Artistic Director Michael Walling in conversation with Mahesh Dattani

Tell us something about Border Crossings. How did it come about?

In some ways, Mahesh, I think it's down to you. Richard Cave and I had been thinking for a while about setting up a new company when I came to Bangalore, and we did that production of The Tempest together. Richard and I had been feeling very unsatisfied with the conventional approach to theatre in Britain, even with the conventionally unconventional approach, if you see what I mean. We were looking for ways to break down the barriers between the arts, to incorporate video, dance and music into theatre in a way which was really organic, not just stuck on the side.

Which does happen in a lot of your shows......

Yes, sure. What I learned in India, though, was why it felt so important to do this. For a start, I learnt about the South Asian theatre, which is every bit as much a theatre of dance and music and puppetry and design as it is one of "acting", and that was a big revelation to me. It made me realise how much the naturalism which I had been feeling so uneasy with was a style moulded by a culture, rather than some particularly truthful form of acting, which is how people in the west still tend to view it.......

It's naturalism, but that doesn't mean it's nature. It's a style like any other.

Exactly. And a style which has become so much a part of the western psyche that it no longer allows for a radical vision. If you're somehow uncomfortable with Western society, which I undoubtedly am, then you can't really express that in an entirely naturalistic form any more. And this was the other thing I learnt in India - that societies from outside the West have so much to teach us. Not just about art, but about ways of life, ways of being. So I became interested in exploring the ways in which theatre forms from traditions other than the Western could illuminate and criticise Western forms, both in the theatre and social structures.

So the company crosses the borders between cultures as well as the borders between art forms?

And discovers in the process that they are in a way the same borders. In the Indian theatre, if you talk about acting, you're talking about dance. In the African theatre, you're talking about music and storytelling. It's the exclusivity of the Western forms that we're trying to overcome, and with that the exclusivity which is currently present in the Western psyche.

You don't think much of the West, do you?

I'm pretty disillusioned, I suppose, but also optimistic in that sort of schizophrenic way which only artists can pull off! I find our society today mindless and brutal - the total blindness to the suffering which capitalism is creating in non-Western countries; its destructiveness in spiritual, cultural and environmental terms; the arms trade; the political apathy; government by advertisement; the reduction of everything, even our most intimate emotions, to the status of a commodity.........

All that's present in India as well, you know!

Oh, absolutely - I'm not claiming any monopoly on corruption! Because of our shared colonial heritage, we've now got a global economy and we're coming quite close to a global culture, if culture one can call it - and I suppose in searching for forms that question and expose that, globally, we're fighting a sort of rearguard action against all that mindless blandness.

So where does the optimism come in?

From the great human energy which you constantly encounter when you work in the theatre, whether that's from the artists or from the audiences we meet. Young audiences especially I find incredibly exciting. People always say the theatre is a dying form, and I think that's total nonsense. It's what people said about painting when photography came along, that it would die, but in fact because photography took over the nitty gritty job of just recording things, painting was freed up to explore the world in other, less literal but deeper ways - which goes back to what we were saying about naturalism. We've got our naturalistic media in film and TV - but those are both very passive media, and what people seem to be more and more excited about now are not passive media but interactive media. And that feels to me like a great opportunity for the theatre. But it's a challenge at the same time. Young audiences, and audiences from communities outside the white middle-class, are often put off by the theatre's reputation for stuffiness, which is why it's so important that companies like Border Crossings have really extensive education and outreach programmes, which allow people to experience theatre as an active medium. They're active as an audience, of course, but for people who are used to recorded media it's often quite a big imaginative leap to understand how they can have an active dialogue with the stage, and I think workshops can often lead people down that way of thinking, which is a very empowering thing.

Isn't that a bit dismissive of film?

I love film as a medium, and, as you know, we use a lot of video in our work. But I do feel that theatre makes a mistake when it plays poor cousin to film and tries to do all the things which film can do better.

Like?

Like people eating real food, or battling their way through real floods made with real water, or looking like they're really being shot to bits by a machine gun or something. But what is great about film for us as theatre professionals is that it's taught the audience a whole shorthand of dramatic language which wasn't there before. Jump cuts, flashbacks. You can use them on stage now, and people get it. I suppose in a way this is to do with the old issue of theatrical magic: what's magic in the theatre isn't trickery - it isn't "How do they do that?" The theatre is full of what Prospero calls "rough magic", a magic in which the audience have to invest their own imaginations or else it doesn't work, a collusion in the alchemy of transforming something into something else, say an actor into a god. I suppose that's one reason we use video in our work, because people do know how it's done, because they understand video, have it in their front rooms. The strings should show.

When we use video on stage, it actually becomes a really anti-naturalistic thing. Part of that is because the video artist who works with the company regularly, David Wheeler, uses video as a way of creating montages of imagery, rather than just filming straightforward stories, which wouldn't work next to live action anyway. He creates meaning by juxtaposing images in frequently astonishing ways, so the mind of the spectator creates a link. And there's an additional montage in placing the video images next to the actors and to music. Again, it's a very empowering thing for an audience - they have a whole load of things to take in all at once, and they make their own links between them, draw their own conclusions.

We've been talking a bit about audiences. I'd like to think about the way in which the group has crossed borders with productions outside the UK. Do you think it has helped audiences cross borders?

Well that's certainly the aim, and I like to think we've had some success, yes.

Any anecdotes you could share with us?

The production which toured most extensively was Twelfth Night, which - thanks to some really exciting people at the British Council - visited Mauritius, the Seychelles and Zimbabwe, as well as touring to quite a wide variety of places in Britain. We were part of the Leicester Haymarket's Asian Theatre Programme, for example. It felt really important that we should encourage the play to engage in a cultural dialogue with those varied audiences - particularly since we were in a way the sponsored representatives of British theatre in those countries for that time. And, of course, all of the places we visited are themselves multi-cultural spaces: Mauritius is a society where everybody is from immigrant stock, a real ethnic cocktail, with lots of South Asians, lots of Africans, quite a few East Asians and some Europeans too! Zimbabwe is still struggling its way through the aftermath of its colonial past; and Leicester is full of Gujeratis, including some of your own family, Mahesh! The first line which Shakespeare gives to his central character, Viola, is "What country, friends, is this?" We exploited the never-land quality of this Illyria to encompass the African-ness and Asian-ness of the audiences we were approaching. This was partly a question of casting a mixture of black, Asian and white actors; but, more importantly, it was to do with approaching this classic "British" text through the medium of the theatre cultures we would be addressing. Rehearsals began with workshops on movement and performance styles, which were led by artists from India and Japan. Our composer was a Mauritian; Eric Appapoulay, and he worked with the actors to find a musical world which approached the play's mystery and melancholy through a culturally broad range of styles.

What was wonderfully liberating about this process was that, by leaving naturalism so far behind, we began to find a way back towards some things which are planted in the text but with which the current western tradition does not normally allow us to engage. Like the whole question of gender. In the Eastern theatre, it's absolutely usual for men to perform as women and women as men. So, by working through these styles, we were able to use the same young male actor to play both Viola and Sebastian, creating a gender ambiguity which allowed the characters of the twins to wreak comic havoc wherever they went. The anarchy of this was emphasised by Feste being a sort of Asian Eddie Izzard - a drag artist who moves between genders with the same ease that he moves between Olivia's and Orsino's houses, and who alone sees through Viola's disguise. Of course, in Shakespeare's own theatre, the female parts were played by boys - and Shakespeare was far too skilled an artist not to exploit the conventions of the theatre in which he worked to create meaning. So by looking at the play through the eyes of non-Western cultures, we actually found a way of unleashing something present in the text which you wouldn't otherwise see. Most plays are in some way about identity, because acting is really a means of exploring who we are. In our Twelfth Night, we were probing into identity in terms of culture, race, class, gender and sexuality.

Now, in Mauritius, people were really surprised just to see such a varied group of people on the stage together. Dev Virahsawmy wrote a complete new play in response to the show: it's a musical about gender politics in Mauritian culture (amongst other things), which he called Sir Toby. I had one particularly inspiring letter thanking me for casting Vivienne Rochester as Olivia, because the black population in Mauritius tend to be the most economically disadvantaged group, and this Countess was a real role model for them, even if she was a rather dippy one! When we toured the show to Zimbabwe, I wanted to develop this still further, and cast Wil Johnson, who is black, as the Count Orsino. This meant losing the Asian Feste - Peter Kenny took the role over, and the whole audience gasped when he accepted Orsino's orders. It was also the time when Mugabe was starting his crusade against homosexuality, calling it "unAfrican", whatever that's supposed to mean. So the production's exploration of gender identity acquired more resonance there, particularly since Wil's performance made it very clear just how desparately Orsino falls in love with Cesario (or Viola, if you want). Because the actor playing Viola was male, the audience couldn't get off the hook by pretending that the same African warlord who had inspired them by ordering Feste around was a heterosexual having a confusing experience! Orsino, Olivia and Antonio were all seen as desiring basically the same person: this anarchic blank onto whom they could project their own emerging identities.

And did the audience accept this?

People came hundreds of miles to see the show. Literally. In the Amakhosi auditorium in Bulawayo, there were people who had come two hundred miles to watch it. And in Mbare, which is a very poor township, people were rioting because they couldn't get in. Identity really matters when a culture is changing quickly, and so theatre matters. Becomes a really basic human need.

Do you often change your productions like this, to suit particular audiences?

Always. It's almost a company hallmark, really. I also think it's quite basic to the form of theatre, or to theatre as it ought to be. Because a theatre production is never really finished in the way that a painting or a novel or a film can be finished: it only really exists in the moment of performance, which by its nature is ephemeral. So it's bound to change, and I think we should make a virtue of that, rather than being scared by it. We've got a culture which privileges the written word more and more, even through things like the internet, where you're supposed to be able to have "conversations" like this one, which are actually written. Because the theatre deals with the spoken (or sung) word and the kinetic body, it is a really fluid form, and that's one of the reasons why it's so necessary at a time when so many aspects of culture are so frozen, so commodified. It goes back to what we were saying earlier about empowering the audience, having a dilaogue with them. The work changes every time, even if it's just that one audience finds funny what another one did not.

A lot of what we do is about translation. Sometimes this is translation from one language to another, like when we did Toufann. More often the process is a more subtle one of cultural translation. You and I spent ages working on the script of Bravely Fought the Queen before we did it in Britain. Now, to some people, that would seem odd because the play was already a proven success; it had done really well in India, and it was in print there. But we found that many points which, when you wrote for Indian actors, were made explicitly in the text, could be rendered through the subtext by Western actors with Stanislavski-based training. So here was a case of Western styles informing Asian work.

This sort of process becomes most marked in the company-devised work, like Mappa Mundi. At the moment [December 2000] we're at a stage when the piece has had periods of development and writing, and has been performed in one version in ten or so different theatres. You could say that we've made our product. But what we're actually doing now is going back to it, in the light of the audience response and the actors' own feelings about the piece, and re-working it really extensively. So, when people see Mappa Mundi next year, they will see something very different from what they saw this year. Some of the scenes will be the same, but they will be in a different order, and there will be a huge shift of emphasis in the central storyline. It's quite a pragmatic thing - it's to do with seeing the opportunity to do something exciting. I'm keen to tour the piece overseas, and, when we do, I want to do some workshops with local people to extend and develop some of the stories, to bring the play really close to that audience. It's a bit like archeology: you keep digging, and discovering layer upon layer of buried life, and each layer is somehow a response to the one before it.

Mappa Mundi is probably your most multicultural work so far, isn't it?

I suppose it is. Actually, I tend to call it "intercultural" rather than "multicultural".

Why?

I'm a bit suspicious of multiculturalism. It can be a form of oppression through ghettoisation. I feel very wary when any form of art gets put into little boxes: you know, "gay plays", "Asian plays", "plays for and by disabled people". Not because there is anything wrong with theatre giving representation and voice to these minority groups - quite the opposite. But I do think sometimes the powers that be deliberately encourage work which can readily be labelled in that way in order to make themselves feel they have served those communities in some way, and also (subconsciously perhaps) to keep those communities neatly marginalised by those very labellings, to keep them out of the mainstream. And that just isn't a faithful representation of the way people live nowadays. We don't live multiculturally, in lots of different little cultural ghettos side by side like a row of terraced houses: we live interculturally, we're in and out of each other's kitchens all the time. So I'm interested in work which reflects that experience, the feeling of being alive in a world which is shrinking really really quickly, of being exposed to people who are different from you, rather than simply affirming that there are other people who are the same. They aren't the same, anyway - we've just been told that they are.

I was in an opera rehearsal the other day, and the director was getting really worried that in one particular moment it was obvious that the performers had about six different types of movement training, and just couldn't all move in the same way. And I found myself thinking - why is that such a worry? Isn't it more truthful to see all these people moving in different ways to explore the same basic human truths? Doesn't that actually enrich the experience of discovering who we are through watching this performance? I suppose this other director was interested in making something which was complete and crafted and consistent, and I just don't think life is like that. I like it when things don't fit quite perfectly. It's more truthful.

And that's why you use such a range of people when you're casting?

Yes, it is. Even in a play like Bravely Fought the Queen, where we only used actors of South Asian ancestry, we had that extraordinary variety; from Suchitra Malik who had just flown in from Bombay, to Harmage Kalirai, with his Northern English accent. It added to the sense of different worlds clashing in the play, and also to the sense of the play as performance. By not being "real" in that filmic sense, we were able to get at another, much deeper form of reality.

In Mappa Mundi, one of the things which was really moving was finding the unity underneath it all. I remember laughing one day in rehearsals about how strange it was to see a Mexican being coached in Chinese movement by a Zimbabwean through the medium of English! But oddly, precisely because the whole thing apparently had so many layers of artificiality, what you were left with at the end of it was a very pure sense of humanity.

As you know, we sometimes get accused of appropriating forms that don't really belong to us, or of cultural tourism, or of being magpies. I can see why people get defensive about their cultures, but we aren't actually doing anything to damage them - I mean, just because there was movement based on Beijing opera in Mappa Mundi doesn't make the people in China who practise that art full time any less expert and admirable, it doesn't deny the great value to their world of their nurturing and preserving that tradition. We don't approach material and forms from non-Western cultures disrespectfully: we approach them through people who have training, knowledge and personal experience to bring, and these things are therefore enriching for everybody involved, including the audiences.

I don't look to the foreign because it is exotic. Quite the opposite. I look to it to tell me who I really am. I remember you telling me once how you only really came to understand India once you had been to the West, and seen the differences. I find the same thing - it's about seeing things in the perspective of other things, understanding what is strange even in what is familiar. And, through that, discovering who, fundamentally, you are.

I remember when we toured to the Seychelles, I was staying in a hotel room and there was a Gideon Bible in the drawer by the bed. In the front of it there was this beautiful page with that verse from John's gospel about "God so loved the world" in loads and loads of languages. Different scripts, everything. I suppose it would be misleading to say that all these languages were expressing a universal truth, but they were certainly all expressing the same thing. And, of course, once long ago - all of these languages were one. And that page of writing was just such a wonderful image of the unity which we can find through diversity. It was exhilarating, just to sit there and look at it. And to imagine.

See profiles of Michael Walling and Mahesh Dattani