Four Writers, Four Cities: Collaborative Writing for Performance
BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk is a collaborative project between four playwrights - David Lindemann (Berlin), Andrei Kureichyk (Minsk), Charles Mulekwa (Kampala) and Gabriel Gbadamosi (London) – to develop and write a play for production in four cities which draws on shared research and experience of our different performance cultures and contexts. The project emerged from The Fence, a network of European playwrights established in 2003 and developed through a series of twice-yearly meetings and exchanges at theatre festivals and events across Europe. Curated by writernet, of which I was Chair, the network has instigated a series of international collaborations aimed at remodelling writer/translator exchanges and exploring both common ground and structural differences in rethinking the role of the playwright in our culturally diverse societies.
The objective of BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk is to rethink our cultural diversity in terms of cultural mobility: to facilitate the playwrights in working internationally; to foster the relationships between the playwrights so as to enable closer forms of collaboration in relation to writing, translation and production; and to explore both the multi-cultural and international contexts in which we work with the aim of finding innovative solutions and approaches to collaboratively writing within and across cultures. Our method is to visit each of our four cities in turn with our domestic ‘host’ guiding the research by disclosing how existing performance practice is embedded in the context of the ‘city’ and also asking what strategies they themselves use to make work in that context. All four writers generate material for the performance by writing pieces of work in response to each of the four cities, while making adjustments to our working methods through discussion, practice and critical reflection.
Presentation of ‘BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk: Four Writers, Four Cities’ 5-7pm, Friday, 5 June, Goldsmith, University of London
As a result of an informal conversation in 2005, four playwrights have embarked on a journey together to write a play or performance piece, discovering each other’s cultures and approaches to theatre along the way. They meet in each other’s cities, talk to leading theatre makers there and explore why and how each playwright writes for performance.
‘The play’s the thing’ – but the practical question of how four established playwrights from different cultures work together puts into perspective a wider set of questions about intercultural dialogue: Why attempt it? What have they discovered? About themselves as well as the others? What connects them across their differences? And what sort of production will this literally cosmopolitan play become?
On Friday 5th June, the Harold Pinter Centre will be hosting an opportunity to find out what has been achieved so far and about the personal and practical challenges involved. Two of the playwrights, David Lindemann (winner of the Stückemarkt, Berlin Theatertreffen) and Gabriel Gbadamosi (the Pinter Centre’s AHRC Creative Fellow) together with dramaturg/administrator Terry Ezra will be talking about and reading fragments of the playwrights’ work, illustrated by video footage and photographs.
Afterwards there will be the opportunity to talk to the playwrights directly. If you would like to attend this event or to be kept up to date with developments in the project, please email terryezra@hotmail.com.
See video recordings of the discussion and the trailer for BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk: FourWriters/FourCities.
Two Reflections on the Process of Collaborative Writing for Performance:
BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk - FourWriters/FourCities, 5 June 2009 , Goldsmiths
Gabriel Gbadamosi: What Are We Doing Here?
Four writers, four cities, one play. In the course of this project, three children have been born: Gleb, Iola and Caspar.
We’re cooking: This is slow food.
We’ve been in London, then Minsk, and last in Berlin. Gleb was ill after a visit to Cuba so Andrei took part in video conferencing on the Berlin leg.
Kampala is to come.
What are we doing? Getting to know each other. How we think. Working out what it’s like for the other writers operating in their own cities. Putting ourselves in each other’s shoes. Learning.
If nothing else, learning.
On the London leg, among other things, I took the writers to a dress rehearsal of Richard III at the RSC, supper with the literary manager – and Shakespeare’s grave: English theatre is dead. And yet, it lives.
I took them to a Bronze Age burial tomb, the enormous shape of a fish, on the hills in the centre of England above Winchcombe. There’s even a hollowed out chamber to sit in on a visit, 4000 years later. Those people came by sea; they’re still on the move in the belly of the whale; where are they going?
Trying to give the other writers my sense of place, the place in which I happen to have been born, works best by showing them its art, its age, its strangeness. Land art – henges, barrows, churches – has this to tell us: take your time, take the space.
David feels dead and buried before we start…
What’s it like when we come to write? At first, like horses shying at fences. Pull back and go again. Each of us writes in response to place, people, and circulates the text for the next person to revise as dramaturg. Very sensible, but there’s something else at work: like two positive or two negative poles of a magnet brought together…
There’s resistance… and, by turns, compulsion. We’re compelled by the holy grail of the project – to produce a play which could represent a meeting of minds, an overview of our encounters with other cultures, cities, peoples.
What will it be? A conspiracy of writers? A merging of minds? A polyphony of voices? A clash of styles? A convergence of compromise? Do we have to be bound by dependence on our own cultures and languages, or can we break out? Become and create something else?
We throw it out to the people we meet… What should we be thinking about for our project?
In Minsk, we meet University students, ranged in their packed classroom… eager for any connection to something outside. ‘Germany ? London ? Africa ? Yes! And please, tell us, what is the same and what is different?’
Sameness and difference… Is that what connects us? Our differences are visible, outward, occasionally a little edgy; how are we the same?
I have an edgy conversation with Andrei: when he dies, and dies young, he says, he wants to have written and left behind a library of books. I point out that Charles, too, thinks he’ll die young but he’s older and running out of time. And anyway I question the wisdom of spending your life building a mausoleum. He says he doesn’t want the writing you can find in newspapers, his writing is about the soul.
Charles launches an internal email coup: I as the instigator of the project have to do some leading… Everyone is ready to write, how should we start?
We’re on the scent of something, like greyhounds. Perhaps we should be a bit competitive? My scene, your scene, his scene… And why, by the way, are we all blokes?
That’s my fault. I asked people whose minds intrigued me, who were different from me, thinking only of our geographical and cultural distribution: one African, two European, one Irish-Nigerian; everybody spoke English; each coming from a strong theatre culture… Women might have cut through a lot of the bullshit.
But maybe there’s a parallel project, of four women writers? Or one where gender is not an issue? Or it is the issue, and men and woman confront it? Is our project about men? Is that how we’re the same?
I decide we’re a travelling circus. Our mobility as artists and writers is a rationale for me of the project. Our theme is ceaseless, restless movement. How to bring the diversity of our acts to bear on writing to our increasingly, technologically globalised society?
Even in mono-cultural Minsk, two languages – Russian and Belarusian – secretly vie for space… The title of one of David’s plays is Kuala Lumpur, it’s in German, I can’t read it. Charles, who I met in Kampala, is at University in the States… I am an Irish Nigerian Englishman born into the cultural diversity of South London.
Ours is an Odyssey… Our protagonist is Odysseus. I ask everyone to take an episode to reflect on our own cities.
Andrei takes Circe and is writing about love – because he argues that Belarusians have an emotional problem; they make even political choices on the basis of their emotions and not reason.
Charles takes The Slaying of the Suitors – after five years in the US, a new generation of Ugandan writers have taken his place. How does an African émigré return home after being away in America? Charles doesn’t accept this thesis and won’t yet reveal what he intends.
I take Cyclops – not because our prime minister has one eye, but because we as a country in the midst of financial and political crisis are fearful and can’t see what’s coming around the corner; fear can blind you.
David s writing The Sirens – and not just because as a German your hands are tied and you can’t react whatever you feel to the Israeli bombing of Gaza. How can a new generation of Germans, emerging from the division of their own country, face the world without feeling strapped to the mast of Germany’s history?
It’s slow work… We’re on a journey. Wherever it’s taking us, can that still be described as home?
And what does this performance look like? If it doesn’t belong to any one place, can it capture the belonging to movement?
David Lindemann: We Are Not All Going To Arrive At The Same Point
Gabriel said: this is slow food. Yes it is.
But food, the culture of food, has different levels.
One thing is to buy the ingredients, find a good recipe or invent something new, but in any case to follow the basic rules of cooking. In the end you may have a proper meal, be it English, African, Belarusian or German. You will find somebody who likes this in each of the places. Like a well made play: it will find its audience somewhere. But the significance of a well made play is limited.
This is not what we are doing, and besides the fact that our meal is cross-kitchen we have to keep in mind that the culture of food contains more than cooking and eating. It’s always about meaning. Every culture is about meaning and the constant production of meaning.
I remember us visiting a Nigerian restaurant in London.
Eating with fingers, spicy food.
A man in a black suit sits next to us. He is, as Gabriel tells us later, from Nigeria, and this obviously is his lunch break. He tells Gabriel in Nigerian language [pidgin] that we are doing it good: he means eating.
Who is he to judge what we are doing?
Why does he not say: nice shirt? Or: You have to wear a black suit like mine in this restaurant, or: Interesting subject, what you are talking about?
This restaurant is Nigerian ground, like an embassy, and Gabriel has to take over the role of the diplomat. He is translating. And he is pleased, seems to be.
The man in the black suit works like an audience.
You cannot know what impression the audience has.
What meaning do you produce by adopting a cultural practice which is not yours?
How to find a common language to put the difference into words?
To say, this food is spicy, or, this food is hot, may not mean anything in a culture of food in which everything is hot.
Like in theatre: this is a political play, a philosophical play, discursive or whatever each person imagines. To say, a play written by Andrei is about the Russian soul, doesn’t mean anything: every Russian play is about the Russian soul, according to him.
We talk about different things even if we think we talk about the same thing.
That is an outcome of our project. We are working on the impossible. We are not all going to arrive at the same point but somehow cross each other in the dark.
This is our task, to make the most out of this situation.
Not to write the most meaningful play, because we cannot control meaning.
Our diversity is our significance.
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