Final writer's meeting in Tokyo Saturday 31st May

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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…..