Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles: Part Two – “One Step at a Time”
“From little streams do broad rivers flow. Now when the big, broad river – the river of life – doesn’t flow like it used to any more, it’s not because it’s feeling bloody-minded, or suddenly turned sluggish, or because it’s all leaking away underground. No, it’s because the thousand little tributaries that feed the big, broad river don’t put any water into it any more. Why? Because they, themselves, have dried up. There’s no mystery about it. The whole problem, you see, lies in these little streams. And each one of you is effectively responsible for a little stream.”
From “The True and Faithful Story of the Man Who Never Gave Orders”
Unlike the autocratic Emperor Qianlong, the story within “The Man Who Never Gave Orders”, as we called this play that I performed many, many times as a one-man-show in the early years of my work in “Industrial Theatre”, suggests an alternative kind of leadership dynamic to making one’s subjects “tremble” and “obey”.
It told the story of a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy because it had failed to adapt to changing circumstances and its leadership had believed that if you just kept on doing what you knew, and telling people to shut up and do what they’re told, it would all come right in the end...
So they brought in an oddball from a different world who, instead of telling people what to do, asked them questions, listened to their answers, and used their knowledge and understanding, and they themselves, to make the changes that were required. Thus the whole notion of “I know all the answers” and “just do as I say” leadership was turned on its head and the “leaders” became the nurturers and encouragers of all those who carried the real value of the company in their hands. Not rocket science, of course, but don’t forget this was the 1980’s and some worlds had barely changed from those austere, male-dominated, hierarchical days of 50 years before – and some still haven’t.
I stood on a loading platform in a Scottish iron foundry in Dundee and told it as the night shift came off and the dawn shift came on. I told it to a hard-nosed bunch of prison governors and kissed one on the top of his bald head at four in the morning after he’d told the filthiest Robbie Burns poem imaginable to the last ones standing around him. I told it to one of the biggest insurance companies in the land again and again. I told it up in Manchester in the days after my mother died and a ruddy-faced Cheshire farmer stood up with tears running down his face and said, “That’s my story! That’s my story!” And I told it to all 180 wild Australian women in Hong Kong in 1993 who, despite my being drastically unbriefed, at least let me live to tell the tale.
I also told the good Antipodean ladies another story about my first visit to Australia, back in 1985, when I discovered something about my ancestry both from the point of view of my paternal grandmother, born in the wilds of New South Wales a hundred years before, and, in a more oblique way, our more ancient ancestry as human beings, despite the best attempts of such as my great-great-grandparents and their descendants to diminish and destroy this heritage on arrival in this vast “new” territory on the other side of the world. But as this story was courtesy of another theatrical experience, I’ll save it for a future chronicle.
I didn’t tell either story in smoggy Beijing in 2007, however, nor how the year before my wife, Gill, and I had visited Mainland China, me for the first time, to join our eldest son and his family on a wonderful adventure in the care of our ever-present Chinese guide, “Charles”.
It was he, with delightful humour and touching generosity, who opened up a whole hidden world to our wondering eyes including travelling in a small boat up the Li River between the cormorant fishermen and the towering vertical outcrops of Guanxi before canoeing back down several days later; secret river bank villages where teeth were pulled and chestnuts cooked outside in the narrow streets in sights surely unchanged for centuries; the tenderest of human-manured pak choi cooked with an endless sequence of little dishes of meat and vegetables in a village house still daubed with the revolutionary graffiti from Mao’s Long March of 70 years before in the best meal we had in China; clouds of the biggest and most beautiful swallowtail butterflies that kissed our heads as we climbed Nine Horses Hill with the juice of ripe persimmons dripping down our chins; the wriggling White Flower Snake Gill carried over her shoulder in the bag on the pole from the terraced rice slopes of the land of the Dong, the Jong and the Yao for our Dragon and Phoenix soup at the end of own long march that evening.
No. We had another tale for our participants here, based on the subtleties of unconscious bias and the distinctions between discrimination and harassment, with the added ingredient of being able to give feedback to and coach our protagonists in the drama in the privilege of the learning from the workshop process. Not quite so exciting as the tales of the Dong, the Jong and Yao you might think but, for both the Chinese, with strange things floating in the jars they drank from by their chairs, and their stiffly upright British counterparts with whom they sat side by side, it was certainly different.
Many, if not most, had not experienced live theatre in any form before, let alone right there in front of you, close enough to touch. Then sharing this experience with those to whom they might not have dreamt of exposing certain feelings or perceptions under normal circumstances – well, can you imagine? But by establishing a certain distance between their reality and the world of the drama, and gently immersing them, “one step at a time”, it became possible and safe to first discuss and then identify what was acceptable and what was not amongst the behaviours portrayed by our characters in their professional relationships.
As a consequence, through carefully facilitated reflection, our participants were able to take away a heightened awareness of how they themselves might contribute to a more supportive and informed working environment, both as individuals and collectively.
But maintaining the engagement and well-being of all participants in a course of this nature is not easy, for them or you, the facilitator, however well-prepared and supported one might be in the process. In fact, despite having a brilliant translator, the level of concentration required in addition to questions and discussion, while managing the pace and ensuring the ground is covered – it’s exhausting, frankly. And if you have just one day free in your demanding schedule between flying in and flying out, then you try to make the most of it.
The air in Beijing in 2007 was no longer air. It was a barely breathable, opaque, toxic, chemical porridge that clogged and smarted all tender apertures and organs that came into contact with it. Inside, in the filtered, air-conditioned space of office or hotel, was so much better than out in the street, for all the life to be found there. But further out, way beyond the city limit, it was said, there was another world, fresh, bright, full of flowers, birds and the bells of distant temples. Could it be true? Only one way to find out.
Unfortunately, my taxi driver, having sworn he knew the way, had obviously never been to the Fragrant Hill Imperial Garden, now a public park, in his life.
Still recovering from being kidnapped by a young artist the previous evening, when I’d been dragged though a dark alleyway and forced at brush-point to spend far too much on not very good “traditional” Chinese paintings to take back home to my family, on my last and only free day, I just wanted air and light and leaf. Not too much to ask, surely.
Nevertheless, two hours later, at last escaping my progressively less magical mystery tour, here I am, sitting under the Chinese Lantern Tree in the courtyard of the old Zhiao Temple, built in 1780 in honour of a great Tibetan monk. And there it stood in beauty and tranquility for a hundred years until brutally, callously, smashed flat by the British and the French. Why? We know, sadly, of course we do. At least the Chinese government started rebuilding this and other desecrated temples in the 1940s and 50s and over the following decades enabled us to enjoy and contemplate both the beauties and iniquities of the past, in all their conflicting and confusing, not to say, shame-making complexities.
A huge, chequered Swallowtail butterfly settles on a shrub beside me and I hear a spattering of applause like leaves in a breeze up above my head where, perhaps, a concert is taking place? And over there, a temple with gorgeous green and apricot glazed tiles, the hum and buzz of crickets everywhere, some as loud as drills. And birds! The first birds I’ve heard since arriving in China. And there, on a huge, deep green, broad-leaved tree towering above my bright orange Chinese lanterns, the leaves politely clap to honour the beauty that persists, despite the ravages of foreign barbarians. It smells green here, deep juicy green, like a sunken lane in Dorset in the Spring, so different to the noxious air of Beijing.
As I climb the steep, steep path to the top of Fragrant Hill, a lizard crosses my path, and another, tiny, gold-black-brown in horizontal stripes, is curious about me. It circles me, bright-eyed, in ever tightening rings, closer, closer – gone. Meanwhile, the granpas who are warned on a notice board at the bottom of the hill about the steepness ahead – “one step at a time, never give up, says the gentleman bamboo” – are variously walking up and down, one very, very slowly down, as if looking for the mind he lost a long, long time ago, and children dart in and out of vision between the trees like hot, happy lizards, calling to each other across the path.
I pass someone resting in a hammock, an elderly woman, reading her book in the shade of her parasol, the hammock swinging almost imperceptibly from time to time in the gentle breeze. And then a call comes from a bench nearby. “Welcome to Beijing” the young man says, with his young lady nestling close beside him on their bench. I start to walk towards them but he places his hand firmly on his blushing young lady’s knee and looks away to signify that our exchange is complete. We should go about our business, he with his courting, I on my way up the steep, steep path. “One step at a time. Never give up.” And so I do, and don’t.
We are a family climbing this mountain, in a beautiful breeze, with butterflies and birds of all varieties – the former visible, the latter, for the most part, only heard. The granpas, children, lovers, the reader-in-the-hammock, me – and The Woman Who Never Rests.
This woman of a certain age in her sensible slacks climbs slowly, step by step, her measured pace never varying, tortoise to my hare, as she passes me each time I rest. She is listening to some comedy on her transistor radio, held by one hand to her ear, which I hear, canned laughter fading, as she takes each zig and zag up and away, step by step, until, setting off once more, the volume rises as I catch and pass her. And so on. Up and up.
Cocooned entirely in her own world, I might not exist. In contrast, I, for all the distraction from the natural sound of bird and leaf, child’s cry, the crunch of foot on gravelled path, accommodate, even welcome her presence with her rise and fall of artificial laughter as she climbs and climbs without ever stopping to rest. I suspect she wouldn’t should the mountain reach forever into the highest, dizzy blue realms of the Celestial Kingdom, climbing step by step until she touched the stars.
But there, at the top of the 1,827 ft high “Incense Burner Peak”, taking its name from a great rock resembling an incense burner, so I’m told, perched high up there on Fragrant Hill, the mountain stops, as do we. By The Stone at The Top of The Mountain, we sit and smile, all of us – the great, bow-legged, grinning, gap-toothed granpa with his skinny, knock-kneed, grinning, gap-toothed grandson, The Woman Who Never Rests (who now does, even laying down her radio, silent at last), a fleet of sailor-clad school-children on an outing and one happy gwai lo. In the sun, on the top of the Fragrant Hill, all’s well with the world.
But then I hear it, such a tiny sound.
“weeb, weeb”.
What was that?
“weeb, weeb”.
Where is it coming from?
“weeb, weeb”.
And then I see it. Down there, beside my left foot. A tiny, beautiful, iridescent flying creature, its wings, its entire delicate frame caught in a silken spider’s web. Trapped and miserable. Exhausted. Unable to move, let alone fly. Not even one step at a time. Ready to give in.
“weeb, weeb”.
“It’s all right,” I cry. “Don’t despair. Help is at hand!”
Gently bending down, I reach out and, strand by strand, disentangle my sad iridescent blue and green princess, mindful of her delicate limbs and waving, wondering, wary antennae. At last, she is free and sits for a moment, perched on my finger, antennae questing. And then she lifts her head and looks at me.
At that very moment, over by The Stone at The Top of The Mountain, a young man breaks into song. Free and floating as a voice from a temple bell, he sings of whatever he sings, love, I expect, perhaps the same song we heard once in a market in Shenzhen, the previous year, which a friend translated for us, so struck had we been by its high, quavering, heart-touching tones:
“My girl likes to sing and when she sings
The whole mountain bursts into flower.
Her songs enter my soul,
My heart is troubled,
My hands burn, I grow shy.
When I hide under her window
To listen to her song
She throws a bowl of cold water
All over my bare head.
Wet through, I shiver with cold.
“Don’t come if you don’t sing,” she sings.
“Sing more than you work
Or how can I know your heart?”
I watch my princess take to the sky, become a speck and then just a memory – the mark she made on my walk up Fragrant Hill.
On my way back I stopped, as urged by Mother, Daughter and yet another Granpa, my new friends from my extended family on the downward journey, to admire the “Bells in the Cloud” Pavilion, and the “Glazed Longevity” Pagoda, both of which had been razed to the ground along with the “Gardens of Perfect Brightness” in the Anglo-French attacks towards the end of the 19th century. Both had since been perfectly reconstructed and painted exactly as they had been in all their Buddhist glory, the pagoda seven stories high, adorned with 80 niches glazed in yellow, green, purple and blue tiles, with bronze bells hung at the end of the densely stacked eaves designed to tinkle when the wind blows.
While the bells did as bidden in the gentle breeze, I sat nearby, drinking green tea and pondered on my longevity, past, present and future, in a glazed kind of fashion. This was rudely interrupted from time to time by a smoky school of card players at a nearby table who slapped their cards down furiously as each game came suddenly to an explosive conclusion at regular intervals.
But that night, the eve of my departure, I celebrated three things in succession with my international friends from my evenings at the Jianguo Bar in my hotel.
The first glass of Glenfiddich was to the potential for a whole new seam of work here in China after a series of very successful days despite all the challenges. It seemed that our theatre-based approach had achieved a breakthrough no-one had believed possible, given the contrasting cultures concerned. But from “blue collar” through to senior executives, on both sides of the cultural divide, the participants had opened up and shared stories in a way that surprised everyone involved. And it heralded a wider appreciation of our craft, beyond the confines of this particular client, watching spies permitting. Or so it seemed in that moment.
The second glass was to “wet the head” of my new grandchild whose imminent arrival had kept me on tenterhooks until I received the news that afternoon. May he take life “one step at a time” and, above all, “never give up” was the toast.
The third, and final glass, a pledge – a pledge to “sing more than I work”. As I raised my glass, I wondered how long it would take for the bowl of cold water to be thrown over my head, soaking me through to the skin. Not long, I feared, not long, as a wobbly rendering from Stevie Nicks’ “In Your Dreams” was struck up by the resident bar band.
