Speak What We Feel. Not What We Ought to Say.

Where does the time go? Another week down and Christmas speeding towards us.

Actor Ian Redford came in on Monday and gave an excellent, gregarious session on 'actioning text,' which seemed to go down really well. Ian's been in a few times before and always gives us great value. He's got so much experience working at The Globe, The National, with Out of Joint as well as loads of TV, but talks softly and with great humility about the process of acting. He's just finished playing Joe Keller in a highly acclaimed production All My Sons at the Belgrade in Coventry and is writing a one man show based on Samuel Johnson, to perform at the Johnson Museum off Fleet Street in December, a role decked in benign generosity and hooting laughter. He was born for it.

At lunchtime Patsy gave a brilliantly accessible presentation on her Vocal Points project, which unashamedly advocates finding as many opportunities as possible to banish reticence and release voice throughout childhood and into adulthood. We could all do with being a bit louder and a lot prouder seemed to be the welcome key message. There's no patience in this thinking for a University of repressed reflection.

On Tuesday the second year 'scratched' an idea for a forum theatre play aimed at Primary School children. The social realism of most interactive pieces replaced with a composite fairy story - can Little Red Riding Hood, cope with the peer group pressure of the seven dwarfs, the foolish behaviour of Hansel and Gretel, the bullying of the Troll guarding the bridge and the thieving tendencies of light fingered Goldilocks... and still out manoeuvre the wolf? The work was flawed in not quite being ready for intervention, but the idea had great potential. We accept that children will be vocal participants in theatre events, why not give them the chance to influence the action as well.

Wednesday was full of meetings - firstly with Richmond Community Safety team at Twickenham Stadium to go through the programme for the community day we're going to help facilitate next February working with the local police. The session focused on trying to pull out some key messages, particularly around alcohol abuse and stop and search, the two areas which seem to course the most aggravation between teenagers and police officers in the borough.

Then onto Ham House for a planning session with Gary and Jorge looking ahead to the 400th birthday party next May.

Ambitiously we're going to try and get 3,000 people in for the day listening to local bands and choirs, having fun and culminating in a community sing song... Happy Birthday, Our House by Madness, Country House by Blur... you get the picture! On Rugby days a DJ at the Barmy Arms plays a cracking three hour set of anthems, the pub rocks and the songs are carried across the town and down the river. Gary wants something of the same uninhibited and anarchic nature for the party.

Our students will lightly host the event, playing many of the famous and infamous visitors and owners of the house over the past four centuries. It's a bit of a relief to see a shape emerging for this event, however vague it may be at this stage.

.

Applied Theatre Centre?

Had a meeting with Trevor to try and consolidate some of our work and also begin to work towards a strategy. It feels wonderful to work here at present, but there are so many projects, initiatives and partnerships that we risk missing the tricks if we don't begin to lay out our objectives and possibilities.

Tfac is obviously a major focus and I'm keen to push on with shaping the way St Mary's students can have a positive impact on the development of the Community Theatre Centre in Lilongwe. We're also looking at delivering other key component parts of the course with outside agencies. I hope The Comedy School will deliver the Prison Drama module for us next year at Level 3 and that the National Trust will develop a module in Drama and Heritage with us during the spring and I'd love to keep the relationship with the Creative Learning department at Richmond Theatre going through the Schools Based Project.

We also want to keep the ever wonderful Spiral close to us and I'm going to take ten or so students out in December to do a short week's work in Cantabria on arguments surrounding the new legislation allowing for the exhumation of the old civil war graves, with Carol and Chris, perhaps as a taster for bigger things in the future. Meanwhile Matt's work on the Robben Island project and Trevor's Cancer Tales continue to develop.

There are local projects too, both Richmond Council and the Kingston International Youth Arts Festival have approached us in recent weeks asking if we'd be interested in developing work for them.

Trevor thinks we need to become an Applied Theatre centre. A place both for consultancy and research. Once all the various strands of our work are tied together we make quite an impressive bundle. Can we turn this into something sustainable, a place where we explore community cohesion through theatre making and perhaps begin to embed the notion of storytelling into local cultural practice?

.

Mixed Up North.

Back at University and it's been a bit of a Verbatim fest. On Tuesday night we hosted an inset with Richmond Theatre for local secondary school teachers on approaches to the form and tonight I headed off to Wilton's Music Hall to see the latest Max Stafford-Clark, Robin Soans collaboration Mixed Up North, a piece exploring inter faith relationships amongst a youth drama group in Burnley. The conceit is that the audience are a group of liberal minded visitors invited up from London by group community worker Trish, played by Celia Imrie, who've popped in to see the dress rehearsal for a play performed by the group. The process is slow as each character has to negotiate their inhibitions and the often spiky group dynamic, but these lulls in the stage action offer ample opportunity for cups of tea to be made, stories to be told and a sense of community to be created.

The show never happens as the leading man is persuaded by his girlfriend, who thinks 'drama is gay', to walk out. A hastily arranged question and answer session is organised, which allows for some prolonged talking heads. At this point the editing becomes clunky as each character uses their spotlight to tell a story of neglect or abuse, before the return of the leading man and a hastily arranged final run through.

Verbatim as a form is developing, we're beginning to hear new music, but I still think it's at its best when it produces a cacophony of voices merging and inter cutting rather than a series of blanket monologues. It's as much a study of how place, time and other people affect our words as it is a platform from which to voice our own stories.

.

...Next Steps.

Saturday 7th November: So what's next? We'll be back in Lilongwe in eighteen months with the third years. It'd be fantastic if MADSOC had been bought for Tfac by then. We spend the morning talking about ways to support and the idea begins to grow that together with Tfac we could work to raise the funds to buy the space and rename it the CTC (Community Theatre Centre.) It would mean that our students would take performance work out to perform there and this would provide the prompt for a week of exploration and workshop. The £80,000 needed to purchase the space seems manageable, particularly if our St Mary's students feel they have a stake in the building. It's hugely important to find the right material to take to Malawi, but if we are, in part, heading out to celebrate the new centre then there's a genuine and immediate focus. It's important to start now. How to organise?

The plane was two hours late leaving and only just missed another huge storm, which seemed about to sweep across the airport as we left the runway and headed north, back towards Ethiopia. I tuned out a bit and watched the in flight movie (500) Days of Summer - which was perfect travel fodder, soft and quirky. Once we'd changed planes at Addis there was nothing to do but sit back and wait for a morning arrival. In and out of sleep, we drifted silently over the neon constellations of towns in Sudan, Egypt, Libya and then out across the Mediterranean and back to Europe in time for breakfast.

.

ABC Group.

Friday 6th November: Back at MADSOC Jack and I spent the morning working with the ABC group of sex workers from Mchessi in a workshop led by Togo, a Malawian actor, who'd travelled up from Blantyre. I'd met these women eighteen months ago when they were first forming their group. They put together a fantastic forum performance which we took to play outside a local police station. It caused quite stir. Buoyed by that and the continuation of Tfac workshops they've grown from strength to strength and now each woman has their own focus group of further sex workers, some as young as 12 years old - all of whom are exploring through drama the strategies and alternatives to improve their lives. The ripple effect of this empowering work is clear to see.

The drama too is more sophisticated. Ryan is looking to take some of their work to an international AIDS conference in Vienna next July and Togo's work this morning is designed to help the group see some strategies for theatricalising their stories.

Quickly we're turning inanimate objects into life. A bar is set up, Gift plays a bowl of nuts, whilst I join Bettina, Hawa and Mabel as bottles of beer. Soundscapes are created and the objects dance with each other, only to freeze when a man walks into the bar. It's playful, subversive and all the time offers new perspective, new ways of seeing. We laugh shed loads.

At the end of the session condoms are distributed and the women pile into their mini bus back to the township. This afternoon they'll run their workshops. It's all been incredibly inspirational.

Back at the Tfac office in the British Council we have a debrief meeting about the base lines. Jack is sharp and honest, questioning whether the improvisations set up to observe current behaviour are effective.

'Surely we're not seeing how the participants really feel and behave,' he says 'aren't we watching them perform what they think we want to see? I'm not sure the results will be accurate. Role play isn't about personal reaction. It's about perfecting a character.'

The comments take us into debate. One proposal is not to announce the intention of the improvisation, but have a member of the Tfac team lead it. With training the leader could tease out a whole range of attitudes and opinions. There's still no guarantee that participants won't escape into character however, but there's less opportunity to avoid the focus if you play against a trained antagonist.

Claire, who interprets the data, questions the morality keeping back information from the participants prior to their participation, but as we don't reveal the specifics of the questionnaire before it's being answered this new idea seems a direct parallel of effective practice elsewhere on the baseline. The debate will continue on Monday.

The week over we head to a bar in the animal sanctuary and enjoy a couple of Kuche Kuche beers whilst another lightening storm sweeps across the park. It's been a wonderful week.

.

Rolling with Royce

Thursday 5th November: An early morning suited and booted meeting with Dr Kayira the head of Education at Mzuzu University to see if there is any room for exchange programmes with St Mary's. The taxis heading up the hill away from the market are all 50 Kwache (15p) regardless of distance, but operate like buses, pulling in to let people in and out up to a rather squashed maximum of six or seven.

The campus itself is green and peaceful and although nowhere near as well equipped as our place it felt like a purposeful academic community. St Mary's works best on a vocational level. Subjects like Sports Science, Drama and Education bring in the most students and Mzuzu has a similar feel - albeit Environmental and Agricultural study take priority over creative and recreational industry.

Dr Kayira met me in his study and we talked for about an hour without really getting beyond positive intention. There are possibilities here, but I'm not clear on the outcome beyond the wonderful experience that coming to Malawi brings our students. It's a long way to come without a clearly defined, deliverable project. Still there is time to muse on this and Dr Kayira certainly seemed interested in hosting.

Back in the bus station I realised that I'd missed all the reputable companies shuttles back to Lilongwe. The only choice was to get on one of the owner operator buses. The only one available had a huge spiders web of a crack over most of the windscreen. I asked what time it was due to leave.

'When it's full!' answered the man in front of me boarding with two chickens in a basket.

About an hour later, with standing room only and a double mattress completely blocking the rear windscreen a local priest boarded the bus prayed for our safe delivery back in the capital, shook the driver's hand for luck and crossed himself as we shunted out onto the open road.

The man next to me had an oil pump in a plastic bag on his lap. He quickly introduced himself to me as Royce.

'I own my own bus company!' he announced proudly.

'Great!' I replied ' how many buses?'

'One!!!' he said laughing at my stupid question, 'but things are not so good just now. The pump has gone and I can only get it repaired in Lilongwe, that's why I'm travelling.'

We spent much of the six hour journey talking about everything from the impact of the World Cup in South Africa next summer, to irrigation, to the popular re-election of the progressive Dr Bingo, which seems to have brought added stability and no little hope for future development. Each year new technologies mean that fewer rural families are made vulnerable by seasonal famine.

'It's good you're here,' says Royce,' as we approach the suburbs. 'Malawi is full of business, survival teaches you enterprise, but we need more infrastructure. We have a wonderful lake, but no port. Beautiful scenery, but no tourism. So education is a key, not the only one, but without it nobody will take us seriously. So it's good you're here.'

We said goodbye in at the bus depot by Devil's Street Market. Shaking hands I wished him well and hoped he would find a good mechanic. He smiled and told me he knew England would win the World Cup. Then suddenly a huge thunder clap and the sky opened up for the first time since June. The rains had come.

.

Mzuzu.

Wednesday 4th November: Morning back in the TTC to have a brief look at the initial questionnaire responses. The only issue is that the women interviewed are much less forthcoming, even in anonymity, about their sexual practice than the men and many of the more personal questions have been left blank. Tfac has only been three three weeks and we question whether, even with consent forms and confidentiality statements, that's long enough for the trainees to build the trust needed to have confidence in this part of the process. Of course no responses also reveal something of use for a baseline survey, particularly if the questions are answered at endline in a few months, but it's difficult to gauge whether the reticence is a cultural measure or an indicator that, signatures aside, we've not gained genuine consent to conduct the work yet.

Gheneli is also worried that the questionnaire was handed out at 4pm and this didn't give participants enough time to answer everything thoughtfully before the mad rush for dinner in the canteen began at 5.30pm. She decides before reading on to collect another sample of respondents this afternoon.

Unfortunately I need to begin the long journey home and so bid a fond farewell to the future President and her team. The ever joyful Patrick drives me to the bus depot, offers his greetings and best wishes to all my family and friends and helps me negotiate a ticket for the first leg of my journey, the two hundred miles South to Mzuzu.

It's slow progress as we pull into every village and hamlet en route. Children crowd round, bang on he windows and reach up to offer nuclear orange coloured Fanta, bananas, bags of water, corn on the cob and fried chicken pieces to the travellers. At one point a group of monkeys appear by the side of the road and the driver slows up so we can throw them some food and watch them squabble. There's clearly no hurry to arrive.

I snooze, read and watch the glorious scenery as we climb up away from the lake and into the cooler air of the mountains. Five hours later and we dusk drawing in we pull into town.

I find the Flaming Tree guest house - it's a calm haven; a few rooms doted around a communal courtyard. A library of second hand books donated by the backpackers who've previously come through stands in the reception area and the owner serves a seemingly never ending round of tea, toast and sweet homemade mango jam as tired guests relax into the evening. It could almost be late August in Sussex, but for the lizards still and blinking on the bedroom wall.

.