blue. Some pause. A machine monster starts to move with big noises. Norang shouts ‘No, Blue!’, Aka plucks up his courage and goes into the screen. Then Blue comes out conducting the machine. Blue controls the machine quite skillfully. Aka shows his interest to the machine. Blue lets him to control it. Aka is excited controlling the machine.

Aka: Right! We can dig the ground with it. Let’s dig again!
Norang: Dig?
Blue: Dig again? But there’s nothing there. No secret.
Aka: No, Brazil!
Norang: Brazil?
Blue: Brazil?

Aka makes a globe with Blue’s arms. He explains when you keep digging the ground, you can reach the other side of the globe and meet Brazil.

Norang: Brazil, why?

Aka explains his Brazil. Where there’s a big comfy bed, where he can climb up the tree whenever he wants, where he can pick fruits, rub them on his cloth and eat, where he can just rattle around. Norang understands what he meant. She explains her Brazil. Where it’s full of flowers, full of it’s scent, a little stream, singing bird, no trash, pure air, no contamination. Blue also explains his Brazil. Where it’s very quite, undisturbed, controllable, where he can make a spaceship and do a space trip.

Scene 8: Second digging – to Brazil

Three of them decide to go to Brazil, they starts to dig again. They look down the hole, make some noises. The howl is loud. Aka goes into the hole, then Norang, finally Blue.

Scene 9: Brazil

- needs more time to think….

Scene 10: Back to reality

They realize they are actually hungry. They say things they want to eat. Bread, sandwich, sweet potato pie, kimchi, chocolate, yoghurt… Norang resumes her search for Yoghurt, but stops soon. Blue and Aka make a trap and show it to Norang in order to console her. Norang is delighted. They place themselves a bit far from the trap and wait together. Norang starts to sing. Blue and Aka join in and hum it together. They fall a sleep soon.

Clock ticking.

Scene 11: Up to the crane

Aka pulls a string that is attached to the trap by accident while he rolls over in his sleep. Norang wakes up with that sound. She shelters Blue and Aka with things she finds around her. Then she hears sound of cat up on the crane. Norang is afraid but gathers herself and starts to climb up the crane. She misses her step, things fall down. Blue and Aka wake up. They try to save Norang. In the end they both climb up the crane. They are afraid as much as Norang. They close their eyes, holding each other tight. Norang starts to sing again in order to beat her fear. Blue and Aka sing too. They open their eyes with count of three. They look down the city. It’s their first time and it’s beautiful. They point their own houses.

They hear workers’ step coming to the building site.

Blue: Let’s go down.
Aka: Yup. (starts to move)
Norang: Wait!

Norang takes out seeds she finds when they dug the ground. She gives them to Blue and Aka.

Blue: Seed.
Norang: (imitate Blue’s English) Seed.
Aka: (imitate as well) Seed. Seed (in Japanese)
Norang: (imitate Aka’s Japanese) Seed
Blue: (imitate Aka’s Japanese) Seed
Norang: Seed (in Korean)
Aka: Seed (in Korean)
Blue: Seed (in Korean)

Norang throws it lightly. Blue put it on his palm and blows it. Aka eats it. Norang and Aka are surprised. Aka spits it. They all watch seeds falling, describing a big parabola. They laugh, slowly come down from the crane.

End.

First Draft in english

2008-10-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

Looking for Yoghurt

by
Kim Mijeong
Toyoko Nishida
and
Peter Wynne-Willson

First Draft October 2008
PWW English version

Cast of Characters
Norang – a Korean girl, recently moved from the countryside to the city
Aka – a Japanese boy, in search of monsters.
Blue – an English boy who has his own hiding-place within the site.

The action of the play takes place inside, and just outside, a large building site in a modern city in the present day. There is a musician beside the stage.
[Before the performance, a young Korean girl, Norang, looks for her little stray cat, Yoghurt, in the foyer and auditorium.]

Scene 1 Outside the Building Site
[It is autumn, in a big city. A vast building site looms on the stage. Norang is in the auditorium, looking for her best friend, a stray cat called Yoghurt. She is repeating her special signal. She comes onto the stage, still searching.]
[Throughout the play, the characters speak in their own language – Norang in Korean, Aka in Japanese, and Blue in English]
Norang: Yoghurt!
[ She is close to tears. The search is important for her. Yoghurt is her best friend. She sees a rough trail of pawmarks. Excitedly she places her curled hands in the paw-prints and follows the trail. It leads to the outside of a building site. She looks up.]
[Inside the site there is a movement in the shadows, and a sound. The site is huge. The prints lead straight up and over the fence. She wonders whether to go into this place of obvious danger, or to give up on her search. She squeezes under the fence, and disappears into the shadows]
[Time passes]
[Aka, a Japanese boy, leaps onto the stage. He is on a mission, humming his own theme tune as he goes. Although his approach is a full-scale fantasy with himself as hero, the cause he is undertaking is a real one. The ‘monsters’ within this site have destroyed his favourite area for playing. He does a commando roll. He views the building site, checking it out, lining up the monsters in his sights.]
Aka: Monsters.
[He moves back, to warm up for his ‘assault’. He fights the air. He makes sure he is really an action hero. He comes slowly forward, but ‘steps’ on a secret switch, and the ceiling starts to close in on him. He fights the weight off, and rolls clear. He views the site again. Checking the wire perimeter, he imagines that it is electrified, and writhes on the floor. There is movement in the shadows of the site once again. He might be seen, so he backs off. He prepares for his final approach, and leaps dramatically over the fence, disappearing into the shadows]
[Lights go down]
Scene 2 Inside the Building Site
[Lights come up on another part of the site]
[Norang arrives, frightened in the shadows of the site, but continuing to look for Yoghurt. Aka arrives fractionally later, and flings himself on the floor, in a surveillance position. Norang goes out of sight. Aka becomes aware of her and hides so as to stalk her. Norang is unaware of him. ]
[Norang looks for Yoghurt, softly softly. Aka starts to copy her actions without sound. When Norang turns, he backs off and hides himself, frightened. Then they exchange sounds, from a distance. Call and response.]
[Silence]
Norang: Yoghurt.
Aka: Banana. Hamburger.
[Norang is a little less frightened. She is curious. She explores behind a screen. They play a kind of hide and seek. Norang surprises Aka from behind. He screams, and threatens her with a ‘weapon’. She screams more.]
Aka: Shh!
[Norang screams again. She sits, frightened. Aka backs off, then approaches from behind the screen. He puts his hands over and does a little hand play. A dog eats a cat. Norang smiles. She makes a bird with her hands. Aka makes a bow and arrow, and shoots the bird. The bird dies]
[They have made some contact. He pushes his hand through the screen. Slowly she touches it. He pulls her through. They look at each other.]
Norang: Norang.
Aka: Norang. Aka.
Norang: Aka.
[She moves away from him]
[Lights down]

Scene 3 Finding Blue
[Lights up]
[There is pile of crates centre stage, covered in plastic. It is Blue’s ‘Command Centre’]
[Aka follows Norang again]
Aka: No-rang?
Norang: [nods] Norang.
Aka: I am here to fight the monsters. You will be OK.
Norang: I don’t understand.
Aka: Yoghurt?
Norang: Yoghurt?
Aka: Aka.
[Norang gives up trying to understand, and starts looking for Yoghurt again. Aka follows and joins in, without understanding. He gets distracted, and begins fencing with a makeshift sword]
[A light comes on in Blue’s hiding place. They notice. Aka investigates. He believes he has found Yoghurt.]
Norang: Yoghurt?
[Aka nods. Norang is excited, and looks, but the ‘jaws’ of Blue’s pile of crates open, and she jumps back in fear.]
Aka: Not Yoghurt?
Norang: No.
Aka: Monster.
Norang: Monster.
[Aka seems a little afraid, but he summons up enough courage, and attacks the crates. His word gets ‘eaten’ by them. He attacks again, pulling off the plastic covering, wrestling with it on the floor. A young English boy, Blue, is revealed, hiding. He has two lights on his forehead. He desperately tries to rebuild his place. Aka has jumped back, frightened again. Blue is talking to himself.]
[Aka signals Norang to help catch the monster. They take the plastic sheet, and try to catch him. There is a struggle. Blue protects his shelter, and covers himself with a newspaper. Aka pulls it away, and Blue covers just his eyes with what is left. Aka signals Norang to ‘cover’ him. He pokes Blue with a weapon.]
Aka: Who are you? Do you live here? What are you doing here? Norang!
[Aka signals Norang to hold Blue, so that he can attack him. Norang initially gets ready to do this, but backs off. She recognises her own experience in the eyes of Blue. She passes him a new sheet of newspaper, he covers himself again.]
What are you doing here? This is the place where monsters live. They destroyed my playground. Are you a monster?
Blue: You aren’t supposed to be here. It isn’t allowed. No children are allowed.
Aka: You don’t look like a monster.
Blue: There’s a sign, outside. Danger. Didn’t you see the sign? You aren’t supposed to be here.
Aka: You are a monster in disguise. But you have met your match.
Blue: There is a sign. I always see the sign. Why didn’t you see the sign?
Norang: No.
[Aka shouts out. Blue is frightened. He puts the paper back on his eyes and curls up. Norang pulls Aka out of the way. She stays at a distance, but sings to Blue tenderly. After a while, Aka joins in the singing loudly and disrupts the moment. Then he backs off, sulkily]
[Norang moves a little closer. Blue switches on his headlight. Then off again. She peers through at him.]
Norang: Do you live here? Your house? [She mimes]
Blue: I don’t live here. I come here when I want. This is my command centre. I can control everything from here.
Norang: Norang. Aka.
Blue: I know. Norang, Aka. I wrote them down.
[He gets post-it notes with their names on from inside his shelter. Norang does not understand the writing. Aka joins them. He tries to see into Blue’s hiding place. Blue is upset again. He closes up his shelter again.]
Norang: Aka is a monster-hunter [Blue makes no response from inside his shelter]
Aka: Monsters. They are in here. They have destroyed everything.
Norang: I am looking for Yoghurt. [Still nothing] Have you seen Yoghurt?
Aka: Leave him. It will be dark soon. [He moves away]
Norang: I think maybe Yoghurt is dead. Maybe the monsters ate her.
[Blue flashes his light at Norang. She looks back at him, and moves over to his shelter. He pushes a roll of paper through to her. She opens it. It is a plan of the site.]
[Norang takes the plan over to Aka]
Norang: Map.
Aka: Map. [He takes control of it.]
This way. [They go off]
[Lights down]
4 Exploring the site
[Aka leads an exploration of the site, led by the plan. They go through a set of obstacles. Blue comes out after a while, and watches from a distance. He follows some way behind. Aka and Norang swim through an ocean. They walk across the side of a cliff. They get stuck, and signal to Blue, who is watching them from his place. He comes out, but stays his distance, throwing them something to help them. They continue across imaginary stepping-stones. Blue follows, walking through the water. They cross an imaginary river, on a rope. Blue follows, but again does not manage to summon the whole picture into his imagination. They examine the plan again. Aka has it upside down. Blue comes close enough to see. Turns it round. They follow a path to find Aka’s tree.]
5 The remains of the tree. The grandmother’s story.
[Aka runs to find where the tree that he once played on is, but it is not there.]
Aka: The tree. It was here. I climbed on it. It must be here.
[He is puzzled, and upset. Blue realises what he means and shows him what happened.]
Blue: The tree. It was here. Big tall deciduous tree, I think …a Zelkova Tree. I saw what happened. [They do not understand him. He demonstrates as he explains] They drove a digger at it first, but that didn’t work. It was strong. So they got chainsaws. They cut off the branches first..
[Aka attacks Blue]
Blue: I didn’t do it. That’s just what I saw. Why are you angry at me?
Aka: The tree was my tree. It was my tree that I always climbed up and played with!
[Aka, hugs the stump of the tree, upset. Blue can’t understand Aka’s action. Blue just looks away. Norang looks at both Aka and the place where the tree used to be, then starts her grandmother’s story. ]
Norang: (sings) Once upon a time, there was a funny story.
[Aka and Blue listen closely to her singing, although Blue still keeps his distance.]
Once upon a time, way back in the past, there was a village.
[They don’t understand, so she makes them act out being houses. Aka joins at once, Blue resists being touched, but forms a little house]
There were little houses. And a big tree in the middle of the village. A really big tree!
Aka: A tree?
Blue: Tree? Maybe Zelkova. [At this stage he is responding to the puzzle, rather than enjoying the story]
Norang: Yes, a tree. And there was a blind old woman in the village.
Aka: Old woman
Blue: Old woman.
Norang: Then one day, the old woman said,
‘Surisuri Masuri, I can see, I can see, I can hear, I can hear,
The day when the sky opens up in the middle of pitch black night,
There will be a baby!
Our Baby!’
Blue: A baby?
Aka: Baby!
Norang: Yes, Oori ai.
Aka: Oori ai.
Blue: Oori ai.
Norang: Then one night, (makes sounds of bird singing at night) in a dark night, when
everybody is still asleep,
[Norang, Blue, Aka lie down and close their eyes.]
It became really bright all of a sudden in the middle of the night.
[She moves Blue over, and makes him switch on his headlight]
The sun was rising.
Everyone in the village woke up and looked up the sky.
[Norang makes Aka stand up.]
In that moment!
[Norang hides and starts to make a sound of baby crying. Norang stands up and says ‘Our Baby’, (‘Oori ai’) holding a baby in her arms. Blue and Aka repeat the word. Three of them nod to each other then say it in one voice. ]
All: Oori ai!
Norang: The baby grew very fast. He walked by the age of 2. Two years old.
[Aka walks, Norang applauds]
Five years old. He rode a horse.
[Norang gives Blue a crate, which he rides as a horse, with some help]
At seven years. He hit a flying bird with an arrow.
[Aka and Blue show it with movements.]
Norang: The word flew everywhere.
[They whisper to each other, spreading the rumour.]
Amazing boy. He can do anything etc etc….
[Norang and Aka make Blue a king.]
Norang: King!
Aka: Your majesty!
Blue: King!
Norang: Word finally reached the king.
King (Blue): [Suddenly leaping rather scarily into role] No! Just like there’s only one sun, there is only one king in this world. Me! Just me! Bring me this Oori Ai. Get the child right now!
[Norang and Aka ride horses.]
Old Man (Norang): I can hear, they are coming, we should hide Our Baby!
[Norang hides Aka. King (Blue) threatens people of village (Norang) to bring ‘Our Baby’. King finally pulls out a sword when he hears nothing. Just at the moment when the king was about to cut off someone’s head, Aka appears as ‘oori Ai’ and starts to fight him. Norang stops him, because he has got the story wrong. He is supposed to say, ‘take me instead’. He goes back and they replay the scene properly. ]
[Our Baby’ appears. King carries him off. ‘Our Baby’ stops and tells the people of village, that he hid something under the big tree. What he hid is for the people and it will save the world. He explains it with mime. He asks people to keep the secret and then the king drags him away]
[Aka and Blue run to Norang]
Aka: Then?
Blue: And?
Norang: So this is where that big tree was!
[All three of them gaze at where the tree was, slowly drawing the tree with their eyes. Then they realise together the implication of the story, suddenly pointing at the tree stump and starting to dig the ground.]
6 Digging 1 [looking for the secret]
[They dig all together under the tree, to find what the child has left them. But the ground is hard and they do not make very much progress. Blue opens his little case, and finds a pair of scissors. He carefully cuts around the stump, and they lever it up. They dig again, but still do not find any secret or treasure. They are disappointed.]
7 The machine-monster
Norang: Nothing.
Blue: No secret. No treasure.
Aka: [acting out as he speaks] The secret was here, but then the monster came here, and ate it. Monster.
Norang: Monster?
Blue: There are no monsters here.
Aka: Monster, yes.
Blue: No. No monsters. I have seen everything.
Aka: Monsters. I heard them. They killed my tree. I will kill them.
[Blue runs through the screen. Aka and Norang try to stop him. Too late. They wonder about following, but do not dare.]
[There is a loud machine noise, and movement behind the screen, visible only as shapes, lights and shadows.]
Norang: Blue!
[Neither Norang or Aka dares go to save him. The ‘monster’ begins to come through the screen. Aka tries to summon the courage to fight it, but they hide. The ‘monster’ emerges, and it is a digging machine, being controlled by Blue.]
[Nervously, the other two children approach and observe]
8 Digging 2 [Going to Brazil]
Blue: There are no monsters here. Look.
Aka: No monster.
Blue: The monsters are out there. Out there. In here, we are safe.
[Blue demonstrates the way that the machine will work to dig. Aka encourages him to continue where they were digging. They operate the machine together, and dig deeper. Soon they have created a big hole. They look down the hole and call out to listen for an echo.]
Norang: Ooo hoo.
Aka: Brazil.
Norang: Brazil?
Blue: Brazil?
Aka: Brazil. If you dig. Down.. It is where you come out.
Norang: What?
Blue: He is right. We dug from the top of the world. We must have gone through the crust of the earth, and the earth’s core.
[Blue demonstrates]
Aka: Brazil.
Norang: Brazil? What is Brazil?
Aka: Brazil is a perfect place. Much better than this world. In Brazil, I am the king, and you and you. Noone stops us from exploring. We will have as many trees as we want, and we will be free to go everywhere, and climb.
Blue: A perfect place. Brazil? If Brazil is a perfect place it will be quiet. Nobody to disturb everything. Peace.
Norang: In Brazil, the city is like the countryside. You can hear the birds and smell the flowers. People do not shout. They sing. Everybody sings.
Aka: Come on.
[They go back to the hole. They look down. Aka summons up courage to jump in.]
Three, two, one.
[He jumps. They look down, he looks up.]
Norang: [calling] Brazil?
Aka: Brazil. Come on.
[Norang follows him]
Norang Three, two, one.
[She jumps. Aka greets her in ‘Brazil’. Blue waits at the top.]
Blue: Coming. Three, two, one…. Two, three, two, one..
[He jumps, and lands with the others in ‘Brazil’]
9 In Brazil
[There is a change of lighting and atmosphere. They are in ‘Brazil’ – where there are none of the problems that face them up on the land. They play this new world, where they are all of the people. Aka’s world is physical, Norangs world poetic and musical, Blues world is quiet and controlled]
10 Disappointment, back to reality
[The lights and atmosphere change back, and they return to the reality of the situation.]
[Norang remembers that she still has not found Yoghurt.]
Norang: Yoghurt.
[ Blue gets a piece of paper and starts designing something. Aka observes. It is a Yoghurt trap. They build it, with a crate. Aka tries it, but they need bait]
Blue: Bait.
[Norang finds a scrap of food in her pocket. They try out the trap, and catch Aka. They reset the trap and hide and wait. Norang sings. They sleep.]
[Time passes.]
11 Up the Crane
[The dawn is arriving. Aka rolls over in his sleep, and springs the trap. Norang wakes, and checks the trap. Yoghurt is not there. She resumes her search, while the others sleep. There is a noise, and she thinks she hears Yoghurt up the high crane. She builds some way of climbing up, and tries to get there, but she gets into danger and freezes. She calls out]
[The others wake and see Norang. They suggest ways of rescuing her. They offer the map for her to jump. Blue suggests a parachute. They try to climb up. Blue gets up to her, but then he is scared and stuck too. Aka follows and they are all on top.]
[There are sounds below. They realise they are all in danger. From the top, they can see the city. They look at the dangers that are out there, and at each other]
[Aka produces three seeds from his pocket]
Blue: Seeds
Norang: Seeds
Aka: From Brazil. To grow another tree.
[Norang holds her seed, counts to three and releases it. Blue does the same.]
[Aka counts to three and puts the seed in his mouth. Norang is angry with him. He spits it out, grins, and they watch it fall.]

Checklist for first draft

2008-10-22T23:31:00.000-07:00

This is the checklist the writers compiled on saturday, to bear in mind as we write our first draft script:
· What the seed means for each charcter at the end.
· Slow down and mark the stages of understanding, language [moments where they understand]
· And the stages of trust.
· Add back in the level of fear of the building site.
· Chart the progress of Blue’s trust, and Blue’s imagination
· Make Blue’s fear of people and touch and sound clear
· Mark the links between sections and make them clear
· Strengthen Aka’s ‘political’ motivation. – ie what the ‘monster’ is.
· Make clear Blue’s assertion that there are no monsters in the site, but they are outside.
· Change the atmosphere, music and style for the grandmothers story
· In Brazil:
· Have a different atmosphere style and music
· Have a different rule of understanding?
· Make the fantasies global, structural, not merely reflection of children’s ‘desires, but an actually better world
· Show the origin of the seeds.

Anyong and Sayonara..for now

2008-10-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Korean and Japanese members of the company have disappeared into the sky above Birmingham, and the latest leg of our journey together is over. We will be having a writer's meeting in Seoul on the first of November, and then it is e-mail and skype all the way to April, when rehearsals will begin in Seoul.

So it is great to be able to report that we are well ahead of our self-set schedule, and that after the meeting in November we will have a first draft. It seems likely that this will be a firmer draft than might have been envisaged, and that is testament to the way the fortnight in Birmingham has gone. The characters and rough structure squeezed together at the end of our time in Tokyo stood up well. The actors grabbed the characters and made them very firmly their own, and responded with such a quantity and quality of invention that the writers have had material for a whole canon of plays.

The final chapetr was another of those saturday mornings... perhaps a slightly more tired one, after the very full schedule of the stay in England, but nevertheless a very useful one. A wide-ranging discussion, joined by Caroline, Rachel and Simon from the REP, and by Yeon, and Judy, Byung Ho, Ayako and Minato, took us to the very end of our list of needed decisions, and a summary of those does bear witness to a successful time.

The characters are solid, and work vey well together. We have changed Norang's focus slightly in that her background in the country is stronger, and the idea of her being a victim of bullying has lost significance. We feel a need to make a little clearer that Aka has a strong motive for his arrival at the site - a need to prevent, or at least protest the damage that 'monsters' are doing to his favourite place of play.

The structure, breakdown of scenes and main action is in place, and we are happy with it.

We are happy with the time scheme of the play, and with the conventions for language, and with the design ideas, the rules for fantasy and reality, and much of the specific action and even lines.

We are really happy with the actors, and the way they and the creative team have worked togther.

With all these positives already in mind, we addressed the key issues that we have to bear in mind, and decided approaches to them. The check list for the script itself will be written up and attached to this blog in due course.

The musician will be decided by the end of November. It will not be Minato himself, but his presence during the workshop has given him a strong sense of the kind of skills the musician chosen will need to have. There will be a meeting about design in Seoul on 1st November, by which time Yeon is intending to have a storyboard. There will also be a first meeting about costume at that time.

Photos and video of the workshop will be collated and copies shared in Seoul. [All these meetings etc, are happening during a visit I am making to take part in an international symposium at the Korean National University of the Arts] Decsions have also been made about timings and parcticalities in relation to the rehearsal and performance stages of the play. If you are a casual passing reader, keen to see the play that emerges from all of this, please watch this space.... at some time it will be coming to a theatre near you.

Sharing the Yoghurt

2008-10-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

The final day of workshops seems to have arrived extremely fast. The actors arrived fresher than yesterday, and had an hour or so to get ready, while we made final preparations for people to come and watch. In the end there were 30 kids from the two schools sitting at the front and about fifty adults, plus all of the company, so the room was full, but fortunately a crisp day of autumn sun had taken over from the stifling heat of earlier in the week.

The presentation went really well, with the actors impressing everyone, and the children really deeply involved. The response was overwhelmingly positive - with some people extremely impressed and no really major criticisms at all. Plenty of suggestions and minor queries and criticisms, but the company was overall delighted, relieved and pretty proud. After the presentation, there was a lavish lunch of sushi, and then the actors went out into the square for their 'impromptu' musical performance, which was great - with Young Ju predictably stealing the show by involving half of Birmingham in an elaborate korean Hokey-Cokey. The children and staff from Chandos and Reaside joined in, before taking a long backstage tour. After that there was only time for a brief Q and A before they had to go home. Chandos had prepared some beautiful question sunflowers, for the Japanese and Korean parties to take with them, and they had obviously enjoyed their day, with great support from Rachel from Brightspace.

The afternoon was taken up with a meeting about music, where we worked out our overall approach with Minatosan. Mijeong has finished korean lyrics for the theme song, and he has ideas for music through the piece, which he will finish when we have finished the first draft of the play. He then led a workshop, showing how the mixture of percussion and melody may work. It all ended in a song.

Meanwhile, the producers had a meeting, thrashing out the terms of our process of longer-term touring, very amicably, and then even more amicably, we all gathered at the Kababish in Moseley for a well-earned curry, hosted by the Rep. Not for the first time I was struck through the day by how uniformly nice a group this is in which to work. Nice, and talented too.

Today is Toby Day

2008-10-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the day, I said that we had earned a bonus day for good behaviour, and for being ahead of our schedule. The fact is that the day had been planned all along, but it seemed to fit, because we had managed to get to the end of our process of working through the play in time to leave it behind for a day, and work exclusively on physical aspects of the play, with a visit from hugely experienced physical theatre guru Toby Sedgewick.

We had talked about presenting him with specific sections of the play only, but in the end having started at the beginning, we worked all through the parts we had mapped out, presenting them to Toby, discussing and then working through possibilities. It was a fun, and extremely useful day, with some great new ideas, and it was a good moment at which to get an outside eye on things, from such a positive and inventive person. There were some great routines emerging, around diving down to Brazil, and the machine monster, and some of the principles of how we are presenting reality and fantasy were much clearer too. The whole day also reinforced the value of the way the set is evolving into lower-tech and simpler approaches.

In the evening we discussed our approach to Friday's sharing, coming to the conclusion that we should present the majority of scenes that we have prectised. We decided to leave out the 'Brazil' section, since it would give us a useful opening to discussing ideas for inclusion there, withg the children from the two project schools, who will be there for the sharing.

After running through the prolonged extract we will show, there was another long conversation with Minato, this time centred around whether the play contained too many key words and themes. His philosophical and abstract approach is proving quite a challenge at times, but there is a lot to be said for these kind of challenges. If we all worked in the same ways, would there be such richness in our international collaboration?

The Meaning of Brazil

2008-10-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

This morning was set aside for 'Brazil', and we started with each actor writing an account of their dream destination, then inhabiting it, and explaining it to each other. The long improvisations were wild exhibitions of how deeply their understanding of the charcaters is developed, and our first attempt at the scene which may appear within the play was both very accurate in its expression of their desires, and also very funny. Yudai taking the role of Blue's robot, increasingly out of control had everyone in pieces.

The planned drumming session outside on the terrace at lunchtime was cancelled, because for once the weather had let us down, but we decided it would be better anyway to do it after the sharing on Friday, as a celebratroy bonus for the children coming, and any of the rest of the audience that wants to stay.

In the afternoon, we ran on to the end of the play, adding in the idea of the children sleeping while guarding the yoghurt-trap, and the whole section of climbing the crane. It seemed another productive day.

The writer's meeting was filled with another long discussion raised by Minatosan questionning the meaning of 'Brazil'. He felt that it was confusing to mix real ideas of a real country, with the ignorant fantasy of the children. We talked about the mixture of fantasy, dream and political ambition that the section might contain, and we remembered our desire for the play to explore children's wisdom in relation to world issues. Perhaps the depictions of brazil were too limited to the immediate desires of these childen, rather than the wisdom they would express if given the chance to rule a new world. But there was not enough time and energy left to discuss this through to a conclusion, and we left a little weary.

Hotting up

2008-10-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

The temperature in the Rehearsal Room at the REP is high, as autumn has forgotten to bite, and the open windows cannot fully clear the air. There is a tiredness in evidence which is hardly surprising - the visiting team here came to work pretty much straight off their long flights, and the schedule has been intense. We have got a long way, and there will be some gritting of teeth in making the final push.

This morning we started with the scene in which Aka finds the place where his favourite tree once stood, and then Norang tells her grandmother's story. The actors first attempt at it is strong, and there are few big issues to debate. As we go further into the story it becomes clear that we are at a point where we need to make some more specific decisions about the design - they are improvising activities like digging, when we are not yet decided how we may really be representing them as yet. But Yeon reminds me that in a normal process the designer would not be expecting to be involved until there is a draft script at least, and her involvement to date will in the long run prove a real bonus.

At lunch time today there is a production meeting, and in some ways this emphasises how much is still to be decided. But the pace we have been working has felt high, and the amount of time wasted in fruitless exploration has been impressively small. Considering how complicated it would be to deal with conflict on any scale, across the three countries and languages, I think we have been really lucky in the degree of like-mindedness at the heart of the project, and the way our differences have felt like complementary forces.

In the afternoon we went back to the beginning, and readdressed some of the areas discussed yesterday. The actors ran through the first three scenes impressively, and again the day ended positively....

Ali, who was with us in Seoul and Tokyo, came and visited at the end of the day, and we went for a drink together. Tomorrow, the midday 'concert', and an afternoon of being visited by students on a careers day....

The Meaning of Yoghurt

2008-10-13T23:45:00.000-07:00

We started the new week with a new synopsis, and a new plan - to work through the play scene by scene, deciding content, staging and music.

Yeon and Judy and Simon, the lighting designer, went to Leicester to visit the Peepul Centre, which will be the project's second venue in May 2009. In the meantime the actors began their improvisation at the beginning. The very first scene, where Norang and then Aka arrive at the building site, seems fairly fixed already, and when we tried it with the lights off it gave a hint of the atmosphere which the start of the play may have. The next two scenes are altogether more fluid, and the actors have by now developed such a habit of inventiveness, it seems churlish to be asking them to narrow down. But over the course of the week, that is what we will need to do.

Our problem this week may be staying focused on the current purpose, which is limited to exploring the story so that we can create the script. Once everything is stood up, it is hard not to work on scenes to the point where they 'work'. The fact is we do not need to go this far, and cannot really afford the time to, either. When we have enough evidence to enable us to 'write', then we can move on.

It is a harder process than last week's, and takes some adjusting. In the afternoon, we stop to discuss things, and get involved in a long discussion started by Minato, raising the question of the meaning of Yoghurt. His approach to the music is very different - with a strong emphasis on symbolism, and he was finding the meaningless of the name Yoghurt a real block to his creative approach. Norang is repeating a word again and again in searching for the cat, which is an unmusical word, and which has no positive meaning. Mijeong in turn felt that it was important that the name was 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It was an unexpected conversation at this stage, and a challenging one.

The actors are drumming with Minato every day, and he has decided that they should do a little performance on Wednesday lunch time, to focus their minds, and so they will play outside the theatre. It is going to be a fascinating aspect of the project, to see how the music evolves.

In the sfternoon session we stopped for a while to welcome 40 teachers who were participating in a careers day at the REP. They watched a little of the improvising, and we introduced them to the project. Their response, to a random section of the process was encouraging. On Friday morning we have quite a sizable audience joining us for our work in progress, apparently, so this was a good dry run.

In the evening, the writers meeting was more complex than previous ones, as the issues we are wrestling with get more complex, but it was fruitful too, and aftre we finished I wrote up the first three scenes in a form which begins to resemble script...

Breakdown of Scenes

2008-10-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

Looking for Yoghurt – Breakdown of Scenes - this is the new outline that came from Saturday's meeting

1 Outside the Building Site
Blue is a movement in the shadows. Norang arrives, looking for Yoghurt. She follows a rough cat trail. Decision – go inside into danger or give up on Yoghurt? She goes in.
Aka arrives. He is on a mission, to destroy the monsters that have taken over his ‘playground’. The cranes. The machines. He is 007, Spiderman, etc…. He avoids the ‘electrified’ fence. He goes in.

2 Inside the Building Site
Norang continues to look for Yoghurt. Aka becomes aware of her. He ‘stalks’ her. Norang is unaware of him. Hide and seek. Then they exchange sounds. Call and response. Then they are face to face. They are frightened, then communicate a little.

3 Finding Blue
Norang goes back to looking for Yoghurt. Aka joins in, without understanding. He finds Blue, hidden. Norang finds Blue, too. Blue has a place which he has made his own. His little world. They try to find out who he is, and why he is there.

4 Establishing contact
They make some hesitant links. Slowly they begin to play together. This builds into a clapping game. We find out a little of their reasons for being there. Monsters, missions and Yoghurt.

5 The remains of the tree. The grandmother’s story.
Aka finds the remains of a tree where he played, before the building site was here. He is upset. Norang tells him her grandmother’s story, about the special child. They enact this together.

6 Digging 1 [looking for the secret]
They dig together under the tree, to find what the child has left them. Blue hangs back, but goes to his world, and finds them something to help digging. They do not find any secret or treasure. They are disappointed.

7 The machine-monster
They start to look for Yoghurt again, and Norang touches something which starts a machine. Aka and Norang think it is a monster. Aka makes a show of killing the monster, but he is afraid. In the end, Blue joins, without fear, and rides the machine-monster.

8 Digging 2 [Going to Brazil]
The reality of their situation comes back to them. If they carry on digging, maybe they will get to a better place. Brazil. The machine, now that they can work it, may help them dig deeper. The three together now, dig to get to Brazil. They are playing together well now.

9 In Brazil
They arrive in ‘Brazil’ – where there are none of the problems that face them up on the land. They play this new world, where they are all of the people.

10 Disappointment, back to reality
They come back again to the reality of the situation. Norang still has not found Yoghurt. The clapping game does not cheer her up. The boys set up a Yoghurt trap. They hide and wait. Norang sings. They sleep. Time passes.

11 Up the Crane
Norang wakes, and resumes her search. She hears Yoghurt up the crane. She gets into danger. The others wake and rescue her, then they realise they are all in danger. They use whatever they need to climb the crane. From the top, they can see the city.

We Like Saturday Mornings...

2008-10-12T01:59:00.000-07:00

One conclusion from our first week is that the decisions we made on the saturday morning at the end of the Tokyo workshop week have stood up very well. On that morning, we mapped out the charcter sketches and synopsis, and nothing that has happened this week has made us chnage our minds about any big aspects of this. The shape and focus of the stroy feels about right, and most of the work has been consolidating and fleshing out.

So we decided at the beginning of today's big creative team meeting that we like Saturday mornings.

In rehearsal room two, there are two radiators which we have not been able to switch off, so we have to switch on an air conditioning unit to counteract them. But everything else is remarkably efficient. OK so we do allow ourselves the odd tangent, but generally, with Ayako acting as chief translation referee, and giving the yellow card to anyone who speaks for too long, we keep to the task that we have set.

That task for this saturday morning , is to re-do the synopsis, identifying the individual scenes in the play, and to cut a three-hour story short, we achieve it pretty well. Much of the debate is about the beginning, and the idea that has now emerged of Blue being present from the beginning, as an Ariel-like spirit in the building site, visible as a shadowy presence only. There are also break-thorugh decisions around the order of events later in the play, with the sequence in which they find a machine-monster now inserted between the digging sections. The new synopsis will be drafted over the weekend and should appear here shortly afterwards.

The writers had lunch together at Woktastic on Saturday, and then went our ways...with everyone who is staying in Birmingham going to watch Birmingham Royal Ballet later....

Waiting for Taxis...or How Theatre Can Change the World

2008-10-10T00:58:00.000-07:00

It is hard to believe we are already coming to the end of week one. Yerang arrived today, to take over the Korean translation, having just finished her doctorate thesis in time. She has lived in Birmingham for many years, and she leaps into the process, giving some extra momentum to this crucial role....

Today was pencilled in as 'monsters' day, and also contains the second school visit, to Reaside in Frankley - the other group who will be shadowing the project throughout.

Before setting off there is time for another quick creative team meeting, at which the design idea is fleshed out further. On Saturday we will break our synopsis into sections, and then Yeon will propose a stage picture for each of these separate sections. The objects needed for each will be chosen, with different combinations used for each section, and they will all be needed together for the final climb up the crane.

Yeon has once again been in and changed what is in the space, removing much of the stuff, and leaving three areas, also covering them with clear plastic sheeting. The actors improvise in this new space, looking a little as if they are now beginning to feel the effects of a very full-on week, and energy is low... But once they are up and running, their exploration of their character's personal 'monsters' is strong - particularly when the plastic sheeting becomes some kind of snake of creeping smoke, whcih threatens to envelope them. The three of them are working together extremely well, and the level of inventiveness is constantly impressive.

For the workshop in Reaside, we prepare a rough plan, which involves improvising the beginnings of the play to elicit responses, and then raising a question of 'monsters' without using that word. What are the characters afraid of?

The group at Reaside consists of a dozen Year Six pupils, who have been chosen to take part. Once again the welcome at the school is impressive, and today, by arrangement, we are all there in time for school dinners - another part of the cultural experience for the Japanese and Korean members of the company.

The introduction to the children is encouraging. They are older than the Chandos group, and have already had some contact with the Rep. 'We did a project on how theatre can change the world,' says one girl. 'That's great...that is what we are doing with Looking for Yoghurt'. It seems an appropriate beginning - let us set our sights high together.

Perhaps because of their age, the children are more practical and realistic than the younger group, less imaginative, but there is once again a great width to their responses, and the session is short but valuable. We collect some more clapping games ['my boyfriend gave me an apple...'] and some good ideas for 'monsters', as well as a strong sense from the way the improvisation is watched that even in this early form, our story and characters are of real interest to our intended audience.

Outside the school, it is sunny but cool, with the first leaves of the year beginning to change colour. Sending enough taxis to retrieve our big party from Frankley proves a challenge for the taxi firm, but the spirit in the camp is buoyant.

Back in the rehearsal room we have a wonderful session looking at the character scrapbooks that the actors have been compiling - which reinforces how clear and well-defined they are, and also how likeable. There is a real sense that everyone knows them already, and we all care about them too, across their manifest differences. The books are a testiment to the way the week has gone. The final acts of that rehearsal room week are a first run at the final sequences of the play, with the children climbing the crane.

Yudai's total lack of fear makes this a difficult exercise to watch, as he drags a less keen Young Ju up towards the ceiling on a wobbly ladder - but the impact of the sight of the three children together so high, looking out across the city, is very striking. It is a strong finish.

In the evening the company is invited over to Judy's house for a meal and a party. Rachel has arrived back in Birmingham and will join us in the morning for our big writers meeting. The exzchange of games spills from the rehearsal room into the party, with some very impressive clappy games demonstrated by Young Ju and Mijeong. On our way back from the party, my son Jim says, 'I think I know why you like hanging out with Koreans so much...they are all big children like you are'........

Under the Zelkova Tree

2008-10-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

We started the day with a writer's meeting, for a change today, and Caroline Jester, the REP's Dramaturg, sat in on the session to get a sense of the project and the process. These meetings have a rythmn and atmosphere all of their own, with the three languages making everything slow, of course, but the effect of that is positive as well as negative. There is a shared knowledge that we cannot afford to waste words or time, and the group has picked up a very healthy tendency of cutting pretty quickly 'to the chase'.

The first section of the discussion this morning reflected on the day of music, and we put some decisions in place about the way of approaching the music in the rest of the fortnight. The idea of the shape of the music echoing the shape of the relationships within the play seems strong, and there will be a progression in the way the music comes together along these lines. Although the actors will generate some percussion themselves, there is already a commitment to having a musician, set apart from the action, and he or she will be picking up the lead from the action, and supporting it. There seems no way to be able to incorporate Young Ju playing the gayagum, which is a shame, since it is such a potentially beautiful thing to include. But there is a place for singing, particularly by her, as she has been showing in improvisations. There is also now a clear task of creating a new clapping game of our own.

The rest of our discussion was around the introduction of the grandmother's story. Mijeong has drafted a version. It is about a special child, 'All Our Child' who is born in an ancient community. His talents are great, and when knowledge of him comes to the ears of the king, he feels threatened and vows to have him killed. The boy is protected by his family, but he reveals himself. Before he is killed he manages to pass a message that he has hidden the secret to everything underneath the zelkova tree.

Nishida likes the way that this is a story of hope. He is not a hero, he achieves nothing, but he leaves hope. We are now suggesting a link to this story, involving a tree within the building site, where Aka used to play. When the children find the remains of this tree, Norang cheers Aka up by telling the story, and they conceive the idea that the secret from the story may be buried under where this tree once was.

Before lunch, Mijeong tells Young Ju the story quietly, in Korean, and the actors then hear it for the first time, within an improvisation. It is a little clumsy - trying to relate the story through the language barriers, but once again it is an improvisation which points the way for the decisions about how we deal with it in our actual play. A second run at this part of the play also leads us towards some ways of achieving the digging, using milk crates.

Towards the end of the day, there is an opportunity to divide again, and while the actors work with Minato on the clapping games, there is a spontaneous meeting about design. Yeon has some images of korean textiles which she wants to share, and the creative team debates the way forward on design. Everyone responds well to the feel of the images - monochrome and geometric, on translucent cloth - a possible backcloth, and a template for the feel of the whole set. Up to now, she had placed a wide variety of abjects within the performance space, for the actors to experiment, and we had taken the whole space as representing the whole site. The decision is now made that the action will take us to different corners of the site, transformed with as few objects as feasible, supported by lighting, with only the actors involved in these transformations. Objects will be symbolic, maybe at times adapted versions of real objects, given the feel that fits with the overall pictures we want.

At the end of the day we have to say goodbye to Mera, who has been translating throughout, but who leaves tomorrrow for a month in India. Yerang who will replace her, visits to meet with Mera and pick up the baton.

In the evening most of the company watched Jasmin Vordiman's company in an impressively brutal piece called, Yesterday, and on the way back to their lodgings everyone was wondering if we could get more bare bottoms and physical violence into our show....

Polyrythmns

2008-10-08T20:47:00.000-07:00

Music day today, starting early with the gang making its way to Grove School in Handsworth.

Minato had asked for a chance to spend time with a group of young children, to collect their childhood songs, and we worked with a Year Two class [7 years old] for the morning. Drumming, clapping, dancing and singing their way through Japan, Korea and the UK, via Africa, America, India and Australia. It was another lively session, and Minato particlularly enjoyed the clapping games ['A sailor went to sea sea sea..']

Back in the rehearsal room we did a session filling in some of Blue's back story. Toyoko went into role as his mother, and we heard her anxieties for her son, with his special talents which are so aften misunderstood. The actors also improvised some name-calling and other episodes from his childhood, before we re-approached the moment where he is found, hidden in the building site. There was more poignancy, and tension around.

At lunchtime we went en masse to see CTC'c lovely production, Five, which is on in the Door, which will also be our venue for our world premier in May 2009. It was a timely visit - a play which is simple yet beautiful, with no language.

After lunch we talked a little about the morning workshop, and the roles of music within the play. Minato spoke about two musical elements which had symbolic power. One for him was the simple call and response, which the actors had done with children in the morning. This for Minato represents the communication between parent and child, missing in the case of Blue. It is an element which our play needs to contain, to represent the communication that is developed without language but across barriers.

The other symbolic concept we are now exploring is polyrythmn. African musicians had worked with him, presenting complex ways of putting together seemingly incompatible beats. Where this combination works, the different rythmns combine, while the individual is still in evidence. This echoes the symbolism central to the play - difference is at one time both surmountable and in itself to be celebrated. Whether this is the difference between the complementary primary colours of red blue and yellow, between Blue and the child seen as normal, between cultures and languages, or between the different rythmns of africa...all have this twin potential.

The music will provide a soundtrack, and yet be also an integral part of the storytelling. The production of Five had that element to it, although the musician was more of a character than ours is likely to be... Dance too, may be an element... in the world under the ground perhaps, and there will be many times when we are close to dance - digging, climbing etc. Or maybe the children themselves will sing and dance.

We also decided to explore at some time the inventing of a new tri-lingual clapping game of our own. Maybe three elemenst which complement each other...back to those polyrythmns again....

In the evening, the company watched the REP's own production of Wuthering Heights, and liked the set...we wondered how Byung Ho would feel if we came up with a set design like that, given that he wants ours to fit in as hand luggage.......

Into the building site...

2008-10-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

As the excitement of the first day makes way, Yeon is in the rehearsal room early, to build an obstacle course of material, and create our first version of the building site. Ladders, hoola hoops, rubber bands and plastic sheeting fill the room. Milk crates, are in a stack in the corner - smelling a little.

The first improvisation of the day sees the three children coming into the site and meeting. At first it is a little too simple, but at only the second attempt, the scene seems to fly...Yudai as Aka, is a fantasist - imagining himself as 007, overcoming his own litany of imagined dangers, in addition to the real ones. Young Ju is an appealing figure as Norang, following a little cat paw trail, wondering if she dares enter through this barrier, and crying out for Yoghurt. Daniel is hidden away, peeering meaningfully from though a crate. The impro is long and full of suggestion and invention.

The room is pretty full, with sometimes three translators, in addition to the thtee writers, Stage Manager and designer. Simon, our lighting designer, who will come with us to Korea in April, also drops in, as does Ohiro the composer, who came last night.

After letting the improvisation run on for a long time, there is applause as it finishes. So many notes already written. We have time only for a quick rehearsal of the outline of our school workshop, before it is time for a quick lunch, and then a little convoy.

Chandos School is close to the centre of Birmingham in one of the most diversely populated areas of the city. It is an impressively creative and approachable school, and the children gather round the team as we arrive into the playground...'who are you?'...'what do you do?'. There is a great atmosphere about the place.

For those of us from the UK the visits to schools in Korea and Japan were the highlights of the work there, and we hope of course that the same will be true in reverse. Certainly the welcome at Chandos is impressive, especially considering they were not really expecting an invasion of 14 people into their staffroom. There is such an air of friendliness about the place. It is an important session, because the class of Yaer Five children we are working with will be attached to the production from today right through until May, working with me towards their own performance drawn from the same themes. Their ideas and level of engagement with the afternoon workshop is great - meeting the company, and then the actors in role as the characters, watching a short scene and then creating their own suggestions through drama. We asked them about the scnee where the children dig down to 'Brazil', the perfect world down on the other side of the planet. What would their perfect world be like?

Their tableaux reflect worlds with sport and shopping, rest and freedom. they show travel through space, and wishes being granted. One thing is clear from the session - children love digging, and their visions for a utopia are rich with possibilities. It is an energising and stimulating session, and the company comes away buzzing.

Back at the theatre there is time for two hours of drumming, while the writers dissect the outcomes from another dense and exciting day. We are already feeling time ticking, but the atmosphere of discussion is serious and clear. These are writers with strong instincts, and clear sight - qualities that will be crucial if we are to get the practical tasks of the fortnight achieved, despite the slowness of rythmn which is the inevitable effect of translation. Ayako has devised a system of yellow and red cards which she waves if someone speaks for too long, or before translation is done - something which still happens all the time.

Tomorrow is a music day, and we have decided too that it is Blue day - a long discussion about Aspergers has helped us flesh out a little more of what the character background should be. Thursday is pencilled in for 'Grandmothers story', and 'digging', and then friday is 'monsters' day, and the next school visit. It all promises much......and I am tired already. Tired but happy.

The next chapter - sunny Birmingham

2008-10-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

The next frenetic period in the roller-coaster that is the 'Looking for Yoghurt' devising process is underway. Over the weekend, the members of the team flew in from various places, and on Monday we started work in the big rehearsal room at Birmingham REP.

We now have a cast in place, with a Birmingham trained actor, Danile Naddafy joining the team, and two of the actors from the workshops, Yudai and Young Ju playing the other two parts. Also involved practically for the first time is composer Ohiro Minato, and two locally based interpreters, Mera Seo and Yerang Seong. In addition we have the support now of the resources of the REP, which seem very lavish.

On Sunday, with total diregard for jetlag, we had a seven hour writer's meeting, to plan the two weeks ahead. It was a good feeling to be back together, and after the frustration of so limited a time in Okinawa, we have a schedule which should give us plenty of time for talking between the practical sessions. Our aim is simple - by the end of the two weeks we want to have our play, ready to take into rehearsals. There may well be a period of writing up, before this translates to being an actual first draft on paper - but we now know from experience that all the key decisions are best made when we are all in the same room.

On Monday all the work was around the three characters. The decisions on the synopsis were made right at the end of our workshops in Tokyo, and now that the play is cast we need to work with the actors to flesh out the three children. Certainly the first day of working on this was encouraging. daniel has leapt into the process well, and seems appropriate casting for the withdrawn Blue, while the energy of Young Ju [irrepressible and alwys so positive] and the physical fearlessness of Yudai contrast well. The actors were set the task of creating scrapbooks for their characters, and set off into Birmingham to find the perfect book. In the meantime, the writers planned the next stage.

We are working long full days, packing in the range of activities needed, and the REP has housed the company in flats in or around the theatre, which makes it all practically very easy. An invitation is being sent out to a range of people to see the work-in-progress at the end of the second week and so we will have to maintain that focus and work-rate right the way through. But as we begin, there is no sign that anyone will mind that.....

Two weeks to go before Birmingham..

2008-09-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

It is beginning to feel very close to the next stage of this long complex process. On the first weekend in October, people will start flying in to Birmignham for our final devising workshops. Two weeks together, taking the play from its current outline state towards the script. Flights are booked, accommodation arranged, a schedule for the fortnight is being finalised.

In England we now have schools lined up for the main education project which will shadow the production over the next few months through to performance. Two primary schools in Birmingham are involved, and they will be making up their own performances on the same themes, as well as contributing their ideas to 'Yoghurt' itself. The latest plan is that there will also be a 'digital yoghurt' project, and we are currently looking for an artists to commission to create an environment for this project within 'Second Life' - an area of cyberspace where young people from all of our countries can vist the construction site, and explore the issues and ideas and the world of our play...... watch this space, as they say...

The biggest missing piece of the jigsaw at the moment is the UK actor. Ian and Ali who were with us on the first stages, are neither of them available now, and so tomorrow we have auditions. Somebody out there is about to join the circus.....

Okinawa Thoughts

2008-07-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

We had a big production meeting in Okinawa, in the very short time that everyone was available. Mr Shimoyama, so busy during the festival, could only manage a 10.00pm meeting, and Toyoko was arriving later in the evening, so she was there for the later stages only. But it was good to sit in the hotel dining room, around a long table, and feel how our great endeavour is progressing.... it is an exciting feeling.

These are the highlights of our discussions....

...Birmingham REP confirmed they will present two weeks of performances from 15 – 30 May plus three days in Leicester from 1 – 3 June.

..... Joyful confirmed two weeks of performances from 15 July – 2 August.

... Kijimuna Festa confirmed 5 performances from 5 – 7 August 2009.

The plan for our next workshops in Birmingham in October is taking shape. Minato San will arrive late, but will be present for most of the two week workshop.

There will be a sharing of the work, with sections played on Friday 17 October with invited audience including children.

There are two additional periods when writers may meet (at no cost to this project).
End of October in Seoul – Peter and Nishida san will travel to Seoul.
Festival of early years work in Bologna, Italy, February 2008 (dates to be confirmed)

Simon Bond, lighting designer, will attend sessions as necessary and meet with director and designer.

The objective of the Birmingham residency is to develop the production style/staging of the show, and to complete a detailed storyline and first (patchy) draft script before departure.

The casting of the play was agreed by everybody, and the three actors will be approached within the next few weeks. The final cast member will be a musician. It may not be Minato san, as originally anticipated, but instead a Japanese musician chosen by Minato san.

Yeon explained that design would consist of “organic/earthy” materials, not industrial materials. It will not be naturalistic design. The design will enable the set to pack up relatively small for international freight. Little to add at this stage.

It was emphasised by all UK members that the design should feel Korean, that Yeon should bring her Korean-ness to the project as designer. Although the location of the story is a city which could be any modern urban place, we should be very sure that the meeting of cultures is very much in evidence in the play, through visuals, music, and stagecraft. UK members are very keen that Korean and Japanese culture are strongly represented in the production. It is important for each partner that we do not end up with a production that is universal in that it could have been produced without the international partners. We do not want a production that looks “Western”.

Yeon’s idea is to devise the set with the actors and to collect objects such as ropes, nets and ladders. She would like these objects to be brought to the school workshops too.

Minato san plans to appoint a Japanese musician to the project who will probably join the company for rehearsals in Korea.

There will be one musician, but all the cast members will be asked to contribute to the soundtrack for the production. Rhythm will play an important part. Minato san would like to hold a full day music workshop with the actors in the first week as early as possible as a skills audit. He will also lead a music workshop for maybe 1 hr a day during the residency.

The writing team will use the school workshops to explore the characters of Norang, Aka and Blue and to generate ideas and feelings of loneliness and alienation.

All partners discussed the idea of creating a digital means for children to exchange their creativity and ideas via a website. In the budget all partners aim to contribute to a budget to pay for this facility. But first we need ideas as to how to do this. A brainstorm by email required. Peter, Mi-Jeong and Nishida san to exchange ideas by end of August.

Birmingham may organise a seminar to run on one day during the performance period themed on intercultural collaboration and using the project as a case study.

Japan will host a symposium for the project if it can be linked to a performance of the show in Tokyo.

We also had a meeting in Okinawa with Professor Dazai, Hisao of Tamagawa University Dept of Performing Arts, attended by Peter, Judy, Professor Young Ai, Choi of Korean National Univeristy of the Arts, and Professor Yuriko Kobayashi of Toyoko Gakuen Women’s College Tokyo. The idea is to create a one day event completely focussed on the project Looking for Yoghurt, inviting interested artists and academics for discussion and members of the Looking for Yoghurt production team to discuss the process.

A Tropical Bonus

2008-07-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

Today the creative team and the producers of Looking for Yoghurt are meeting again. We have been able to do this because most of us are involved in the Kijimuna Festa, the fantastic annual Young Peoples Theatre Festival in Okinawa, Japan.

For Hanyong, it is a double occasion. The Bridge is being presented here for the final time, and as an extraordinary journey comes to an end, the next steps are being taken in the new one.

Okinawa is a unique place - a subtropical island a long way south from the main islands of Japan, with a culture and history apart. Home to 20,000 US soldiers and airpeople, with an economy heavily dependent on their bases, it shares with Korea a past of being tossed between the neighbouring powers of Japan and China, and was actually owned by the states after the war and as loate as the seventies. Okinawa City, where the festival is based is what would be called 'sprawling', a mess of low-rise box buildings, of peeling concrete, constructed flat and thick to withstand the harsh storms that lash the place. It is a weird amalgam - smiling and exuberant south pacific islanders who are supposed to be formal, reserved and japanese. Then while struggling with that paradox they have been hijacked by the seedy commercialism of the US Forces. But it is a mixture which it is hard not to enjoy, in the anomalies it throws up. Certainly it would be really hard not to enjoy being here, with its beautiful weather, turqouise tepid sea water and silver beaches. Not to mention 300 performances by companies from across the world.

So into this context, hosted by one of our producers, Hisashi Shimoyama, the Looking for Yoghurt team has assembled. Judy and I have been here for a week, with Byung Ho. Yeon and Mijeong arrived on Thursday, and Toyoko will arrive tonight, just in time for our main producers meeting. That is at 10.30pm, timetabled to get access to Mr Shimoyama, who is currently the busiest man here, as organiser of this huge festival. Also here is Rachel Kavenaugh, Artistic Director of Birmingham REP, who is getting up to speed with the project, as well as tasting some work and getting some experience of this part of the world.

Yesterday we had a meeting with Mijeong, Judy, Rachel, Yeon and Byung Ho, to re-cap a little and plan for our main writers meeting which will be on Sunday. Mijeong told the story of the play so far, in a typically enticing and skilled way, and I think it made us all feel as if the work we had done in May in Seoul and Tokyo does stand up - the ingredients are all in place. We talked through a few posibilities, and filled Rachel in on where we were and a little of how we got there.

So this get-together is a bonus, an extra oppurtunity to plan, and already the chance to meet again here in the sunshine feels like a really valuable one. It may be that not many major decisions will be made, -at least on the creative side - until we have our workshop time together again in October in Birmingham, but as another step in building our collaboration it is an exciting and very valuable one.

The workshop team in Tokyo

2008-06-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

The title in three languages

2008-06-29T14:46:00.000-07:00

요거트를 찾아라!

「ヨーグルトを探して」

Looking for Yoghurt

An apology and an invitation

2008-06-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Dear readers....I have been moaning that nobody else is contributing to this blog, and have just been informed that one reason may be that nobody else is allowed to! I am sorry to anyone who has been trying very hard but not succeeding. I have now invited some people to add comments...if you are reading this and not invited, please e-mail me at peter@hanyong.co.uk, and I will add you with pleasure to the 'invited authors' list....

Final writer's meeting in Tokyo Saturday 31st May

2008-05-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

The moment of truth.... had we achieved what we wanted during our two weeks...could we pull anything clear from the mass of ideas generated, and had we got a play? We had aimed to have the heart of our play at this point...perhaps the story,. certainly the title...and the ticking clock was in the corner of the Asibina Office, as we sat down for the final three hours of our time together.

Here are the notes from the meeting.....

Notes from writer’s meeting…Saturday 31st May in Tokyo
Key decisions from the two weeks workshop…

The play is set in the near future in a modern city, at and around a major building site, fenced off and hidden from view.

There are three principle characters, all of them children - Norang [Korean], Aka, [Japanese] and Blue [English]
Norang is an innocent, she has been the victim of some bullying, but does not appear a victim. She is afraid of the dark. Her only real friend is a stray cat called Yoghurt.

Blue is guarded, quiet and odd. He believes that in the building site, hidden, he will be safe from monsters. He is uncommunicative [perhaps to an extent autistic?] but determined, and practical.

Aka is adventurous, rebellious, and political. His parents worry about him, because he questions too much, and fantasises…he has dreams. He believes that what is being built behind the fences is wrong. He is not ultimately as brave as he appears.

There is little language, and the convention as the play unfolds is that the actors speak in their own languages but understand each other. There will be enough repetition to enable the play to be performed in the same form in all countries.

The style is physical, with a set which is symbolic . There is a musician, outside the action, providing a live soundtrack to the piece.

Outline of the action of the play…

Norang is looking for Yoghurt. The fence around the building site is hard to get through or over, but she does. She believes Yoghurt must be inside. It is dark, and she is frightened.

She looks for Yoghurt, exploring the site as she does so.

Aka breaks in. They are scared of each other.

They begin to communicate a little.

Norang goes back to looking for Yoghurt. Aka watches without helping.

While she is looking for Yoghurt, Norang finds Blue, hiding…. He has been to the building site before. It is his escape.

Stand off. They cannot communicate… Fear

They take little steps towards each other. Is Aka looking for Yoghurt too? No, he is on a mission, he says… How about Blue? We do not know, but it does not seem to be his first time there.

There is a noise. Blue believes a monster is coming. He is preparing, and thinks the only safe place to be is there, because the monster is coming. The sound must mean it is close.

Aka thinks a machine in the site is a monster, but Blue shows that it is just a machine. Aka’s pride is injured. The monster is invisible. The monster is outside the site. They are safer inside.

Norang is worried that the monster will eat Yoghurt.

Norang is sad….Aka tries to make her feel better. They play a little…

Norang tells her grandmother’s story, of what was on the ground before the building site. The story is the myth of a boy who may have buried something important. She enacts it.

Aka interprets the story as meaning they must dig, to get to another world.

Yoghurt may be in the other world. Norang and Aka want to dig.

Blue has listened to the story. He gets digging equipment. It is his first real acknowledgement of being on the same side.

They dig. They find another world in their fantasy. They imagine what it is like…what would the world be like if we were in charge?

Ultimately, the digging does not work. There is no magic…treasure… They are sad.

They play again. Now they are really making contact.

The game in the middle of the building site gets dangerous. Norang is in trouble. Aka is frightened. Blue saves her.

The monster is heard again. What is it?

Norang looks for Yoghurt again. Both boys join this time.

They hear Yoghurt high on the crane in the centre of the site.

They climb up the crane

At the top, it is dangerous and frightening. But they can see the world. Yoghurt is not there, but the darkness is coming.

Norang says, ‘I am not frightened of the darkness, the darkness is beautiful, I am only afraid of being alone in the darkness….’

So that is where we are after two exhilerating weeks....we will have to see how we feel about it after a passage of time, but right now it feels like a good strong core for our play, and where it has come from is the real excitement. The way the writers have sparked off each other, and the way the actors invented have both been remarkable.

...and we have a title... Looking for Yoghurt, or 요거트를 찾아라! or 「ヨーグルトを探して.

It has been a lonelier process than I expected, writing this blog. I had hoped that there may be a few comments from others involved...so please...whoever you are...feel free.......

Day Five - Friday 30th May Final Workshop in Tokyo

2008-05-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

It seems to have come very fast, but today was the final day of the workshop, although we still have time tomorrow, Saturday, for a crucial meeting of the writers, before the long flight back.

We have narrowed in still further on the story and characters of the play, and more and more each day has come into focus. The day was designed to fill in gaps, and go a little deeper with some of the aspects less explored. Aspects of the setting, the characters, and way the three of them relate...

We started with a monster exercise, creating different creatures with different numbers of ators, culminating in a terrifying fourteen person monster. Then we made a big map of the construction site, and used that map to transform the room. Then the second of two mapping exercises - a map of another world that is reached if you dig deep enough in the ground. An underground sea, a squidgy land, fish darkness, people with an overdeveloped sense of smell, pyramids, ancient places, snakes in mountains, a helicopter-toilet.....

The next part of the day we addressed another issue which has exercised the creative team..the symmetry of the characters, the three nations. We have explored the possibility of characters that in some way stood for our three nations, but this seems not to be the way to go. Then we thought about other groups of three, which in some way may have a symbolic aspect that helps us, the example being stone, paper, scissors, a game shared by all of us. So, in search of symbols which will help our story, now we did a brainstorm of 'magic threes' - red-amber-green, morning-noon-night, red-yellow-blue, etc... Then we took this into a charcater exercise.

Take a threesome, and create a short scene, once again children in a construction site, but now, three characters in some way suggested by the chosen trinity. The resulting scenes drew out some very clear things. The furniture laid out as the site was irresistable for every group, and each improvisation included elements of climbing, digging and jumping in holes, whether as a game or for other purposes.

After lunch we did a group exercise called the laughing snake, where you form a human chain, with heads on tummies, and inevitably this leads to everybody collapsing in a heap of giggles... Then the final session, starting with individual character exercises designed to explore the reasons children may have for being on the site... each actor creating their own character and reason, before getting into groups of three and seeing what happened. Another very fruitful session, with a slightly more serious tone to it - with some thoughts about the mixture of characters and motives for being on the building site, from escaping from abuse, to looking for a pet rabbit.

At the end the producers were all in the room watching, and we set up a run-through of the sort of content around which we had been working. Young Ju, Ian and Yudai, with Tatsuo as the drunken security guard... taken through a kind of version of some of the action we have been discussing. the actors really gave a sense of how much we had achieved.

After we finished, a final exchange of games, and an attempt at another complex Korean dance, and we were all saying goodbye. Or at least beginning to say goodbye, because it was a process that went long into the night, with another wonderful meal and a fair amount of drinking.

In the meantime there was a meeting of the creative team with the producers, at which we were joined by Minato-san the composer, and a long producer's meeting which was both productive and positive. Timetables and ways of working were agreed, and everyone expressed their satisfaction at the start the project has made, and the wonderful reception we have had in these two amazing cities.

Thursday 29th May Day Four in Tokyo

2008-05-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

We started the day with an exercise introducing the idea of animals, through a continuum, animal to human, changing from one to the other, and points in between. The actors are leaping into this kind of exercise now, and the following session was the best of the fortnight so far, with four very powerful pieces of improvisation in groups. They were in response to different stimulus cards, but they shared a new level of intensity. Language is beginning to be less relevant within these - some of the scenes contained two or three languages but without dwelling on misunderstanding, even without misunderstanding at all. Also striking were the repeating patterns of behaviour...the way playfulness is the route children use to overcome fear or difference, the way childs play reflects their view of the adult world.

The next exploration centred around the nature of monsters, real, imagined, metaphorical. Again the work was strong, and the themes are becoming clearer. The concerns of the children in Seoul and here for the world around them mix well with their preoccupation with monsters, whether the monsters are purple with three heads, or a cloud of dark smoke. Also clear was the fun to be had from childrens incomplete understanding of the world, alongside what we know we want to say about their wisdom...

When under threat, all believed that adults would come to save them.... initially at least.

We discussed the relative merits of playing children and animals.. some felt that playing children is to be avoided, all agreed that playing children badly is to be avoided!

After an exhilerating days work in the rehearsal room, we set off for our second workshop with children, in an after school group in Tukerazewa. The japanese actors did not come, with the exception of Tatsuo, but there were more adults involved with the group, and is was different in feel from the school session. The ages were more mixed [from maybe about 7-12] but the atmosphere was very positive, and once again any shyness they felt was certainly quickly got over. Their ideas of monsters were certainly inventive - the vegetable monster created from all those vegetables left uneaten by children, and the giant cucumber, which were defeated by dressing and by salt respectively.

After the session we had a wonderful evening at Toyoko's house, with a succession of delicious courses of food, prepared by her, and enjoyed long and loudly by all of us. The highlight of the evening, apart from the food, was the sight of Byung Ho our tireless Korean producer, getting his head around the task of doing that thing where your two index fingers back each other and rock back and forwards as if one..... I am sure you know what I mean. There is a real sense of family across the group now.

Wednesday 28th May - Day Three

2008-05-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

We sneaked in an early writers meeting this morning, slightly concerned that we have not got enough time together in between the workshop sessions, particulalrly with the two schools sessions coming up.

We decided to switch over to small group work with the actors today, and created some stimulus cards for improvisations. First we decided to set up some discussion of difference between our three nations, still exploring the idea of our story as an allegory of the relationships between those countries. Then we would go quickly through improvisation from the stimulus cards, which we created to explore some of the areas that were repeating, and coming into closer focus - the idea of being lost, being in forbidden territory, child solution to extreme situations, or to being in positions of responsibility, and the means children find of dealing with difference.

The session was really good, particularly when we got on to the cards. The assessment of difference was fairly superficial in some ways, dwelling on difference of cultural habit more than anything else. The group is much better at improvisisng situations and characters than concepts. Also, we have done so much improvising as children, that we need to discuss whether this is where we will end up, or will we find a shift in setting, away from children as the protagonists?

Then in the afternoon we set off to Daizawa Elementary School in Setagaya, for the workshop there. After some discussion it was decided that everyone should go, because we were going to have a large groupo of children, and we should work in three separate spaces. When we arrived, the spaces turned out not to be available, so we were all together in one large group, but it worked out very well. The workshop with the children was strikingly similar to those in Korea, ina way. Certainly if we had expected them to be more reticent, we need not have worried. They were perhaps a little less physical, but once the first stand-off was past, the differences were minimal. The main content was an exploration of monsters, which are becoming a strong theme in the work now. The children's monsters were pretty literal ones.

We played a greeting game that worked well. Say hello in one of our three languages, if the person you say hello to uses the same language, you join them in a chain, and move on. Each time you choose the same language, the chains join, until the group is one big chain....

After this the group went into smaller groups with the adult actors, and they created their monsters. Some impressive creatures too.

After the session we had a long and fruitful writers session in a dark jazz cafe in this studenty, bohemian part of town. The story is being closed down on, and the level of agreement within the writing team is strong still. We are not sure whether there will be some shift into a parallel or allegorical setting, and we want to expore some of that further.

Tokyo Day Two

2008-05-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

Good solid day again, with the group really beginning to gel together. The writer's meeting in the morning reflected on the first day in Tokyo and narrowed down on some areas to explore, also discussing how we would divide up activities, and run sessions. We also had to discuss the two workshops with children, which needed a different approach again from the ones in Seoul. We are going to have one each tomorrow and on Thursday which will leave us a solid devising day on Friday, before the producers meetings then, and our big writers meeting on Saturday morning.

In the practical session in the afternoon, we set up two big group improvisations, building on the 'construction site' improvisation which had worked so well in Seoul. They did a big improvisation on a building site again,and then another about children sneaking onto a wrecked ship, which then gets washed out to sea again. Both of these long sessions were very strong, with the japanese actors opening up visibly, perhaps drawn out by the energy of the group who have come from Seoul.

Toyoko was concerned about the office underneath the rehearsal room, which is in an old converted elementary school, with the stampede of all the actors playing as kids on the shipwreck, but we seemed to get away with it.

Mijeong improvised a story of what had been on the building site before, in role as a grandmother, and this was the most electric session of the workshop so far. They followed it up with a long passage, digging for the secret that would save them...

We had to finish exactly on time - to be clear by 5.30 - a clear little cultural difference here. 5.30 meant 5.30 exactly.

Tokyo Workshop Day One

2008-05-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

Slightly nervous feel this aftrenoon, as the nine new actors assemble in the workshop venue - a converted elementary school in West Shinjuku.

We had a good writer's meeting in the morning, finally having straightforward Japanese to English translation, which gave us the chance to get into more detail about the way we are all thinking. There is a growing consensus around some aspects of the play. The feeling seems to be that our story may be set in some near future, perhaps in a generic urban future which allows us to show a world which is in some way broken. Again the discussion came back round to the image of the construction site...the appeal is growing after the exercise in Seoul, and it seems to have certain qualities to it....the feeling that there was something there before it was a building site [maybe a grandmother has told stories of what was there], the fact that it is the future that is being constructed there on top of the past, the fact that both digging and constructing are fundamental child activities, the metal creatures involved in construction, and the literal fact that the site is fenced and blocked from view, a dangerous forbidden and secret place from the point of view of children......

In Japan, if you dig deep you will emerge in Brazil, rather than Australia, by the way!

We also talked about the way children's play had emerged in Seoul as such an important part of the 'wisdom' which we were exploring...making games from problems, lateral thinking to solve those problems, playing to establish relationships, and to overcome communication problems... It seems certain that this will form a part of the play.

Time ran out on our meeting, and the actors arrived. There is a nice mixture of gender and age, with most of the actors part of Toyoko's Asibina company, except for Keiko who is an actor currently studying in the UK. We did a long repeat of our introductory signing in exercise, a fascinating lesson in the culture of Japan and Korea in itself, with each of us writing our name, and giving an account of it. The shared use of Chinese characters for names gave common ground to the Korean and Japanese actors, and the thinking and meaning behind names spoke eloquently about aspects of the different cultures. New to me was the story of the missing letters, characters banned by the government in a drive to simplify Japanese writing, which left people with forbidden letters in their names....

After the lengthy introductions, the group got to its feet and we began to see the creative energy that will drive this week. We repeated versions of the North South East and West exercise that we had done in school, and then another exchange of games from the three countries. Pig Sumo, where you shuffle on your bum and attempt to knock everyone else over, and Shoving the Sweet, another game involving bottoms and pushing..... We finished with short wordless scenes of childhood experiences, and the range of ideas, the approach and the energy all bode well for the week. There was a moving account of a boy's struggle to brave crossing a river on a water-pipe; the other boy driven to climbing to the second floor to get to watch TV, so that he could talk about the programmes with his friends; the child who was afraid of the steeplechase jump, but got over it when it finally came to the race, and the others who stole the name poles from the cemetery and were taken by their mum to see the monk in shame.....

The pattern for tomorrow is the same, with the writers meeting in the morning, and the race is on to get as much as we can in place during our crucial week here.

It's Sunday, it must be Tokyo

2008-05-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Another week, another city, another beginning for our project.

The group moving on from Seoul comprises Ali and Ian, the two english actors;Tatsuo the japanese actor;Young Ju and Sang Hun from among the Koreans;Yeon the designer;Mijeong and Toyoko and I the writers. Having been through a very concentrated and exciting week in Seoul there is a real sense of family. We had seperate flights to Tokyo, arriving at different airports, and only meeting up at Shinjuku Station - the biggest station in the world, apparently, in the centre of Tokyo. When we met up, at about ten at night, there were hugs and screams as if we were long lost brothers and sisters..... the mood is very high indeed, and the effect of all going 'away' together looks likely to be really good.

On Sunday we had a day to get used to this extraordinary place. The place we are staying is called Asagaya, and seems really nice, full of neat little streets of tiny shops and bars. When we arrived, on Saturday evening, after a sushi picnic in my room, given to us on arrival by Toyoko, we found the nearest bar, which turned out to be owned by a man from Okinawa. Before long, Young Ju had pulled a musical instrument off the wall, and persuaded some men there to give us a taste of Okinawan culture....

But, back to Sunday. We had a meal of sausages, bacons, noodles and burgers, and then went to a concert which Toyoko had directed, a huge traditional style musical, in a vast concert hall. Then we had time to visit a shrine, and take in some of the atmosphere of Shinjuku, before another great meal, this time more traditionally Japanese, hosted by Mr Shimoyama, who flies off to Okinawa tomorrow, but will be back on Friday. Ohiro Minato, who is our composer, joined the group for the meal, and we also met Takyo, who will be our translator all week, and Hiroko, who will join her for part of the time. Tomorrow, we will be joined by nine more Japanese actors, and the serious work will resume....

Friday - Final day of workshop in Seoul

2008-05-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

Another full session, with a great dance at the beginning, and a joyous concert at the end.

We began today with an exchange of games from our three countries, and the result was such a pleasure to watch it felt almost as if we could just polish that exchange up a little, and perform it! That would save us a lot of time and effort over the next few months. To me, Korea won...the level of commitment to children's games is so total..but this is not a competition..obviously.

We did a long and complex group improvisation after that, free-flowing and in the darkness. Children together at night forming relationships..playing status games, frightened and vying for friendship. At times thrilling, and some clear pointers for the shape at least of our story.

After that a round of on-the-spot impros, without words, and then again with sounds...the group is relaxed now, and the discussions after exercises are more animated and going deeper. It seems premature to be finishing this leg, but so much is up in the air now, and there is a sense of achievement in the things that have been generated. The majority of the people in the room are moving on to Tokyo, and the thought is an exciting one.

Young Ju played the gayagum, and Pom I drummed and sang, and we finished with a wild attempt at dancing, and chasing the dragon's tail. Another big meal, and the preparation for the circus to leave town.

Tomorrow is another country.....

Seoul Day Three

2008-05-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

Details to follow...but another good day, with the team beginning to gel nicely, and benefit from the range of people involved. The single working session was fast and furious, with a huge number of ideas generated...

we began with feeding back some of the ideas that actors had brought...set the task of images, stories or ideas of children put in positions of responsibility...for example....

Children are lost in a mountain, one needs a shit, and they get separated from the group...the try to find their way down, without success. Then a girl has the idea of going up insted, so they can see the way to go.....

Children are playing...they are in the kitchen, making a meal of bibimbap. The rain falls and there is a flood. They turn the flood into a game...

Friendship is so important....

The wangtta - the scapegoat...

Language complicates...sounds give focus.....

There is so little time to do justice to this rich process in writing in the bits of time available......

Day Two Wednesday

2008-05-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

Today's school workshop was in quite a different school from yesterday's - a public elementary school, with a group of ten year olds. The space was bigger too, and the session extremely focused and rich. We repeated some of the exerises from Tuesday, and then added an extra activity which went a little deeper..a role-play where groups booked their passage on a space ship to a new world, in exchange for their plans of how to run it..

The school sessions have been the perfect way to begin, with the actors plunged into their world, and dealing straight away with the issues of language in the straightforward way that the children do. In terms of content the striking thing is so often the similarity with children in England, rather than the difference. This group had the same preoccupations to a large extent, as with workshops around the subject in Birmingham. There was some difference in the way the group collected brooms and swept the hall at the end of the session, though!

In the afternoon, back at base, we fed back on responses to the schools work, and then had our first concentrated session creating ideas...exciting and sparky and fascinating - we seem to have a good mixture in our team, and the atmosphere is noticably easy and fertile already.

The writer's meeting went long into the evening, and we already have a feeling that the time here is short. There are some frustrations with the two step translation English-Korean, Korean -Japanese etc, and we have been discussing our translation methods in Japan. This is felt much more acutely in the writers discussions, however, in the rehearsal room there is a clear pattern already of the most exciting moments being least involved with words in any language...

Seoul Workshop Day One - Monday

2008-05-20T06:07:00.001-07:00

Finally underway. The writer's meeting was a little frustrating yesterday, with much of it taking place without translation, but it was nevertheless a good feeling to be together.

Then this morning we went to Joyful Theatre's base in Taereung, and everybody who will be involved in the week here met up. Choi Seung Yeon [Yeon Choi] , who is the designer and chief english-korean translator, flew in just today from Adelaide, and all of the actors assembled. There are five who have graduated from KNUA, three from Joyful Theatre, plus one from Japan, Tatsuo, and the two from the UK, Ian and Ali. Several combinations of the group have met before, but many have not.

We had a gentle but encouraging introduction session, and then together we went across to an elementary school, where Mijeong led a workshop with a lively group of 8 year olds. It went well, focusing on the kinds of issue the school groups had raised in December, and encompassing quite a range of activities.

The school was not typical, in that it had a strong focus on english language, and this was strangely a slight barrier, because the desire to practise english sometimes dominated at the expense of what we were exploring. But once beyond that, many things that the children came out with were fascinating. The stand-out section was where they expressed their anxieties about the world, with strong images such as the idea of the half-earth [like a half-moon, with half of the globe consumed by darkness] and rainbows, shadows, decay....

At one point they were doing an exercise where they had to go to yes or no ends of the room in response to questions. One question was, 'Are you afraid of the dark. One girl was at the yes end, and then ran across. Asked why, she thought a little and then said, 'Iam not afraid of the dark - the dark is beautiful, with stars in the sky...I am just afraid of being alone in the dark'

The children were extremely tactile and physical, notably with Ian and Sang Hun, whom they climbed all over.

There was a full video and some audio recorded, and a full writer's meeting after the session to decide the plan for tomorrow.

Safe in Seoul

2008-05-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

In a few minutes we will start the creative process of the week. I arrived safe in Seoul on Saturday, The UK actors -Ali and Ian - arrived on Sunday afternoon, and late last night Toyoko Nishida, the Japanese writer arrived as well. The writing team is meeting at 3.00. It seems to have taken a very long time to get to this moment...I can't wait now...expect the blog to start buzzing.

On a plane back to Seoul...

2008-05-18T17:50:00.000-07:00

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…..