TANABATA @ TARA Studio

Working with Tara's International Associate Artist, Nanako Kume, Tara is creating a delightful new show for children and families, TANABATA. A love story based on the legend in which the two stars Hikoboshi (Alter) and Orihime (Vega) meet over the Milky Way (Amanogawa).

Nanako is a practising artist and theatre designer from Tokyo and is with us at Tara for the next month curating the performance.

The Assistant Producer is Yuriri Naka. The show is performed by Elizabeth Chan and Directed by Jatinder Verma.

Enchanting storytelling theatre for families and children aged 4-8 yrs.



The performance is supported by the Japan Society, JAPAN-UK 150 & The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

Wed to Fri 10.30am, 1.30pm
Sat 10.30am, 1.30pm & 3.30pm
£5.50 & £4.50 concessions

Box Office 0208 333 4457 or www.tara-arts.com to book online.

SUSPENDED LIVES @ TARA Studio

Wed 18 to Fri 20 February, 7.30pm


Change of Frame with IPSA in association with TARA.



What do you think of when you hear the word refugee? SUSPENDED LIVES explores what it is to be a refugee living in New Labour's Britain. Using Forum Theatre and verbatim theatre techniques, this piece will provoke debate and provide an opportunity for audience discussion and interaction.


BOX OFFICE 0208 333 4457

OBAMA

On 4 November 2008, Barack Obama, a first generation Black American with a Kenyan father, became the 44th (and 1st Black) President of the United States: an event I'd never imagined to see in my lifetime. The world, for both Black and White, is changed forever. Now, anything, literally, is possible. No longer the need, as with Martin Luther King, to "dream". No longer can anyone say a non-White is incapable.

Rosa Parks taught us to claim any school as a right. Mohammed Ali taught us to have pride in ourselves - "Black is beautiful". Martin Luther King taught us to dream. Tiger Woods broke through a bastion of whiteness (golf), as did Lewis Hamilton (F1). Buy Obama has revolutionized our world. Whatever the fortuitous set of circumstances making his victory possible (disillusionment with the Republicans and Iraq, the economy, age), the fact remains he did it: less than 8 years from joining the American political scene as a Senator... and a mere step away from roots in a village in Kenya!

Only in America: it truly is the modern country (if the condition of modernity is the ability to re-invent yourself). And, in the process, restoring faith in the notion of democracy.

The hard part begins now, when he assumes office. Buy it matters little. He'd delivered a symbol to a world hitherto dominated by white Europeans. The tectonic plates are shifting as we live.

Hexham

Roman Fort town, serving Hadrian's Wall. Then the Augustinians came, leaving a wonderfully "homely" Abbey behind. Then a Methodist Church built facing sideways on to the Abbey, as if unwilling (abashed?) to look the Abbey square in the face. The Shalom bookshop is now in one of the buildings of the Church. And we come, into Queens Hall, to perform The Tempest.

Oh, the layers of England! We're in England's Border County (as Northumberland chooses to describe itself). Nearby is Wylam, George Stephenson's village - him of the "rocket engine" that proved an icon of Industrial England - I'd first heard of him in school in Nairobi.

A warm, generous audience: attentive, beaming with pleasure, intensely appreciative at the end. Here we end our tour of England: now the long journey back to London, where the latest Elizabethan theatre to be built (the Rose, in Kingston) awaits: fitting that we end the run of Shakespeare's last play in a theatre not unlike the Globe. We're all excited and apprehensive in equal manner.

I realise I love the Geordie accent - it has an earthy musicality that chimes with the terrain, all sweeping hills and sparkling rivers.

Buxton

St Valentine's Day and we're performing in the gorgeous, Frank Matcham designed Buxton Opera House. Such a joy of a theatre: from the raked stage, the actors get a sense of an intimate auditorium (it seats 1200), hanging on every word. The architecture lends a softness - its the only word that'll do - to the actors, knowing they don't have to push, only talk.

After the show, there's a post-show discussion, with a sizeable part of the audience staying behind (perhaps the bitter North Derbyshire cold induced them to linger on in the warm theatre).

Amongst the questions and comments:

• How d'you multi-role play? I'm interested in that.  'Thought 'twere really good. (A school-boy)
  
• Is Shakespeare really infinitely adaptable? (This from an usher, who'd taught English for 30 years. I find out later she takes umbrage with modern-dress versions. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to her view...)
• Thank you for your interpretation
• This was the definitive Tempest
• Do you think there's hope then? (After I'd talked about the London Bombings...)

Oh, "hope"! I could have melted into the floor. The young woman asked the question for all of us. The story of the Tempest is among those that can keep that flicker of hope alive - forgiveness, so simple so difficult.

When we retire to the hotel bar (there's a Singles Night going on) and some of the cast bemoan having failed to wish their loved ones a happy Valentine's Day, I reflect on my own slip of memory: on this day, at 7pm, 40 years ago I touched down at Heathrow from Nairobi. I was born anew, becoming a Black, a wog, a Paki, an Asian, a theatre director. Perhaps being born again is not an imperative confined solely to the migrant - but it certainly makes it easier! Thrust into a new life with little preperation - except the balaclavas my mother had wisely thought to buy in Nairobi market before setting off with us...

Darlington

Was Shakespeare against women? Why did you choose to make Caliban so sympathetic and not monstrous? Is this a colonial era play - reflecting the colonial times in Shakespeare's day?

Questions from the younger end of tonight's audience in Darlington (another full house). Who says the language of Shakespeare is inaccessible - though of course it is for some, just as for some theatre itself is boring.

Once again I'm reminded of the cuts - "you are amongst our favourite companies, and now we find all the companies we value have been cut. Where's the logic in that?" This from the venue. No doubt others will fill the void. But why go through such constant re-inventing of the wheel?

Great to see the changes in Darlington - quite a bit of public art. Late at night, in the deserted town square, some of the actors and I tried out the latest offering: lamp-posts that pulse in time with your heart-beat! Squeals of delight from us echo across the square. I wonder if some such machine could be rigged to respond to Shakespeare's metre? A thought... 

Swansea

We were at the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea today - tucked just off the main thoroughfare that runs along Oyster Bay on the "other" (posher, according to the locals) side of the River Tawe. A full house again, in this lovely theatre.  

The following morning, walking along Oyster Bay, past Dylan Thomas' old drinking haunt in Mumbles, the sun's fresh and clear in the sky. It feels sacrilegious to have a fag. Sulling a pure beauty. So I move off from the promenade and sit on a low wet wall in the carpark and light up. Self-confined in the sin bin. Which is how I feel after the 50% cut. Half my life has been hacked off. In the time that remains - I am 54 now - can I recover the half?

One of the things I've begun to appreciate of late is how much more energy I need: I'd only eaten 5 toasts washed down with weak coffee when I had my mope along Oyster Bay. Now, flush with my favourite Chinese (crispy Peking Duck), I'm aghast at the maudlin tone of the morning. What? Already given up? Don't given the so-called mandarins of the Arts so easy vindication of their decision - of course I'll fight on! Tara is, and always has been, more than simply a touring theatre company. It is an idea, that burns as critically today as it did during that long hot summer in 1976 when the idea was born. The idea of mapping the new post-War contours of this country. Contours that wind uncertainly between East and West. 

Yesterday, the Archbishop seemed to have lifted the veil on some of these uncertain contours, when he talked of the "inevitability" of some aspects of Sharia law being adopted within the legal framework of Britain. Whoa! In the hysterical responses to his musings, we see the dangerous rise in intolerance, characterized by a clear backing away from the sensibility of multiculturalism that shaped so much of post-War culture. The re-assertion of "core British values", as the PM is increasingly trumpeting, is worryingly close to what we'd hear from the National Front and the BNP in the 70s and 80s, when they talked of 'Britain for the British'. They meant white British only, of course.

I have always been against purities and authenticities - the 'pure blood', the 'authentic approach to Shakespeare's verse' - as arbitrary expressions of power. Life (and certainly modern life) is the in-authentic, impure "justle" of multiculturalism.  Why should the actions of 4 young British men, who bombed London commuters in defense (or glorification) of what they saw as their religion, discredit the sensibility of multiculturalism?