A Tropical Bonus

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.