Overview of the Project as an Interview
COLLABORATION, CREATIVITY AND EQUITY IN INTERNATIONAL, MULTILINGUAL THEATRE-MAKING AND PERFORMANCE
Interview: Peter Wynne-Willson, director of Orange Polar Bear, with Daniel Tyler-McTighe
Peter Wynne-Willson is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Theatre at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and a writer and director with 40 years’ experience of work with theatre-in-education, theatre for young audiences and bilingual theatre. Here, in discussion with Daniel Tyler-McTighe, he relates the background and processes of his most recent Anglo-Korean performance, Orange Polar Bear, and draws out the issues that emerged from the experience.
Dr Daniel Tyler-McTighe is currently Director of Barra Culture and Visiting Research Fellow at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He was Director of the University of Oxford/Creative Multilingualism’s Multilingual Performance Project and Head of Education at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He has worked for 20 years in community-engaged performing arts, education and theatre-making, including work in Spain, Poland, China, and South Korea in the early stages of Orange Polar Bear.
DTM: I know that Orange Polar Bear itself was a fairly long-term project, but also it came out of a whole body of work over quite a few years, didn’t it? How did you first get involved in collaboration with South Korean artists and educators?
PWW: It goes back to 1999, when I first spent four months as Visiting Professor of Young People’s Theatre at the Korean National University of the Arts [KNUA]. Instrumental in that link was Professor Choi Young Ai, who ran, and still runs, the postgraduate programme on Theatre for Young Audiences [TYA]. She invited me, as a Theatre-in-Education [TIE] practitioner, to come to Seoul and set up a module in her MFA [Master of Fine Arts] programme specifically on the UK model of TIE. We worked together at KNUA in three separate spells between 1999 and 2005 and the idea to explore collaborative projects grew during that period, while we created work with students in Korean, and also adapted English texts for Korean use [eg. Head or Tails – ASSITEJ[1] World Congress 2002 Seoul]. My experience of cultural collaboration during this time, in the specific context of the UK and Korea, was shaped by my colleagues and students at KNUA, who were engaged in a process of redressing the balance in the field of theatre for young audiences, which had become dominated by imitation of western forms and content, after 50 years of cultural colonisation, at the expense of contemporary and traditional Korean equivalents.
In 2005, during my third spell in Korea, we embarked on the first of these projects, The Bridge, and set ourselves the task of working as equal co-collaborators. It was this impulse, rather than the experimentation with bilingual forms, that led the process. We believed that if we could achieve a genuine collaboration, we could learn from each other, and create something that enriched both ‘sides’ of the project, and opened up new possibilities. In the light of this belief we set principles for the work.
1 - Collaboration should be as balanced as possible – there should not be any sense in which one of the two cultures or languages is leading the process.
2 - The play should be created through a devising process involving artists from both countries, with two writers.
In addition to these key collaborative principles, we adopted methods we were both familiar with and committed to as TYA practitioners – such as devising through research and improvisation and involving the target audience in the research and creative process.
DTM: So the first of these projects was The Bridge in 2005? You presented that in both countries, in schools and theatres, and then toured again in 2008. Can you give us some insight into that process?
PWW: It was essentially created with graduates from the Master’s course I had been teaching – an extremely capable team, supported by KNUA, which has wonderful resources. The UK half of the collaboration was a specially recruited team of experienced freelance applied theatre performers, gathered under the banner of Hanyong Theatre [‘hanyong’ is the Korean word for ‘Anglo-Korean’] and we created the play through workshops in both countries, improvising around research into the stories of English and Korean people during the Korean War [1950-53]. Initially working with students in Seoul, interviewing veterans, then improvising on those themes with teenagers in Birmingham, then back in Korea with the eventual acting teams. Design and production were supported by the University, and Arts Council England funded the UK element.
DTM: The Bridge was clearly successful as a production – it toured twice, and was selected as the only UK performance at the ASSITEJ World Congress in Adelaide 2008 and the Kijimuna Festival in Okinawa, Japan. What were the most important achievements within it, in your opinion?
PWW: The collaboration fundamentally worked, certainly for everyone who worked on it, and it seemed for the audiences too. The aim from the beginning of The Bridge was that it would be presented in exactly the same form in both countries, with no translation offered, so audiences had to make what sense they could of sections in English and Korean, and in a way it played with the fact that different audiences received slightly different stories. [Korean audiences, for example needed little introduction or explanation of the Korean War itself, so there were some factual elements only included in English, whereas some of the Korean text was full of meanings to which the English-only speakers would not have access fully, but that mixture of fascination and exclusion they might feel was one of the ways in which the piece operates]. It was telling a seldom told story, and had a depth of meaning from the testimony of those we researched with, and a passion in performance which made it an exceptionally moving and effective piece. It certainly demonstrated that this kind of partnership had something unique to offer.
But the clearest thing that came out of it was the starting point for our next project. While we often struggled for understanding in the very hot rehearsal room in Seoul, our children were outside, playing together happily and effortlessly, in spite of the same culture gap and language barrier as the adults. So we asked ourselves the question – ‘what do they know that we don’t?’.
DTM: And that was the basis of your next project, Looking for Yoghurt?
PWW: Yes. We wanted to carry on, because we had gained so much from the complex process, and the response had been so positive. We wanted to take the production pressure away from the University and produce the work through partnerships with existing companies. We wanted to try working for a younger audience, and we wanted to answer that question. As we put it in our research question at the beginning of the process, ‘What can we learn from children about working across cultures – how do they make friends with people that speak another language?’
DTM: For Looking for Yoghurt, you added an extra culture and another language by including a Japanese element. Why was that?
PWW: Good question! We thought it would add to the interest and to what we could learn. We thought it would add to the practical complexities too, although we had not appreciated that in fact it would multiply those rather than add. Actually the decision was opportunistic – we had an approach from a Japanese festival after The Bridge, and we took advantage of that. We believed we would discover more, by taking on this extra dimension.
Looking for Yoghurt was a simpler story and production. The story could not have been naturalistic or historical in the same way as The Bridge, without the same level of research and understanding that we achieved over a long period, multiplied by three. What we were exploring with this project was seen as a universal question, and so the setting was not specified – it took place in a world that was common to and made sense to all the characters and audiences, in a building site in an unidentified city. The story was built from extensive work with children in all three countries once again.
DTM: It was performed in all three countries as well, wasn’t it, and this time enabled by partnerships with theatre companies in each country?
PWW: Yes, the Arts Council very wisely advised [after The Bridge] that we needed a producing partner in the UK to make the work sustainable, and we enlisted Judy Owen, and made a partnership with Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The logistics of international touring are complex, and it had been clear that to work as individual freelance artists and researchers on projects like this was not going to work over a longer term.
DTM: What then were the significant things that emerged from the performances of Looking for Yoghurt?
PWW: Taking our key question ‘What can we learn from children about working across cultures – how do they make friends with people that speak another language?’ into the research phase of the project was immediately productive. The question became ‘how do you make friends if someone doesn’t speak your language or comes from elsewhere?’, and asking this to young children across the three countries produced a surprisingly clear and unanimous answer, which could be summarised as ,”we play together, we eat together, and then we are friends.” This emerged from a series of drama exercises in workshops in Seoul, Tokyo and Birmingham, with a range of children aged 5-12. At the same time the artists in the project discussed our anxieties, and the anxieties of other adults around childhood. What evolved through the subsequent devising process, involving a series of creative workshops with mixed actors again in all three countries, was a story about three young children, playing alone on a building site, looking for a lost cat. We explored new ways of working physically without language, as well as exploiting shared references, and maintaining a mathematical balance to the story by distributing various well-known groups of three across the characters [so that for example the characters were ‘Nori’ [Korean for Yellow] ‘Aka’ [Japanese for Red] and ‘Blue’.]
DTM: After The Bridge and Looking for Yoghurt, you did one other project before Orange Polar Bear, the TIE piece Nori. How did that fit in the development of these collaborations?
PWW: Nori was a slightly different project – much smaller scale, for one thing – and it fitted in at the same time as we started planning the project that eventually became Orange Polar Bear.
Nori was a collaboration between Theatre-in-Education companies, with just one Korean actor-teacher and one UK actor-teacher. It was actually modelled on an old Coventry Belgrade participatory TIE piece for infants called Pow Wow, which was about a cowboy and ‘Indian’, in which very young children are tasked with building a bridge between cultures. Nori took the same concept, with an old woman and an undersea creature. It did not tour in both countries in the same way, in that it was created with UK artists alongside Koreans in Korea, but only performed in Birmingham, working with The Play House TIE team. The age range of the audience was 3-6, so it was aimed at a much younger audience. I was the only member of the Orange Polar Bear team involved in Nori, and so I suppose its principle contribution to the story we are telling here was in the continuing development of my own understanding of working collaboratively with a Korean team, and of the ways of using a language which was not understood by any of its audience within an early years setting. For me the principal ‘lesson’ that emerged from the experience was that the ‘barrier’ of a foreign language matters least of all for the youngest of us. Perhaps because very young children are more adept at interpreting the meaning of physical languages, and more accustomed to interpreting words without knowing their meaning, there was no evidence of children switching off or turning away from the creature that spoke underwater language. Instead they worked very hard to find ways of communicating. Perhaps that was another outcome, actually, reinforcing the point about how fundamental the urge to communicate across these barriers is to us all.
I had also by then directed a separate project for ASSITEJ in 2013, called Walking Shadow for the Kijimuna Fesival, Okinawa, Japan. That was devised with six actors from different countries, with another language convention again. In that, the repetition of ideas in different languages was made easier by the need being acknowledged, in that the actors were consciously telling the story with direct audience address to a multi-lingual audience. What we found then was that we could overlap languages, and the audience would tend to tune into the ones they understood. Again the multi-lingual nature of the project had been a really positive element, and I had been bulding up a toolbox of approaches.
DTM: So these projects had all contributed to the thinking behind Orange Polar Bear. Can you describe the origins of the project itself?
PWW: Again, the evolution from the other projects was partly opportunistic. In the years since I had started working with postgraduate students in Seoul, they had moved on into interesting and influential positions and work. One outcome of this was that several graduates from KNUA were now running the Theatre for Young Audiences wing of the National Theatre Company of Korea. So the opportunity presented itself for a collaboration with them. NTCK has a dedicated research department, specifically researching theatre for teenagers, and Professor Choi had become head of this team. So the age group for our next collaboration chose itself.
For Orange Polar Bear, the decision had been made that I would direct the project, and not be a writer – a decision led by the producers, and based on the idea of involving a new UK writer that would help secure support for the project in the UK. The project did not follow the pattern of previous projects, of being led by devising teams, but instead processes were created to assist the writers in their collaborative process, and a more ‘traditional’ writing process was at the heart of the project.
So, our starting point was exploring ‘aspects of being 15’ with groups of teenagers in Seoul and Birmingham, with the two writers working with drama educators in both countries. In Korea, the NTCK convened a group of teenagers that met once a week and in the UK the workshop was a concentrated two-day workshop involving pupils and teachers from three Birmingham secondary schools. In both countries the writers introduced some very broad questions, around culture and identity, and facilitated a range of drama and discussion activities, collecting images and ideas, and enabling the young people to exchange messages with each other, and seek common ground, or identify difference.
DTM: Yes, my involvement started with those initial UK workshops and then the next stage, in August 2014, when we took three teenagers from Birmingham to Seoul, and worked with the Korean young people on creating a performance, Will and Ji-young, based on the characters emerging from the original workshops with the writers.
Aside from the wonderful opportunity for the three teenagers (and me) to experience the visit to Korea and working there, the activity in the theatre was something completely unique to me. I had previously worked with Evan when he was commissioned to write a youth theatre play for young people in Birmingham, Leeds and Plymouth, and I had directed devised performances with young people many times, but this time we were facilitating workshops and devising performances with young people that would feed ideas into a professionally written play for young audiences, rather than by young performers. To some extent that could be seen as a distancing measure for the young people, but in fact the excitement and empowering effect it had on them – knowing that their ideas and creativity were feeding into a professional, international production – was really clear to see and hugely positive. The teenagers from both countries collaborated, played and communicated together brilliantly – perhaps even more productively than the adults, which brings to mind what you were saying about the transition from The Bridge to Looking For Yoghurt earlier. The balance and equity between languages sticks in my memory from this experience in Seoul, on the one hand the long meetings that would be even longer to ensure everything was translated and communicated perfectly and, on the other, the creative energy and enjoyment produced through working bilingually in the rehearsal room as we played theatre games, improvised and devised with the young actors.
How did this focus on devising with and alongside young people, this teenage-led stage of the process, feed into the final stages of making the finished play?
PWW: Very directly. Although the writers had set up some provocations in the earlier workshops, the process really was an organic one, with many ideas, images and attitudes making their way from the early workshops, or from that improvised performance in Seoul, into the final play. That was genuinely teenage-led, but their input then continued at each stage of what became a very long process. In many ways the final stages of the project were closer to those early, creation stages than with any piece I’ve worked on, although there were at every stage more complications caused by the distance and the language gap.
Initially the two writers went away from that performance and each wrote their first draft, which related half the story. Then they came together for a concentrated period, in London, and essentially banged those two drafts into one. At the same time there was work going on to raise funding for the full production, and a workshop happened at an ASSITEJ festival in Birmingham, where a work-in-progress version was shared with an international audience. Then the Korean partners, who were to an extent tired with the drawn-out nature of the project – there was one failed UK funding bid which put the project back – opted to do an all-Korean version as another stage of development of the project.
DTM: How did that work, if the whole project was framed as an exploration of bilingual work?
PWW: Well, it was the hardest part of the whole process actually, for me at least. The problem of the audience understanding the language was not there of course, but it was replaced by a greater problem of staging a piece which was all about these two people in entirely different worlds, and the links between them. With all parts played by Koreans, a crucial dimension of the project was not there. The story and characters and structure and themes of the play were all given a chance to be examined, and the audience really seemed to enjoy the play, but the central fact of the two groups of artists visibly collaborating was missing. But more important than the flaw in the version artistically, the balance of the creative teams was not there. I was there as co-director with the designer, Yeo Shin Dong, and was the only British artist involved in the rehearsal process. The Korean writer was there, but Evan was unable to attend except for the performance. It was an absolutely beautiful production, and there was also now an original music score, which was lovely, but the directing relationship never really worked – it was extremely hard for me to play a valuable role in an otherwise all-Korean process. It served in a way to show the real value of the consciously balanced working method that we had used at all other stages of the project.
DTM: So, moving on to look at the final version, and the project as a whole, can you sum up what, as director of Orange Polar Bear, were the main artistic challenges?
PWW: Many of the challenges were absolutely the ‘normal’ challenges in directing a large-scale project, which is a collaboration between so many creative people – practical and organisational decision-making, managing time and momentum, managing complex relationships, keeping the many plates spinning, trying to have an overview, and seeing how sections of the project will fall into place.
Over the course of the series of projects described earlier in this interview, I had evolved a particular approach to working bilingually, or more significantly bi-culturally, which placed a major emphasis on trust. While trust is crucial in all collaborative creative projects, it is even more so in cross-cultural projects, or perhaps more accurately there are special barriers in developing that trust across cultural divides. On a simple level, if the members of a good ensemble know each other well, they will tend to develop short-cuts and understandings which enable their processes to work smoothly. So if there are fundamental barriers to them knowing each other or understanding each other they make the process of working together harder. Coming from very different cultures tends to produce these barriers, and the building of trust is more complex – it requires specific work.
This is where the time-scale of the project becomes valuable – the building of trust is a slow process, and somewhat following the lesson learned from the children in the research for Looking for Yoghurt, we needed to eat together and play together alongside all of the discussion and negotiation in the meeting rooms, rehearsal rooms and online. The actors shared many common languages, and an investment early in the rehearsal process in exchange of games, non-verbal improvisation and familiar drama exercises paid dividends in the building of trust between them. It was harder to do this in the meeting rooms, and probably the greatest challenges were where communication usually is done by discussion round a table – for example working with the composer, designers, technical staff, and on the administration side, with producers, marketing teams etc. With those that we met only in the context of these meetings there was never quite the same level of mutual trust and understanding.
Other interesting challenges revolved around the writers’ collaboration. Ko Sun Duck and Evan Placey were two very different writers without any previous knowledge of each other, in Evan’s case working in Korea for the first time, and undertaking a cross-cultural project of this particular kind for the first time. It was very evident that they worked in different ways, as any two writers might be expected to do. Some of these differences could almost certainly be identified as cultural differences, but in some ways the knowledge that this is the case does not alter the way of dealing with any difference between artists. While the previous projects had been group-devised, there was an immediate difference with this project, and the first decisions the two writers made almost ring-fenced territory within stories so that there would be two plays somehow dovetailed together. While they watched each other at work with the teenagers, and talked well with each other, they remained quite separate, and I can remember a sense of disappointment during these stages that they did not seem to be meeting each other artistically. The project ended up spread over a longer period than envisaged, but one undoubted impact of the length of time, was a growing understanding between the writers, so that what began as two separate intertwining stories, became much more integrated at the later stages. Only in the final stages of the process were they writing or adapting each other’s scenes, for example, and it felt as if the extra time had enabled a much more satisfying collaboration. The conscious building of trust and understanding through this period was a crucial part of this – it is just as possible for trust to dissipate over time if the processes are not working in this direction.
DTM: You’ve described how all four Anglo-Korean projects were collaboratively created and in different ways multilingual. Why did they all take different approaches to language and what have you learned?
PWW: Generally we have learned from trial and error, and our approaches have evolved. The Bridge was very uncompromising, with no translation support given to the audience, beyond a synopsis in the programme. The language used was the language that would have been used at every stage, in a piece that was mostly in a highly realistic style. We supported the audience a little with an interpreter character who could justifiably translate within certain scenes, and it was quite sophisticated in that he was not particularly skilled, and also had a viewpoint in the story which coloured his interpretation, so the audience was working out the meaning from quite a range of signals. But what was clear in the tours in both countries was that during the section where the British soldier is trying to communicate with three Korean children, it was absolutely unnecessary to ‘help’ the audience understand. This long section always worked in performance, in any country. It was really striking. Something about the energy, the familiarity of the struggle for communication, made it very engaging and the fact that it contained words or sentences that audience members could not specifically translate was no obstacle to understanding. The most repeated response to the play in England and Australia was ‘I was amazed - so much of it was in Korean but I really understood it’. Actually, there were subtleties in the language that a non-korean speaker could not possibly be understanding, but they were witnessing life in a realistic way and so they accepted this and understood other aspects enough to avoid feeling frustrated.
Looking for Yoghurt then used the convention that although the three characters spoke their own language, they understood each other, or at least found ways very easily of understanding each other. So with less speaking than The Bridge, and a physical approach, plenty of repetition, and some focus on words which are the same across languages [‘Yoghurt’, ‘Yogurto’, ‘Yogurte’ is the name of the cat they are all trying to find] and a little use of the Skippy the Kangaroo/Soap Opera Phone Call technique of the question being contained in the answer, once again audience understanding was not an issue. Again the responses of audiences of all ages were positive about the use of language and level of understanding.
This convention, or something a little like it, was used again towards the end of Orange Polar Bear, when the two principal characters meet in the land of ice, they somehow suddenly understand each other. It is a convention which signals to an audience on a number of levels and makes the dialogue accessible in a new way.
DTM: But in Orange Polar Bear you did end up using surtitles or projected translation for the first time. Why was that?
PWW: The writers, particularly Evan, were keen to use surtitles all along, because they wanted audiences to understand everything that they wrote, which is a very natural thing. It was possible in a way that would not have worked with Looking for Yoghurt or Nori [because of the age of the audience, many of whom could not have read subtitles] and the technology of projection has moved on too, and indeed the resources of the producing company. I was initially reluctant to use surtitles, because The Bridge had felt so successful, with the same age groups as target audience, and without translation. However as the nature of the piece became clear it became inevitable. Where English and Korean characters are trying to communicate together you have many options for on-stage explanation and understanding. Where there are scenes of English characters, and separate scenes of Korean characters talking with each other in their own language, your intrinsic translation options are much more limited. In Orange Polar Bear we did have the Looking for Yoghurt convention during ensemble scenes, with English school children unaccountably speaking in Korean and vice versa. But this would not have been possible across the piece, because it largely alternated all-Korean and all-English scenes.
During the writing of the play I was concerned that the surtitles would alienate the UK teenage audience. In Korea NTCK always sells out its theatre with teenagers, when presenting work aimed at them, and they are reasonably often presented with work which is in English or contains English. In the UK neither of these is true, so would the surtitles and large blocks of Korean dialogue mean that teenagers did not come or did not engage? What was observed and interesting was that the level of engagement of those young audiences in the play was in fact palpably better than often. It seemed as if the extra effort of understanding demanded extra attention, and because the drama was of interest, the audience gave that attention. Again, the responses often included, ‘I stopped reading the surtitles’. There were some who had an opposite response and said they couldn’t understand. But overall the surtitles were successful, or the combination of the level of understanding without language and the surtitles as an option was successful.
DTM: Evan has a particular style of writing in the third person, doesn’t he? How did that aspect fit in with the overall creation of the piece?
PWW: Well, in the script, Will’s lines read like narration at times, and that was certainly a factor in making it hard for them to work for someone who does not understand the language. I don’t think you would have recommended that style of writing for a bilingual piece, but we actively wanted the writers to express themselves in their own styles and set ourselves the task of melding these together, and that approach allowed a form to evolve, during later stages, with the ideas about characters, story and images already in place. The concern was that if we had asked them to have this issue of the two languages too much in their minds, there was a risk that their initial assumptions about this aspect would limit their creativity. It was in a way a similar approach to allowing everyone to work in their own language, so that the balance between us is maintained. I am not sure whether that concern was justified - certainly at times it felt as if we were struggling to make a play work bilingually which had several extra obstacles to understanding.
DTM: What other conclusions have you reached about bilingual work from the experience of Orange Polar Bear and the three other Hanyong projects?
PWW: I think that it is on a basic level important, particularly in Britain where we are famously so bad with other languages, for audiences to hear many languages on stage. I would say that these experiences have made it clear to me that while adults worry about watching something in another language, the younger the children, the less this is an issue. Adults, both as audience and as gatekeepers for younger audiences, are unhappy about the idea, but faced with it in practice, if it is well done, are often surprised themselves by the lack of problem, and amazed by their children or pupils. I think I have also found that it enriches the learning and broadens the perspectives of the artists involved, and shakes us out of our entrenched habits, and that on some level audiences can tell if they are watching a happy collaboration, so that it actually makes us all feel a little happier about the possibility of living successfully on the same planet.
DTM: Finally, continuing the important aspect of all this work which started with educating theatre-makers and has continued to have learning and development at its core, what practical advice would you give to theatre-makers who are going to embark on a cross-cultural project of this kind?
PWW: First of all – maybe do not leap to attempt to do it with large, prolific organisations like the Korean National Theatre or Birmingham REP! Or if you do, be prepared for particular stress because the more rigidity there is in the two partners, the greater the possibility of real friction, and structural failure.
That aside, the most valuable advice to have emerged from these experiences for me are around approaches to working across these cultural divides.
Firstly, don’t assume that an unfamiliar process or idea is wrong, or that it is based on ignorance of the correct approach. This may sound obvious, but in small ways it is very easy for this to happen all the time. If the partner seems to be doing or not doing something that you are expecting, specifically as British people we are programmed by years of colonial thinking to assume that it is because they do not know [or even do not ‘yet’ know] how to do it ‘properly’. Combatting the effects of this particular version of privileged thinking takes a conscious effort more than you might ever imagine. This is my personal reflection, and others may feel free from this, but I have observed a great many people fall into this thinking, specifically western artists working in Korea. Almost invariably, the ‘different’ way of doing things is just that, and I lost count of the number of times I learned new approaches and new solutions by making sure I did not jump in with helpful advice about how to do things 'properly', or mutter with my British colleagues about the ‘crazy Koreans’.
For example, during The Bridge, there was growing concern in the UK team about the late arrival of a very complex collection of costumes, all being hand-made, all needing to fit both the actors and the style of the piece, which was essentially naturalistic and historical. Actors were worried about it, and when asked, the producer explained that the costume designer and maker had had to go to her parent’s home town for a week, since it was a year since her grandfather’s death. This meant she would be back a day before the dress rehearsal, and no costumes were made. There seemed to be an inexplicable relaxation about this with the Korean half of the company. Only when it emerged that there was a team of twenty makers who would work through 24 hours was it clear this was just the way this was done. The costumes were all ready in time, they all fitted and the anxiety had been unfounded. This kind of experience was repeated often, in both directions. Until you understand each other enough, there are potential difficulties in any practical or artistic difference. If the trust is there, you can relax and enjoy finding out about the different ways things can be approached. So there is a real concrete advantage in approaching cultural difference in a relaxed, flexible and open way, and assuming that ‘the other way’ is just as good, or even better. Or put another way, maintaining an assumption of cultural superiority will lead to huge levels of stress at the very least.
Holding on to this awareness of privilege is particularly important in relation to language, because there is very often a key ‘English privilege’. All Koreans speak some English, and many to a good level, and more or less no British artists speak Korean. So it is really easy to fall into working in English. When that happens, the balance has gone. We have remained committed to using interpreters throughout all the processes, so that everyone can work in their language. Where this is not possible, then it has to be replaced by very strong awareness that half the group is working in another language, and compensation needs to be made.
My second key advice would be to adjust to the timing, or even tempo, of the process. If you are working through interpreters, the rhythm of sessions changes. The inevitable slowing down of communication can be frustrating, but it can also be valuable. If you have time to think while a translator is conveying what you said, then it is important not simply to use it to plan the next thing you are going to say, because that way you will always think of something and never stop talking. Remember, if someone had heard and understood your original comment, they may have interrupted angrily half way through. Stay focused on the speaker when they are talking, and see how much you can glean from their body language and tone before you get the precious translation. The way timing is affected has to be embraced, and allowed for, and extra thinking time used well can genuinely help make conversations more focused.
Thirdly, strive for real cultural depth. Accept from the outset that you are not the expert on the ‘other’ culture. It is important to find out as much as you can about each other, and that is also one of the joys of this kind of work. But there is nothing less edifying than the sight of a UK artist holding forth about Korean culture to a group of Koreans. There is a parallel here in the responses to current issues around Black Lives Matter – sometimes discussion of this involving white people turns into competitive awareness, and a conversation about how much ‘I’ understand about it. We have all, I imagine, been in conversations which have been dominated by white people explaining the issue of racism. Surely we are getting to realise that this is not appropriate or effective. Racism is prejudice plus power. When it comes to language, the power historically is with English. Power most recently has been in the West. In the case at least of UK-Korea collaborations the relationship has very often been ‘teacher-pupil’, and this is not the same as the equitable collaboration that creates work which is greater than the sum of its parts. As UK artists in a partnership of this kind, our first instinct in discussions about everything, but particularly about Korea, has to be to listen and to learn.
One of the responses to The Bridge came from a man old enough to have lived through the War, who wrote that we [the UK team] had understood the Korean experience. I remember being pleased with this, but reflecting that I would not actually claim that myself. The play, however, did contain much of that understanding, precisely because it did not depend on my grasp of the Korean experience or any of the UK team’s. International collaboration and multilingual work can of course hold multiple voices, and the director in this process needs to be able to handle and channel those voices. It is by careful guardianship of the full and equal collaboration that a bilingual, or cross-cultural project can become something genuinely much better than we could have created alone.
DTM: You sound as if this has been an area of work that has been really significant for you.
PWW: Yes, on every level. I am very glad that some accident brought me to Korea in 1999, and I feel very fortunate with the opportunities that have sprung from that, and with the friends I have made. We eat together and we play together, like the children suggested.
The journey to Orange Polar Bear has been a rich and fascinating one, and it is not intended to be the end. There are currently plans for the piece to be re-toured in a couple of years, and plans are already underway for new projects and new collaborations. The pandemic has obstructed our planning a little, but the link has been too fruitful to be set aside just yet.
[1] Association Internationale du Théâtre de l’Enfance et la Jeunesse (International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People), https://www.assitej-international.org