I told my parents back home “I am living with my boyfriend, and two of his friends Ed and Jon.” And my mother said “All boys….so it’s you who cooks everyday, yeah?”

In my home town, a small rural village in Japan, the word “woman” and “housewife” are so close to each other that there is hardly any gap between. By the way, “wife” and “maid” are close, too. I mean not literary, of course…

Living in London, I have a feeling that I am now experiencing a significant milestone of cultural anthropology – the over-empowering of women. One of the most significant revolutions in fashion history was women starting to wear trousers, and since then we came too far, I fear. What are we wearing now?

The over-empowering of women has lots to do with the sexualisation of children, I think – they were discussing this today on “The Wright Stuff”.

What we have now are women who are confused about their aspirations, a media frenzy with no moral backup, and a stark difference between each country’s attitude towards women.

“Kate’s family can be traced back to a mining family. A miner to Buckingham palace, what an achievement.” “Her father must be extremely proud.”"It’s a girl’s dream, being a princess!”. During the royal wedding furore, England temporarily became Japan. I doubted my ears. “Excuse me, if women’s ultimate happiness lies in marriage, what’s all the fuss you have been making for all these years?” In appearance, women here demand equality in careers, and abuse the word “sexist” as ammunition; actually they still long for being fed by rich men.

In appearance they follow this trend of independent women, but they haven’t changed at heart. They are confused. I sometimes feel sorry for men in London.

In Tokyo, it’s been about 10 years since several train companies introduced a carriage for their rush hour trains specially dedicated to female passengers, because of the unstoppable number of molesters. Women in Japan not only have to live without the concept of Ladies First, but also live in an environment that they can’t even dare glare at the molesters. They are not educated to fight against men, not even voice their opinions. Hence, it was only authority who can stop this, not women themselves. By the way, what an insult for Japanese men, I think. They are officially a bunch of oppressed animals, and a victory to my favourite English gentlemen. But how about English women? Are they ladies? No, they are spoiled and even arrogant. I can imagine, in London, the situation is opposite – young girls wearing slutty clothes and complaining about men just glancing at them – “sexual harassment”. For me it’s obviously reverse sexual harassment. From my point of view, women here should appreciate how polite men are. (Needless to say, this is the reason why there are so many “Japanese girl and English boy” couples all over the place, I speculate. This is the perfect engagement of mutual benefits)

I love head-strong London women who are singing the praises of freedom, though. When I discussed this royal wedding matter with my friend, she said “women can’t choose, women want everything; a dependable rich husband as well as an independent career.” I agree. Maybe I am becoming this monster-like woman myself, I pretty much fear. I am spoilt by my gentle English boyfriend, and am pursuing my freelance career at the same time. But I can also tell that recently I have been encountering more and more remarkable cases that show women with less of the elegance and modesty that the good old days valued so much.

I remember the first thought that came to my mind after the news breaking was “here it comes, ok, people in Sendai are having  their turn now”. It sounds nasty here, but that’s the reality. Everyone in Japan has a share of almost equal amount of earthquakes. The last big one was Kobe, so this time it was a different part of Japan, then next time would be somewhere else.

Okinawa hardly has earthquakes, but it’s a nest of typhoons. About 10 typhoons get born every year in the south of Okinawa, they always start off from Okinawa then choose where to go from there…”shall I go to Kansai, maybe then Kanto, or Hokkaido, or all of them?” They speculate on their future route while they hang around in Okinawa. Backpackers in Europe always use London as their “base”, the starting point, as it’s convenient, and during their stay in London they decide on whether to go to Paris next or Amsterdam next, east Europe or west Europe.

My background music for breakfast is always Japanese online radio news. I know that recently the first typhoon of the year hit Japan. Here comes the Typhoon season 2011. Just like Major League Baseball. It begins in summer and finishes in winter.

Japan is a bunch of islands mainly made from volcanos. They seem to erupt in a perfect shift system all year round so that there are constantly at least one or two volcanos in action to remind people they are there. This reminds me of Fukushima nuclear power reactors, but they were more like 7 new born babies crying out one after another for their mother in a perfect shift system.

That’s why, the word “evacuee” is very common in Japanese news. There are some towns evacuated somewhere in Japan all the time.

What a cursed island it is.

Anywhere you are, you are always under the threat of nature. This feeling is quite similar to the one I had after the London 7/7 bombing. Terrorism is maybe the only threat we have less of in Japan. When I was in Japan, I never thought that we were unlucky, it’s only after I got here I realised that some people on this globe live their life without any shake, any yearly earthquake drill at school, any evacuation pack beside beds, any scary earthquake alarm on telly, consequent phone calls to relatives in other regions informing each other with numbers “it was 4 here, how about you?”, any emergency order from father to family members to shut all the storm shutters of the house. In England, we have pretty fire places, but we don’t have windows each attached with screens for summer, and storm shutters for typhoons.

Having written all this, the feeling welling up inside me is homesickness. All of these desasters are completely part of our life. Also I guess people in Japan wouldn’t be thinking “Oh god, I wish I lived somewhere there are no natural disasters”. They don’t think there is such a place on the globe. At least that’s how I was.

Human’s life at the mercy of matchless nature. For us this is life itself. This absolute powerlessness and sense of fate play the biggest part to define what Japanese culture, art and personality is as opposed to other Asian countries. Also our technical advancement originates in the most reasonable reason behind, not money, not power, but to survive.

The scary thing is that because of our highly developed technology, we now know pretty much where the next major earthquake will be. Not precise enough to save people, but enough to make people get ready. The next turn for the major earthquake is at Tokai area within 40 years. Everyone in Japan knows this. What would you do if you lived in this area? It’s a sentence. Of course there is no news heard that people in Tokai started to move away, or the land price went down. You just have to live with it, even if you know within 4o years your life will be at risk.

In the interval I checked the information in the foyer and the penny dropped. This particular adaptation was once done by Shared Experience and the company is entirely formed by recent graduates from one drama school. That’s why the technique and story telling style was very familiar to me, also the actors….they are all very young and their acting style were strangely unified, almost faceless. It even reminded me of some productions of acting course students I saw at my drama school. “I see, this may be called the standard result of three years in British acting institution.” They are still blank canvases because at the drama school, acting is not an art, but a grade to pass, discipline to follow, and the result is all similar wherever the school is. I am not criticising, but rather praising this well established British actor mass-producing infrastructure, especially when you compare the result with that in Japan. Japanese people believe that actors can’t be made by training, like  rock musicians, and we end up with very few self-taught good actors and lots of fake self-professed actors who are basically dolls in front of the camera.

I read some professional reviews online, and some of them were pointing out that their devised physical theatre style was clichéd. Yes, most of them were quite familiar techniques, and some of them were contrived and unnecessary. My favourite was the horse racing scene because it was one of the few scenes with ideas I have never seen on stage before. But most of the time there was too much going on, and there were hardly any moments of silence and stillness on stage (although I normally focus on the visual and skim the lines) therefore I couldn’t stop feeling that they attempted to over-compensate the inexperienced acting.

What the review I read triggered me to think was “what’s wrong with copying and reusing what’s invented already?” All the other theatrical forms – traditional theatre, dance, musical, even film – are full of clichés. The problem here is that some people still think physical theatre, a relatively newly born theatrical trend, is supposed to be innovative and rewriting theatre history. My thought to that is no. The evidence is my drama school course where I learned avant-garde theatre as a history and subject to learn, and we learned about Complicité. They didn’t explicitly attempt to mass-produce the innovators, unlike mass-produced actors at my acting course. What the course intended was to induce some creative minds, if I put it in a good way. But still training is training, and it might sound too cynical, but I think anyone who graduated from an institution of experimental theatre training wouldn’t be a pure innovator. There are several courses like that all over UK, and every year hundreds of young people are released into the theatre industry and thrive to make their way in experimental theatre world. How come we can still believe that experimental theatre is more art than business? We have to perceive that physical theatre nowadays became another strand of theatre business, and that’s why some young people go to university to learn about it to hopefully make their livings out of it in the future. So when we go to physical theatre productions, we have to expect to see chairs pretending to be a train, hand-held lamp, paper snow, candle lighting ritual, just like we see Jazz Hands in musicals.

Another thing, being a musician myself, I am very sensitive and judgemental about the use of live music in theatre productions. To be honest I didn’t like the musical choice in this production at all, and most of all I cringe when actors who happen to be able to play a little bit of instruments sheepishly play some half-baked tunes on stage. It’s slightly disrespectful to proper musical theatre and properly multi-skilled musical theatre actors. I can’t help expecting that sort of live music to be as high-standard as Kneehigh’s productions, and if they are not as good in music as that, then they may as well use recorded music. It’s such a shame that this single element ruined this production in a way for me.

I have to make it clear though that this production was closest to my cup of tea, and most enjoyable among everything I saw recently and the rest of the audience seemed to feel the same. Better than Robert Lepage, Peter Brook, Young Vic productions….can it be allowed? I wonder. No, maybe it’s the wrong way to judge. I have to say that this production touched the audience most. The combination of sheer young enthusiasm and energy of the production, Arcola’s charming cozy space and most of all Torstoy’s timeless masterful story touched us.

Return of Ulysses was sang in English, and I am not sure how much of the audience followed every single word in the lyrics. But more that that, the most impressive thing in this production is the set – a glass house like a fish bawl. The production used its unique and elegant set to the full extent of its potential. It employed some visually stunning imagery e.g. the relationship between characters inside and outside of the glass, claustrophobic image, and food, water and dirt making more and more mess on the at-first spotless glass surface. My favourite imagery was the transition when the room rotated with some characters in it alongside dramatic music (live Monteverdi music has a most chic effect). It created the effect of a slowly moving camera.

When it finished, some audience members in front of me were chatting as we were leaving the auditorium, ” They know how to put on shows.” I agree with that. Yes, they know how to impress the audience with their seemingly limitless resources.

The only thing I found unnecessary or ineffective was the simultaneous broadcasting at the top of the stage which was showing live images of action on the stage (just like Big Brother) to provide the audience another focus other than the main action. In theory it is a great idea to give the production multiple layers. It is tiresome for a contemporary audience to watch the same singer(s) throughout some long long areas with repeated lyrics. But this Big Brother-style peeking shot idea felt contrived sometimes.

A Magic Flute was Peter Brook’s other stripped down version of opera. This time this Mozart’s enigmatic but pure singspiel was adapted into Brook’s style.

I knew his company was a group of highly capable physical actors, and his directing style was minimalistic. So what I wanted to see was how he tackles this opera differently from other directors. What exactly he picked out from this fragmented story to form his version of opera was important, needless to say, as he would be one of the few directors in the world who is in the position to make works for his artistic vision and ambition, not for anyone else, I guess.

The simplicity on the stage brought one good outcome which was a very acute sense of music. Some of the most charming Mozart scores were presented to the large audience in the auditorium without any distractions. Then Mozart’s sensitive music emerged in a naked form. There couldn’t have been a better treat than this for me, but how about the rest of us? Some I assume would have heard this opera for the first time, then they must have been busy looking up at the subtitles all the time.

The production lacked any unnecessary so called “operatic” elements such as an orchestra, chorus and set, all of which makes opera a spectacle. As a result it ceased to have its festive experience as such, and the sense of celebration of combined arts which opera is all about. In other words, the production was too refined and elitist that it didn’t give us the atmosphere to enjoy Pappageno’s slapstick wholeheartedly, and some flamboyant musical tricks Mozart inserted for his audience including the Queen’s virtuoso areas. They can exist as entertainment because it’s an opera, and opera means the whole package of art form I mentioned above that enable to fill the massive space. Yes, the company’s highly skilled actors had abilities to fill the vast space by their presence, but not all the cast. So on the whole, the production didn’t radiate enough energy to Barbican’s massive auditorium. That’s the risk of intellectualising the opera story, because opera stories often exist to compliment the music and all the other elements. The production took the backbone out of this package.

However there is a successful example. Brook’s other opera adaptation “Carmen” worked wonderfully because it was a film. But this time, his attempt to focus on the human drama of opera would have worked on a much smaller stage, just like the Operaupclose style. Intimate style opera should be done in film or on an intimate stage.

By the way, I immensely enjoyed the piano on the stage, the pianist played every single note of the score with perfect attentiveness, which Mozart’s music requires. Even just to listen to his piano sounding on the big stage was worth the money of the ticket, I felt.

The same old problem for Opera is how we can understand this ancient and foreign entertainment. If you do an opera in London, you either have to have a translation or subtitles.

I love opera and classical music. I was brought up in far East Asia where Western culture is so far away and so great that you can’t stop blindly aspiring to it, and the language barrier was not a problem at all. The first CD I bought with my own money was Beethoven’s piano concertos. Also I listened and sang along to The Beatles without understanding a single word of the lyrics. All I had in mind was how cool the Western sound was and how beautiful classical music was. Each Beatles’ album had a Japanese translation of the lyrics and it often sounded very silly, almost ruining the music.  Although the music was sophisticated, what they were singing about was most of the time merely about their girlfriends and other girlfriends and other… It’s still the same now, I listen to music without paying attention to lyrics, because it’s how I have been doing. So I enjoy Opera as classical music. And I enjoy theatre without too many lines.

Three of them had their own updated translations created specially for the productions in order to appeal to the local audience with local jokes. Yes, it was funny and that’s how it must have been originally in Italy.

Also the acting. The acting skill of the singers were the key to the success. My favourite opera produciton ever is “Abduction from Selario” by Hans Noienfels. He used an actor and a singer each for each character and put them in the same costume and let them play with it. Almost twins or alter-ego-like existence existed often at the same time on the stage and they were there to tell the story to the audience. It was an extremely witty and dark production which cut deep into the core emotion of Mozart’s early and rather emotionally immature characters. The actors played a most intense and superb dialogue, and singers too. It was a perfect example of how drama and music can equally serve the story at their best. You were witnessing a wrestle between drama and music.

All of the above three productions I watched in London changed the setting of  the original opera into contemporary/ unlikely/ controversy/ everyday setting and made it as accessible as possible. Some worked and some didn’t . When it didn’t work, I ended up closing my eyes so that I could concentrate on the music, as it was the only bits pleasurable for me. When it worked, it was great. But even if we keep on doing that “casualization” of opera, still there will be a limit, I fear. Because at the end of the day, why haven’t  these operas been forgotten already after centuries of music history? Because they are perfect as they are, and still the Royal Opera House fills up. Opera CDs sell well enough so that there are still opera courses in conservatories. In the end, I am a classical music fan, it means I enjoy opera as it is, and I feel a little arrogant to say “I want more people to appreciate opera so I will make some deconstructed operas”. No. Leave opera alone.

Having said that, one of my wildest ambitions as a creator is to direct Mozart’s operas in a completely different way to shake up the opera and theatre industry, in other words, becoming the “Matthew Bourne of opera”. So in my mind there are two opposite egos which are conservative music lover and experimental artist constantly conflicting.

My experimental mind wants to create something in between opera and abstract visual live performance using film. So the narrative of the opera should be supported by film with good naturalistic acting, then the structure of Mozart’s music should be left as it is, then visual abstract physical theatre should happen at the same time to combine all of them together. That’s my take on enjoying the music itself  as an atmosphere, without dwelling too much on the meaning and translation of each word.

Let’s see if I can realise that in the near future.

It’s a highly original and compelling idea from a small ambitious film company. It’s a matter of time before it becomes not so secret in London and moves its way to a major event. Pop-up, boundary blurring art is in a trend at the moment. But this one is not in the trend, but making a new genre by itself. Because of this, I truly doubted the power of theatre that seems more limited and dated compared to film, for the first time. My faith in theatre has been shaken. Not that people don’t need theatre, theatre should always be there, like a library will be there, just theatre and library will never be equal or superior to film and internet in terms of their universal appeal, unless you count their romantic value.

From the audience’s point of view, it’s a highly commercial event. As a person with a performance background, I have never encountered such an opportunity for the actors to be genuinely valued and used. It all looks legitimate. Actors in this events are there because of a purely necessary – not self-satisfactry – reason.  I can hear the clicking sound of millions of working actors’ dreams and the public demand on actors matched for the first time. What a sheer joy to watch such a miracle.

From inside, it’s totally different, and I hope to work with them in a permanent position, so I will see. Like some fringe theatre people who despise anything commercial, I have never been impressed artistically by any commercial stuff as they always need to play safe. In that instant, Secret Cinema has a key to still call itself art, because it never try to dwells on the same safe trick. It is re-writing London art scene, and I am hugely proud to witness it.

I am not the type of person who loves kids so much to be nursery staff, a nanny, baby-sitter and so on. I am doing it because there is a supply for this job and I can do it, as simple as that. In Japan I used to teach kids English and lots of other subjects, and especially English I found the job very natural and enjoyable for me. I had a feeling like “that’s it, this is my destined profession. I have a talent in this, and people want to pay. Mutual satisfaction. Not my stupid self-satisfactry theatre malarkey.” But even that time, my pleasure came mainly from my passion for teaching English, not entirely from kids.

It is a weird profession. You take care of 4-year-old girl and ensure her security – basically make her happy – but she’s not your kid. The other day I had this girl two days in a row and was told to take her to exactly the same park. If you do the same thing two days in a row, it is a routine. In the park I saw the same people, and I could tell some people might look at me as her mother because she is half Japanese. I was sitting down on the bench with her scooter and a pack of snacks her mother meticulously prepared, observing people. All of them seemed to be real families, and I was impressed by how much energy the parents put into their kids, really, not just financially but physically. I got completely bored with this park in only two days, but if you are a real parent you can’t afford to get bored. The girl I am looking after is obsessed with a swing although she can’t make it work unless someone pushes her. So I ended up pushing her until eventually she gets bored, which is about 15 mins after, at the same time my arms start to ache. There will be three or four sets of that session a day, every day, for a few years. The point is that my attachment to her doesn’t involve love. So I feel strangely alienated from all the other dedicated parents around me who have the real long-term commitment.

When I watch a TV programme called “Supernanny”, I always get hugely amazed by the skill of Supernanny, and also feel overwhelmed by its responsibility and the reward to be a parent. In other words I get very excited about being a parent one day. I believe that being a parent is the most amazing job I can do in my life and I am looking forward to it. But being a nanny is different. I can’t suddenly set up a naughty chair for someone else’s kid. I am just a guest in her life, no commitment, no love, what can I do?

Of course she is from a family who can afford nannies and they live in London. There is no use in comparing with my childhood. But now I am an adult and can totally understand parents’ perspective –  how and when a nanny comes into the family according to the mother’s work schedule and other commitments. The backstage of childcare which the actual child never gets to know.

My family are  farmers in a rural Japanese village, where most of the villagers are farmers and their houses huddle together to form a village. Also lots of relatives with the same surnames. A very religious and narrow-minded group society. All the adults in my family worked as a team to support my father who does the heaviest work. My mother always picked me up from the nursery at 12 and after that I always played by myself, or with chickens, with mother or someone working in one of the greenhouses surrounding the house. None of my classmates had a nanny, I remember. When mother is busy, that’s when grandparents come in handy. For me nanny was a concept invented only in Mary Poppins, or some super rich families or fairy tales. The whole village knows who you are and which high school you are in and how you are growing mature and ….including terribly private matters they know and rumours so they didn’t make my sensitive teen life easy, I have to say. Since it was a father-centerd family system, the whole family was there to oblige my father and then grandfather. Not only that, to make the matter extreme, because of farming, the family was the business itself and my father was the president of the company as well as the family. We ensure he can work comfortably and the family life existed around him and vegetables. Definitely no holidays, hardly any family travel, no big shopping trips, no Disneyland. For my parents no day off apart from around new years day which is 4 days out of the entire year.  As the last child of three children in such a family, I always had a feeling that childcare is the family’s side business. The most important thing is not to ruin the vegetables all year long as well as keep the family name respectable in front of the neighbors, not to make children happy because they would grow up playing with whatever is available. They didn’t give a damn even if I implore that I feel miserable because I am the only one who hasn’t been to Disneyland in the class. I still have a fresh memory of this – one day I was playing with a tennis ball in a big car park in front of my house, and I fell into an empty gutter as deep as my height. I was brought back to the house and mother tried to see the cuts in my thighs in the living room. I lay down crying in the middle of the tatami mat floor, then my grandfather got annoyed saying “keep that noisy child away from me!” In order to gain their attention and make my smallest voice heard in the family of 7, I worked extra hard in everything I tried and I was always the top of the class in most of the subjects other than sports, but of course my parents were too busy to notice my effort.

As well as being socially restrictive and hardly paying full attention to me, my parents were very strict about buying me things, as they could get away with using the old stuff from my sister and brother. It is only after I started nanny jobs when I entered some houses which were entirely covered with children’s stuff- the whole family exists around the child. Because my parents hardly gave me what I wished, I couldn’t wait to be independent and live by myself, earn money to use for myself. I was just like a caged bird thirsty for freedom, money and approval. As soon as I escaped from my hometown to a big city, I became a street-wise, money-orientated  independent girl who manages everything without seeking anyone’s help. I knew what I wanted, and I knew how to get it. Soon the big city stops being a challenge for her any more, and she looks for an even bigger adventure on the other side of the earth, where she loses her confidence for the first time because of language.

Watching a 4-year-old closely is a very fascinating human observation of dependence and instinct. She sucks her thumb everytime she is tired  to feel her mother. I have a particular type of shiver when the girl cries her eyes out to cling onto her mother after realizing she is leaving. She ignores me and runs away from me, basically she hates me like hell. “Don’t worry your mum will be back soon, very soon. Come on, let’s play with Keiko.” I say, but in my head I am crying and thinking “Oh god, can I go home? I am not here to play a devil for her.” But the mother is of course practical. She pretends  that we all go to the park together and gets her prepared to go outside, and one step outside the door shuts the door behind us. It’s a nightmare for the girl, and for me. She bangs the door madly like a film character getting imprisoned – “open the door!” – , and she cries for 5 mins until she gets exhausted . What can I say? Nothing. The funny thing is that it is only me who gets upset amongst three of us. The mother is fine, the girl lives in her instant instinct as an animal so she forgets once I mention ice cream. I get upset by all this melodrama, and I get a shiver which I only experience in this situation. Did I cry like that when I was little?

That evening the mother came home and we talked about the girl being very interested in the bell of my bicycle, while her own bicycle doesn’t have one. And she says “ok we will buy one for you tomorrow” I used to get very nervous and confused when my parents spontaneously got me to choose something I want to buy. I got even skeptical about it and asked “Why? It is not my birthday.” Or I felt quite uneasy in front of my grandparents who don’t live with me, trying to splash their money for me everytime I see them. Her cat-like short emotions and memory span is amazing. One moment her life is hell because she can’t go to bed with mother but a stranger called nanny, but then when I mention reading books immediately she gets drown into choosing books. When she is eating she is nothing but an animal in my view. She is this big now as a result of daily feeding her mother has been carefully and restlessly preparing every day for 4 years. If she fails to do so even once, this girl would be in trouble. More than all, the health and growth of her each and every cell depends entirely on mother’s attentiveness for another 15 years or so. What a job! and what a fascinating relationship. This small helpless creature is the product of this excessively dependent and beautiful relationship.   For some reason I get a shiver when I look into her eyes which scarcely recognize me.

Luckily my current flat does’t have a washing machine, so I am making use of this opportunity to enjoy my local launderette. There, some spanish speaking ladies work at the counter. Whenever I go there they are tackling with a sea of washing piled up in Ikea bags. Then I think, oh I wish I could swap job with them for just one day, maybe as an apprentice.

There are two reasons which got me into this – seemingly one of the most boring jobs women can do in London.

1: I just love handling clothes, I guess, also the idea of simply having piles of tasks physically in front of you as “Today’s work” thrills me for some reason, people might call it a sense of achievement. If all I have to do to make a living is to come and get on with the task all day, what a peaceful and joyful way of earning that is! Of course I would get bored after a few weeks..

2: The space has a theatre element in there, I always feel. The sense of voluntary community. People come and go. More significant than a bus stop. I go there exactly once a week to do my and my boyfriend’s washing, and one day when I got there, one of the ladies handed me my nickers saying “Excuse me, it must be yours. You left it last time you were here.” A voluntary community. If I could sit down behind the counter all day..

How many launderettes are there in London? Is there anyway to make a network between all the launderettes in London to connect them? An idea to integrate launderettes with theatre – making a London launderette map and setting up a launderette crawls with some performances in the space and some surprises in the machines. Maybe the audience have to change their clothes found in the machine and wash the old one…that would set the time scale of the performance..Also how many launderettes are managed by non-English people?

It is a show about, no, I should not say “about”. This is a show “by” a french rock band – 3 boys and a girl – I would say exploring how much they can make something interesting – some sort of theatre-ish performance – in a rock band format without falling into characters, script … something like that.

Funnily enough, I once saw a similar type of attempt done by another french company at Edinburgh Festival. It was called Score, and they didn’t use any words or characters,  just lots and lots of gadgets to create a humourously low-energy show. The stance is always “We are a geeky french group, and are very fascinated by these gadgets not you, so won’t pull a funny face for you. But it may look funny sometimes, then you can laugh…” I don’t know, is this kind of charm (that English people love to watch) used by certain European companies as a weapon?

I am not a rock musician, in fact I can’t even read a lead sheet, but I could clearly tell that they were quite able musicians. It is such a delight to see people on stage being musically competent. I might sound arrogant, but I have to say I don’t particularly like watching theatre people doing something musical although they are not musicians, as in without being aware that music means years of discipline first and foremost. Everyone can call themselves theatre makers when they want to, but only chosen trained people can be dancers and musicians. This throws me another thought. There was a course in my drama school called Actor Musicianship. Are they super-people who can do both things equally? Another frequently asked general question, “Are opera singers singers who can act or actors who can sing?”

There were several lift-off moments for me in the show. One is when they started to make a cheerful and hyper pop song using the actual instruction guide for one of the instruments as lyrics. Another one was the moment when the girl who was playing a drum standing in profile stepped over the drum slowly under a dim light while being taken over by a guy from behind, and it was at the same time as the music going into a momentum. I also need to note that the girl was gorgeous looking, with long long legs in a leather leggings and pin heels. It was a cinematic moment which depicted the character of the music. Such a shame I can’t describe what the music was, all I can say is it was a sort of quite dramatic and energetic rock.

Sure there were some wishy washy moments and some self-indulgent moments. I needed to ask “ok it’s clever, but why? It looks silly” Or maybe you don’t need to care about that then, because there is no narrative, no character involved here.

I didn’t even know what Somerset House was built for originally. Again, complete novice as a viewer. And here it comes. Even the beginning of the journey thrilled me enough- going two stories down using worn out stairs one of which I couldn’t see from the ground level, already feels like a detective sneaking into a manor house from the rear stairs. The view in this river level corridor reminded me of a Croatian sea side town I visited called Split. Strong sun shining over a brutal but sad looking white wall of an abandoned mediaeval town. Only this time it is in London, so less white and more gray, with mould everywhere.  It was such a refreshing combination of water, sky and an abandoned gray building imprisoned me.

But of course it was not just a public opening of hidden site of Somerset House. It was a sound and visual installation on top. And to be honest as a viewer I wanted more mischievousness to go with this space. Imagine how it is like at night…the conversation with its dwelling, by that I mean history and ghosts. So many possibilities this space can open up for us. But of course it will be another few years or never before we see this space again, because I imagine authorities will shut the door of this historical space once this exhibition finishes.

The longer I live in London, the more I realise its artistic resoursfulness. What a blessing for an artist to be here.