Thanks to everyone who has joined the 'What Shows Where Debate' (see forums section). It's great to get your ideas, opinions and creative suggestions. We had a very productive away day with the board on Tuesday, looking at the 30 possible projects we have in the mix at the moment, and starting to get a sense of the overall shape of the year's work, if not of individual programming decisions. Lucy and I will be doing a lot of work over the next two months to hammer this input and all your thoughts into a killer first year of shows. Meanwhile, I'm trying to catch up on my reading - looking at examples of work by a range of Welsh writers - playwrights, poets and novelists. We will not only be commissioning plays and adaptations for next year, but also inviting writers to work with physical and site specific theatre companies, so there's a lot of different writing talent needed.
Everything has been a bit delayed this weekend though. I was in London for meetings, smugly enjoying good weather as news of Cardiff storms reached me. I got my comeuppance when I arrived home though as my apartment had been badly flooded - so much of Sunday has been taken up with buckets and mops and desperately trying to dry out some irreplaceable art and albums that have borne the worst of the damage. Moments like this remind you how important the personalised, hand-touched objects in life are, and how very replaceable much of the other stuff is. So, in a nutshell, my excuse for everything next week will be water damage - don't say you weren't warned.
While in London I led a workshop on solo performance for the Storm project - a collaboration between Lyric Hammersmith, Graeae (the disability-led theatre company) and Push (the initiative for new black theatre founded by Josette Bushell-Mingo). The week-long project looked like it was a big success, with 40 artists from very diverse backgrounds working together for the week and taking part in workshops run by people including Emma Rice of Kneehigh, David Farr of the RSC, and Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly and many others. The initiative was set up because the organisers felt that there were too few culturally diverse practitioners in the physical and visual theatre worlds, and that a really focused initiative was needed to turn this around. Similarly, for several years, Contact, the theatre I used to run in Manchester, collaborated with Nitro and Tara theatres to run a project called Live and Direct, which focussed on the development of black and Asian directors, at a time when there was an increasing diversity of actors and writers, but not of directors.
So - I have another question. Do we need a more culturally diverse theatre in Wales. And if so, can it be achieved by focused initiatives like Storm or Live and Direct?
Okay, back to the mopping
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