I write to you from an eerily quiet corner of Copenhagen airport on a cold Sunday night. I’m eating bananas instead of a real dinner. This is a (pointless) attempt to stick to my diet, despite having eaten like a piggy for the last four days. The bathroom scales will tell a tale of woe and destruction when I get back.

I’ve been here in Copenhagen at the invitation of Mungo Park Theatre on the outskirts of Copenhagen.  Artistic director Martin Lyngbo and producer Anne-Sophie Fogedby were such charming and thoughtful hosts and really couldn’t have taken better care of me. They’re interested in us working together on a future production and so invited me out to see three of their shows to give me an idea of what their work’s about. And the news is good, kids. The shows were great! First I saw Mungo Park: The Man Behind The Name, a show about the little-known Scottish explorer who the theatre is named after. Next show was Lecture, a show aimed at teenagers, where two stuffy lecturers act out outlandish morality plays based on the seven deadly sins. One character gets killed by a massive flying turd. When the sin gets too much they calm themselves down by playing some ‘quality jazz’ but eventually they give in to temptation and are taken over by the characters they play.

The third show was Woman Know Your Body. This one is based on a classic feminist book from the Seventies which was an enormous hit in Denmark. Practically every Danish home has a copy, apparently. This show is Mungo Park’s interpretation of, meditation on and reaction to the original book. The poster for the show used a famous photo from the book of a vagina – the original book encouraged women to use mirrors to get to know their genitals better. That’s why the Mungo Park show has a mirrored floor. When the big vagina posters went up all round Copenhagen there was scandal in the conservative press which was followed, of course, by a fantastic feminist uproar – ‘what’s wrong with large photos of vaginas being plastered all round the city?!’ Ah, Scandinavia, how we love you.

Trailer: Woman Know Your Body  (Kvinde Kend Din Krop) on Vimeo.

All three of shows had really energetic, charismatic performances which the audiences clearly loved. Underneath that, though, was a really high level of skill, quality and precision that I found really exciting. So, we’re now talking about possibilities of shows we could work on together. We had a lovely meeting this afternoon where we each threw ideas into the hat of things we’ve had on the back burner, ideas that we’ve always meant to get around to. “I’ve always wanted to make a show about dogs” sort of thing (but not that, obviously).

All of January has been really tough-going in terms of work, so this trip was a welcome tonic. I seem to have spent most of my time in the last month frantically trying to sort out budgets, company accounts and board meeting papers at the same time as needing to sort out staff for the new show Untitled Love Story. Writing the new draft of said show has had to be crammed into spare hours here and there each morning, always with the looming fear that I should be checking my email. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why I do all of this at all. So, this trip to Copenhagen has cheered me immensely and made me remember what I love about my job. Thank fuck for that.

In between all of this theatre going, I got the chance to walk around the sub-zero city and take some pictures, which was great. Below is my photo-blog with a selection of my favourite photos. I hope you enjoy them.

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Happy New Year from Paris, reader! A photo slideshow of all the things I have been enjoying over the last fortnight.

Here’s to a great 2011 for us all !

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Morag Stark, Ewan Donald, Claire Knight and Michael Popper read 'Untitled Love Story'

Last Friday afternoon we did a small rehearsed reading of my new piece Untitled Love Story. It’s a very early draft and the show won’t open until next summer. This is how we’re describing it at the moment, though it is bound to change a bit over the next six months:

Untitled Love Story is a participatory meditation-as-art performance that combines the ancient Buddhist meditation on loving kindness with modernist texts and fluxus-inspired instructional artworks. The audience are guided through a meditative visualisation whilst a 360° electro-acoustic soundscape surrounds them. The piece is set in Venice over four different decades, though always after midnight. We hear the voices of four characters who glide past each other on the silky canals, but never meet. An art collector whose glorious, lonely palazzo looks out over the glittering water. A writer who moves to Venice only to find that her partner decided to disappear. An art historian whose frosty personality stands in stark contrast to his midnight breakdowns. A catholic priest who tries to encourage meditative prayer in the cathedral only to be accused of heresy.

We invited a small group of about fifteen people whose opinion we value and read the piece to them. We then forced them to fill in questionnaires about what they thought and with ideas for improvements. I find this process of completely nerve-shredding but incredibly useful. It’s so difficult to get productive criticism from people. Once a show is open people tend to be generous and polite whether they like the show or not. I think you often see artists repeat the same mistakes again and again because nobody is giving them the criticism they need. Of course it isn’t necessarily pleasant to receive, but that’s okay. It’s part of the job to suck it up. The  feedback was very positive (phew!) and also had great, useful criticism to be woven into the next draft.

I’ll get back to writing the new draft after new year. In the meantime I am officially on holiday. I’m writing this from a beautiful apartment in Paris, near the Canal Saint Martin where I spent my birthday (yesterday) and will spend Christmas and New Year. So, dear reader, have a wonderful winter holiday and whatever flavour. See you in 2011!

I’m sitting in Schipol airport waiting for my connecting flight to Glasgow and editing my photos of Istanbul as I wait. What an intense four days it has been. I was there to undertake artistic research. Well, artistic research after a fashion. I was there under the auspices of a lovely organisation from Stockholm called Intercult. They have undertaken a series of projects where they send two artists on ‘dates’ together to cities they don’t know. The artists spend a few days getting to know each other and getting to know the city and then come up with artistic responses which could be shown in that city and then tour to other cities.

For my trip they’ve tried a new method in that they matched me with a local historian and arts producer to see how that works. Her name is Selen Akçali, a native Istanbullu (loving that word) and she knows the city really well. Her father used to make the brand of paint most favoured by graffiti artists in Istanbul. She’s currently working on a PhD about the propaganda activities of the Turkish state during the second world war. Absolutely fascinating. It was a great privilege to spend time with her. Selen gave me an absolutely intense four days of morning, noon and night running around the city. There was so much information to take in that I’m still reeling. It’s an intensely energetic city anyway, let alone with our wild schedule. It was like I had a month’s worth of experience distilled into four days.

I wanted to get as wide an overview of the city as possible. We did some of the obvious things that you might expect a tourist to do. We went to the Hagia Sofia and the Basilica Cistern, both of which I fell in love with (like everyone else in the world). We also did things to give me a view of the other Istanbuls. We visited shopping malls and took ferries. We drank 50% proof raki, which tasted like a marvellous mixture of aniseed and petrol. We visited an incredibly run down Roma area which was just round the corner from luxurious hotels. Nearby were a series of fascinating wig shops which are, apparently, all fronts for brothels. We also ate a lot. A lot. I’m vegetarian which often makes trying local foods difficult, but with Selen to guide the way I tried lots of fantastic Turkish foods that I’d never had before and never even heard of. We saw fantastic art in Istanbul Modern, which seems to well deserve its reputation for excellence and its commendation in last year’s European Museum of the Year awards. I only wish I’d had time to stay and watch the fascinating series of videos about Turkish transgender women, shown in a beautiful dark red room full of plush frilly sofas.

We also saw a truly remarkable exhibition called Molecular Istanbul by Serge Spitzer which was shown in a tiny ancient synagogue. We were given a tour of the all the ramshackle workshops which now occupy the spaces, including a rubber workshop and an aluminium smelting workshop, who allowed us to watch them pouring molten metal into their moulds made of black sand. We were then shown into the main synagogue space which has been disused for years. Actually, it has been used to store mousepads for years. The space was almost dark and we stood in the gloom waiting for our eyes to adjust. Slowly slowly slowly our eyes became aware of a pattern of thousands of sparkling glass marbles arranged to fill the room. It was a beautiful, sublime moment.

Selen also arranged a very special trip to an old power station at Santral Istanbul that has been converted by a university into an energy museum and art gallery. We met Kerem Piker, the architect who designed the art gallery, and he gave us a detailed and fascinating tour of the buildings. As a background to all of this is perhaps my favourite thing about the city which is that there are cats everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. What better recommendation could a city have?

As for my ‘artistic responses’ to the city, it is hard to know. I was so bombarded with experience and information that it will take time for me to digest it and respond. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. In a brilliant way. Watch this space, reader.

Then, suddenly, I found myself getting up at 3am (3AM!) to fly home. And here I am, reader, sitting in Schipol airport waiting for the last leg back to Weegieland. While I’m waiting, here are my favourite shots of Istanbul…

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My producer forbade me from working, which I took to mean that I shouldn’t do any unpleasurable work. So, I spent the week researching the new show, which we’re planning to premiere next August. I’m a little bit behind with the writing of this because all my time has been taken up with dashing around the world for Susurrus. I did create a sample scene for this new piece in the summer as part of my Three New Ideas presentation in Edinburgh International Festival but now I need to fill in all the gaps and get the proper first draft written as soon as possible.

So, I’ve spent this week finding out more about:

• Modern art philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim‘s relationship with Samuel Beckett
• Metta bhavana – the Buddhist meditation on loving kindness
• Fluxus heuristic artworks where the audience are given instructions to carry out as part of the artwork.
• The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Greek sculpture of Nike from 190 BC, now in the Louvre.
• Boccioni’s 1913 sculptural response to the Winged Victory – Unique forms of continuity in space
• Ortolan, a horrifying French delicacy where a small bird is drowned in cognac, baked and eaten whole.
• Venice. City of love and art, bright light and deep darkness. Particularly interested in Venetian acqua alta
• Prisms
• Silk parachutes
• Maria Callas singing Verdi’s Rigoletto
• French literary group Oulipo who advocate creative restrictions such as writing a whole novel without using the letter ‘e’
• My Brightest Diamond singing The Gentlest Gentleman
• Vladimir Propp‘s morphology of the folk tale, where he studied all the Russian fairy tales he could find and created a firm set of rules for narrative structure. Parallels with Aristotle, of course, as well as Eugene Scribe’s formula for the well made play, Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces and so on.
• Connie Francis singing Siboney

All of these feature somewhere in the piece. I wonder if Connie Francis and Aristotle have ever been in quite such close quarters before. There are links between them all, believe me. It’s not quite as random as it seems. Wait and see.

In the meantime, though, I woke up to an incredible rainbow this morning out of my window (speaking of prisms). That’s what people always forget to tell you about the shitty Scottish weather. I saw more rainbows the year I moved to Glasgow than in the whole of my life before that. The dramatic weather from my balcony is always stunningly beautiful. Wherever I’ve been in the world I am always pleased to come home to it. So, reader, I sign off with a collection of photos. The view from here.

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In the ten day gap between the two presentations, I waited things out in New York City. Like all right-thinking people, I love New York. I spent a lot of time here in my late teens and know the city well. I haven’t been for six years so was really excited to be back, back, back (as they used to say in Smash Hits magazine). We were staying in a beautiful apartment in the west village, around the corner from Sarah Jessica Parker (as people kept telling me) but the rude cow never popped in for a coffee.

As  always, I filled my time with lots of art of all different forms. I saw the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial exhibition which I loved. Theatre was SITI company’s Radio Macbeth in a double-bill with War of the Worlds which were both breathtakingly elegant, simple and excellent (something I rarely say about theatre, believe me). My dance card was filled by seeing C de la B’s Out Of Context – for Pina. Despite this being dedicated to our great and glorious leader, I found the show slightly underwhelming. Two films:  Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void which was remarkably, unutterably bad and, of course,  The Social Network which, like everyone else in the world, I thought it was great.

The  arts in NYC are fantastic, of course, but the food always excites me even more. Such excellent food so easily available, especially being in the west village. On top of that is the architecture, which leads me to the real meat here. I’ve put together a little NYC photoblog for your delight and delectation, dear reader. Below are things that caught my eye that I wanted to share with you

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I’ve had an exhilarating few days in Santiago. From what I’ve seen of it this is a great city. I arrived on Chile’s bicentenary celebration with flags and partying people everywhere. This was also the most productive of all these Latin American visits. My contact at the British Council this time was Alejandra Szczepaniak – correct spelling, reader, correct spelling! It’s pronounced shepanyak, not so tough after all. She was only set to work on this project a few days ago and did quite a remarkable job of pulling everything together in such a short time. She was also a great pleasure to work with. We have a fantastic presenter in Loreto Araya from GAM, which is an absolutely stunning new world-class arts centre which I want to move into and live in.

I also met Guillermo Calderon, who brought his production Diciembre to Edinburgh International Festival recently, to breathless acclaim from everyone. Loreto thinks that Guillermo would be a good person to act as translator and director of the Chilean version of the text. I really enjoyed meeting him. I don’t often meet other writer-directors who initiate their own projects rather than waiting for commission. In fact, we talked about how we’d both recently been commissioned for the first time in our careers (me by National Theatre of Scotland, him by the Royal Court) and how strange it is to have the final control of the project in the hands of someone else.

The venue itself is Cerro Santa Lucia. It’s a fascinating park, a steep, rugged lump of rock that was turned into a park in the 1870s. It’s covered in tiny, vertiginous paths and treacherously wonky stone staircases. The views from the top across Santiago are quite beautiful, especially on the mountains beyond. The day I was there it was slightly misty and the mountain range is so huge that I didn’t notice it until I saw the snow-capped peaks above the clouds. Quite incredible.

It felt like quite a relief to be in a Spanish-speaking country. My Spanish is absolutely pathetic but I can at least understand menus and follow the gist of basic conversations, all of which has been impossible for in Portuguese in Brazil. I think that for someone like me whose job is to be able to control language and to communicate well there is something inherently distressing about having language taken away. Santiago felt markedly different to the three cities in Brazil. The city felt much more familiar to me somehow, as if I could be in a neighbourhood of Madrid I’d never stumbled upon before. At the same time, though, I was very much more aware of being foreign. In Brazil nobody bats an eyelid at me, whereas in Santiago lots of people stared at me. I’m very pale and also I’m about a foot taller than the average Chilean. The attention never felt negative, though. I found people really friendly.

Now I’m back in Sao Paulo. As soon as I jumped off the plane yesterday I whizzed off in a cab up and down the helter-skelter streets to a final meeting with the British Council to tie everything up and say our emotional goodbyes. They’ve taken great care of me and I feel like I’ve been here for ages and ages. After that I whizzed across town again, feeling quite the native Paulista, to my friend Paulo’s beautiful posh flat full of new Brazilian art. We went for dinner at a restaurant that specialises in contemporary cuisine using traditional Brazilian ingredients. We had bread with lemongrass, parsnip gnocchi, cheese ice cream and a guava version of what the Brazilians call ‘petit gateau.’ Great restaurant, great company, great evening. It was one of those moments when I feel incredibly privileged to lead the life that I do, the absolute opposite of the lonely low points of sitting alone in an empty hotel room. So, it was the perfect ending to the trip.

My journey home tonight will be twenty hours overnight Sao Paulo – Paris – Amsterdam – Glasgow. Here comes that downside rearing its ugly head again. So, to stave it off I’m going to cram in one last experience and dash off to the 29th Bienal de Sao Paulo, the second oldest art biennial in the world in the world, Venice being the first. It takes place in another amazing Niemeyer building in the same park we plan to use for Susurrus. Today is the first day it opens to the public. So, I’d better get my skates on.

Brasilia was a very strange place. A designed new city in the shape of an aeroplane which is the administrative capital. It looks how Milton Keynes would look if it swallowed a cocktail of black market steroids and yeast. Peppered within that are some remarkable and wonderful pieces of Oscar Niemeyer architecture which I’ve wanted to see for years and love, even though all I have time to do is whiz by in a cab. Foreigners don’t visit Brasilia, it seems. Nobody can speak English or French. I’m the only person in the breakfast room who doesn’t have black hair. The air is so dry that I keep getting spontaneous nosebleeds, including one in the shower that looks like Psycho. My hotel looks very posh (you know, in a soulless, corporate way) but in fact nothing works. The internet doesn’t work. The television doesn’t work. The air conditioning sounds like a Lancaster bomber preparing for take off.

The upside to Brasilia is the British Council staff who are really kind and generous. Ivon spends the day with me in the Jardim Botanico, which is beautifully arid and sparse. The staff there show us round with great enthusiasm and the director tells me about his seven month research placement at Kew Gardens in London. The garden has the most vivid red earth I’ve ever seen. There are enormous anthills made of this earth, one of which is as tall as me. They look for all the world like a series of Anish Kapoor sculptures. In the evening Ivon, Pedro and Simone from the BC take me out for a fantastic meal in a very snazzy Italian restaurant. The chat ranges from Leni Riefenstahl to the aggressiveness of Romans to India’s PR coup of convincing the world that it is an I.T. superpower when in reality most people still live in remarkable poverty.

The next day I whiz off to Rio de Janeiro. I stay in the Hotel Ipanema Plaza. I can see a patch of sea out of one window and Christ The Redeemer in the distance out of the other. Rio is a party town and the hotel is determined that you know it. They play disco music in the foyer and restaurant all day and all night. It’s like eating breakfast in Studio 54. I keep expecting Bianca Jagger and Halston to jump out and dance to Le Freak C’est Chic next to the scrambled egg cart. As you’d expect, Rio is full to the rafters with people in swimwear. Men cycle down the street in their speedos. It’s all very distracting.

The British Council here arrange for a student to act as my guide. Julia is very nice and clever. We have interesting chats about her dissertation on to what degree art is inside or outside the system of capitalism. She also tells me that she’s sick of the Brazilian heat and so is thinking of doing an MA in Aberdeen (!)

The trip to the actual Jardim Botanico takes three tries. The first one is very quick, to give me the feel of the place, and we get whisked round in a golf cart, which is great fun. The next day I get taken to sugar loaf mountain, the tallest of the many tall mountains around the city and you need to take two cable cars to get up there. It is cloudy, so the views aren’t great, but there’s something mysterious about taking a cable car up into the clouds. As we’re about to go down, thirty Brazilian special ops soldiers run past the gift shop with rifles and ropes round their shoulders. Our guide casually tells us that they use the mountain for training, making the soldiers climb up the vertical mountain face. They all have a logo on their arm of a skull with a dagger and two rifles. They also have their blood type embroidered into the chest of their jackets. As special guests we are allowed to jump the large queue and take the cable car down with them. Thirty wet squaddies in a cable car sounds like the plot to a bad porno, or a good porno depending on your tastes.

Then we go back for the proper trip to the Jardim Botanico. It is a truly remarkable garden, a living museum that is two hundred years old. The only problem is that it is pissing with rain. Absolute stair rods. I try to keep going and do manage to walk around the garden for about three hours in the monsoon. I can’t write notes because my maps keep disintegrating. I can’t take photos because the lens gets wet. In the end I can’t even see because the combination of rain and heat means that my glasses keep steaming up. I give up and go back to the hotel. That night is when the loneliness really kicks in. I really miss home and I’m finding it tough being alone so much, meeting new people every day and saying goodbye almost immediately. I’ve been having a lot of trouble phoning home (hotel internet doesn’t work properly in Brasilia or Rio) which makes everything worse. Eventually, though, I manage to get through to Calum and he cheers me up with stories from home. He squeezes the fat cat and makes her meow down the phone to me, which I always enjoy.

The next day, Sunday, was supposed to be my day off, but I have to go back to the garden to finish the work. The weather is better and the garden is an absolute pleasure. I find some really exciting hidden corners to use on the Susurrus route and get quite excited about the idea of presenting a Portuguese version in such a wonderful garden.

I did manage to get some free time afterwards and walked around Ipanema taking photos. Looking back at the camera, most of the pictures or of men in tight shorts. There’s a theme developing here.

I write this from Buenos Aires airport, en route to Santiago for the next leg. The Argentinians all look miserable, as they should as this airport is an absolute pisshole. The only place that people look cheerful is in the duty free, which has the crazy atmosphere of a fire sale in TK Maxx. Usually I do what my dear friend Laura Molloy instructed me and use copious amounts of £400 moisturiser from the display of testers, but even that has lost its lustre. There was no veggie meal on the plane for me (don’t fly Aerolineas Argentinas, kids!) so I’ve just enjoyed a nutritious lunch (at 5pm) of duty free pringles and a toblerone. Oh, the glamour.

Wish me luck with my final push.

After my last entry I still had a few days left in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had a lovely time. The show got a great reception and we did a really pleasurable Q&A session on Saturday morning with over one hundred people gathered to listen to me spout rubbish. Unfortunately, though, they all asked very intelligent questions, which is always a disappointment. Not like my all time favourite question: the audience walk around during your show. Where did you get the idea for that?!

My favourite thing in those last few days, though, was my visit to the Michigan movie palace. I watched the Franco-Russian film L’Affaire Farewell which was great but the thing I enjoyed so much was photographing the building. I’d like to put in a wee slideshow for you here, but the hotel wifi is useless and won’t let me upload any.

The worst thing that could probably happen to a person in Ann Arbor is that they might not give you a double shot in your cappuccino. Next stop was Sao Paulo. This is my first ever trip to South America, so it is really very exciting. I sat on the plane reading the British Council’s dire warning about safety. Don’t carry a large camera, don’t wear a wedding ring, if you get robbed then DO NOT RESIST (their capital letters, reader, not mine). They then go on to tell you not to worry, which is a bit rum.

So, after a hellish seventeen hour overnight journey via Atlanta I arrived into a city that looks to me like a cross between New York and Bombay, but on the scale of Tokyo. All of which is a good thing in my book. Sao Paulo has a population of 20 million people. That’s nearly three times the size of London, fact fiends. It only took me half a day to become smitten with the place. The first thing I noticed is that Brazilian men all seem to wear incredibly tight trousers to show off their mesmerisingly large bulges. It’s enough to make a boy’s eyes water.

My first afternoon I had lunch with Patricia, the lovely producer that the British Council have suggested. She immediately put me at ease and I have a good feeling about working with her. That night I met up with my old friend Paulo. I used to teach him English in Brighton eleven years ago and this is the first time we’ve seen each other since. He took me to the theatre to see Teatro Co.Mo.De-Te perform Dentro Fora. I’d heard that Brazillian theatre was great and this certainly proved it. A beautiful, Beckettian piece with two performers trapped in glass boxes. The performances were skilful and exciting enough that I wasn’t at all concerned about not understanding a word of the Portuguese.

The word on the street is that Paulistas take their food very seriously and quality of food is very good. They are particularly fond of pizza. My meals so far have proven this to be the case. I have availed myself more than once of said pizza.

The next day I met Patricia again with Karen from the British Council and we spent the day dashing all over the city, sitting in traffic jams and mostly walking, walking, walking, walking around four different parks in the sweltering heat. Even the Brazilians were complaining that it was unseasonably hot. The Susurrus research trips are always tiring and I think Karen and Patricia were surprised by the fact that we were all like empty shells by the end of the day.

The park that I liked the most, Parque da Luz was a gorgeous wee place with lots of interesting things like a pond that you could walk underneath and look through the glass, elaborate bandstands, gazebos and lots of sculpture. It was closed for maintenance and so was very peaceful. Yesterday, though, I went back by myself. There was much discussion at the British Council about whether or not it was safe for me to go. Once I got there I could see why. The park was busy with hundreds of people, most of whom looked like they were there to sleep the night or score. It’s a big area nearby for crack addicts. There were also a large number of single women who kept smiling at me and trying to start a conversation. So, all in all, perhaps not the idyllic haven that we usually find to present Susurrus.

So, running out of time, I hotfooted it to my second choice (Parque Ibirapuera) which is a lot bigger and a lot more relaxed. There are lots of topless men jogging in tight shorts. More prominent bulges. It was so big, though, (the park, reader, the park) that I couldn’t cover it all before nightfall. So, I had to cancel a meeting with a translator this afternoon to go back and work out my route. There’s an amazing Oscar Niemeyer auditorium, a Louise Bourgeois spider, a humped Japanese bridge, a secret walkway with a cat colony, a bamboo colonnade and hidden away at the end is the nursery that grows the plants for all the parks and gardens in the entire city.

Then I jumped in a cab to the airport and here I am, waiting for my flight to Brasilia.

I had a pretty grim journey to get here. I sulkily left Calum and the cat under the covers at four o’clock on Monday morning for a seventeen hour journey via Amsterdam. Why do I do this to myself? The only light relief was the remarkably high calibre tourist tat on sale in Schipol airport. Porcelain salt and pepper shakers in the shape of clogs seemed like a marvel to me until they were trumped by salt and pepper shakers inspired by Amsterdam’s red light district: red and black piggies with XXX printed on them, artfully arranged to look like they’re fucking. Now that is top quality tat right there.

It is freshers’ week here in Ann Arbor so I am surrounded by bright-eyed, skimpily-clad students with greek letters plastered on their t-shirts. I feel like I’ve walked onto the set of a slasher movie. I overheard a particularly great conversation:

Girl in street: Oh my God. He was hot!

Her friend: He wasn’t hot, he was like hot!

The wit of Dorothy Parker lives on in these young women.

For some strange reason Ann Arbor has pictures of Venice everywhere. The hotel that I stayed in last time, the hotel that I am staying in this time and the café where I have my breakfast are all covered in photos and shonky oil paintings of La Serenissima. Nobody can explain why.

The actual set-up for Susurrus in the Matthaei Botanical Gardens went very well yesterday. UMS, who are presenting the piece, are taking great care to do it well and that attention to detail makes all the difference. They are such a pleasure to work with. We’ve had a lovely couple of days setting up all the signage and getting the MP3 players ready. The ‘dress rehearsal’ went smoothly yesterday and we open to the public in a couple of hours.

As we were coming to the end of the dress rehearsal yesterday two members of staff from the garden came with a small glass box containing two newly hatched butterflies and invited us to help set them free in the garden. They showed me how to transfer the beautiful wet butterfly onto my finger where it happily clung on for a couple of minutes before I transferred it onto nearby leaf. It was an absolutely mesmerising experience.

After that I had a fantastic dinner with the person responsible for bringing the show here, Michael Kondziolka, the director of programming at UMS. Great name, eh? It’s pronounced konjelka, phonetics fans. He took me to legendary local restaurant Zingerman’s and we had a remarkably diverse conversation that ranged from Patti Smith giving an impromptu concert round the corner to the linguistic pros and cons of L’Académie Française’s control over the French language to a burnt down taxidermy shop that Michael says I must visit. My favourite quote of the night: ‘The French don’t do reform. They only do revolution.’ He’s such a fascinating person and I do feel so fortunate in the fact that I generally get to work with a string of pleasurable, intelligent and stimulating people. There’s the occasional tosser but they are few and far between. I’m generally really lucky with it.

Speaking of tossers, though, Michael told a great story about a famous choreographer in a Q&A with an audience member here in Ann Arbor.

Aged lady audience member: I’m generally such a fan of your work, but I found the costumes in this piece really horrible. I just wondered what you were thinking?

Nasty nameless choreographer: Look at you. Orthopaedic shoes, beige slacks, old knitted sweater. What on earth were you thinking?

The audience was stunned into embarrassed silence at what a bastard he was.

Another fascinating person is fabled writer and performance artist Holly Hughes. I studied her work when I was at university and loved it. I remember being very struck by how beautifully and skilfully written her work was, especially compared to a lot of performance art which is often thrown together pretty shabbily. My friend Diane Torr always says that the difference between theatre and performance art is simply that performance artists are too lazy to rehearse. I knew that Holly Hughes was teaching here at the university so I took a chance and sent her an embarrassing email. You can imagine the gist: ‘I’m here doing a show, I think you’re great, can we meet for coffee, I promise I’m not a lunatic.’ Thankfully she knew who I was already and we met for coffee this morning in trendy Comet Coffee and had a great time. She has a fantastically loud, free laugh and she talked hilariously about competing in dog shows where all of the women look like lesbians even though they are mostly right-wing Christians. I really enjoyed myself and managed not to behave like an embarrassingly fawning fan geek.

Completely unrelated, I always enjoy being in the States at this time of year because Jewish culture is so much more prominent here, which I find really interesting. On page three of the New York Times yesterday there were Happy Rosh Hashanah adverts from Brooks Brothers, Bloomingdales, Macys and Tiffany. British businesses would never do this. Why is Jewish culture so quiet and hidden in Britain?

Yesterday’s inbox contained the good news that I’ve been invited on a research trip to Istanbul which is very exciting. I’ve wanted to go for quite a while. In the meantime, I must dash off now to have lunch at Sava’s. They have a great cocktail called Saint Genet, named after Sartre’s beatification of our beloved Jean Genet. Make mine a double. Chin chin!

Here are some photos:

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CHAMPAGNE! (as Ida would say)

Sub Rosa closed last night after 23 nights, 161 performances and more than 3100 audiences members. Just as we were about to start the last tour (at 12.40 this morning) one of the audience members told us that we were officially the last performance of this year’s fringe, which seems suitably cadaverous for this show!

We couldn’t be happier with the success of the show. Sell out audiences, a Herald Angel award, 4 and 5 star reviews in every one of the papers and loads of interest from all round the world in presenting the show again. What a relief. I thought the whole thing was going to go down the crapper!

The final audience waiting for the show to start

There have been so many tweets about the show, but I wanted to share my favourite ones with you:

DailyInfoOxford Sub Rosa: worth burning a chorus girl to death to get tickets.

JohnRossBowie @davidleddy is kind of my new theatrical hero. SubRosa just freaked the shit out of me.

tomlamont Sub Rosa at #edfest: the most disturbing piece of theatre I can recall. Terrifying, terrific — allot time for soulful walk afterwards.

Deleriad Sub Rosa. 2 severed thumbs up 4 every day story of carny folk.

Wgalinsky Reports of a coup at the Citz Theatre in Glasgow

tomcreed1980 @Wgalinsky Really? You mean the one that never happens in Sub Rosa has happened for real?

I went to the very final tour and afterwards we all met in the Master’s room of the Masonic Lodge with a case of champagne. Everyone got very giddy and it was a fantastic end to the whole shebang. No sooner had we all quaffed, though, than everyone was off to their next thing. Claire was straight on a plane to Santorini, lucky girl. Ange was on a train to London to do a voiceover job, Adam back into rehearsals for Black Watch, Izzi down to the National in London. It’s all go.

This morning, though, I must have been more tired than I thought. No sooner had I got back to Glasgow than I cycled into a lamppost along the river Clyde, flew over the handlebars and did a full forward roll on the pavement. I nearly went from sub rosa to sub aqua. Now I have an imprint in the shape of gravel on my knees and elbows!

Anyway, now it’s onwards and upwards. I leave the country in a couple of days for Susurrus again. We present the show in Ann Arbor, Michigan and then I go on to do a research trip for the show looking at gardens and meeting translators and directors in Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Santiago and Rio de Janeiro. How crazy is that? First, though, I’m drawing the curtains and having a long sleep. Night night.

Adam McNamara in Sub Rosa (photo Murdo Macleod)

The Sub Rosa juggernaut continues unabated. The actors have been nominated for best acting ensemble in The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence. I’m really thrilled for them. It’s a really tough show as they have to do it seven times in a row, late at night but they manage to give such intense performances time after time. On top of that they have all been a pleasure to work with. This is not always the case with actors, as I’m sure you can imagine. The ceremony is on Sunday 29^th. Wish them luck.

The attention that the show is getting is all quite overwhelming. As well as the Herald Angel award we’ve had four and five star reviews in The Guardian, Metro, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Stage, The Financial Times, The List, and The Herald. Theatre cognoscenti from all over the world (‘the people in black’ as my friend Tony Guilfoyle dubs them) have come to the show and been remarkably positive. They are usually pretty cold-blooded about everything. The twittersphere has gone loopy for it. Twittershpere – get me, how modern.The BBC Culture Show was lovely. The rest of the company watched it when it aired, but the idea of watching myself be interviewed on the telly while other people were in the room was too humiliating so I watched it later on iPlayer and cringed in the privacy of my own home.

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Most of all, though, audience reactions to the show have been incredible. It’s very humbling to see the enormous impact that it can have on people. I particularly enjoy it when the tour guides abandon the audience on a street corner in the dead of the night and the audience applaud the empty street. It’s quite surreal, especially if you’re watching it from the end of the road.

Last week was super busy because as well as Sub Rosa we did the Three New Ideas presentation for Edinburgh International Festival. What a stressful day that was. The presentation went very well in the end, but it was a really unpleasant experience and I felt very shaken by it. My Dad flew up to see it, which was very nice of him, and we had a strange cup of coffee in the café afterwards where he was giddy and excited but my mind seemed to shut down completely. It was like I was on Mogadon.

There was also a strange event where the National Theatre invited me to have breakfast with a group of their donors. Basically, there is a group of filthy rich theatre-lovers who get taken to Edinburgh and the National staff act as their social secretaries. People like me are invited to breakfast with them in their private dining room at the Balmoral. You would imagine they would all be Upper East Side Vampires, but the people I met were absolutely charming. I had a nice time with them and they were all really thrilled at the attention the National was lavishing on them and really excited by the work they were seeing. It was really quite heart-warming to see their enthusiasm for the work, especially after spending so much time with The People In Black From Around The World©. One of them said to me ‘the audience walk around from room to room during your show… where did you get the idea for that?’

The middle week of the Fringe is when all the important people like Visiting Arts and Made in Scotland have their drinks receptions. At the Creative Scotland party I was instructed at the front door that I was to be introduced to the Scottish Minister for Culture. I was duly introduced to said minister and she chatted away politely, saying ‘I’m trying to see as many of the Made In Scotland shows as I can.’ I asked her if she was coming to see Sub Rosa. She replied that she wasn’t sure if she could fit it in. I said that it’s very easy to fit in because it happens late at night. Her fabulous response was to smile sweetly, turn around and just walk away. This has become my comedy anecdote of the week. A microcosm of political life.

With two shows and all these hobnobbing receptions to go to, I haven’t had much time to see other shows. I did, though, manage to see Tim Crouch’s The Author. For me, it is the most remarkable piece of theatre writing I’ve seen in years. It is so brilliantly, intelligently and immaculately structured, full of fascinatingly intricate self-reflexive detail. His writerly skill is quite breathtaking. The piece presents a truly profound discussion about the ethics of presenting violence in the theatre, about the impact that it has on the audience and on the people who make the work. I found it deeply moving and very troubling. It raises once again all of the questions I’ve pored over with Sub Rosa and which are impossible to resolve. It is a truly discursive piece, offering little in the way of a directed reading position. It ‘asks’ us everything and ‘tells’ us very little.

All of this means it gets pretty extreme reactions from audiences. The night I was there was particularly wild. There were about nine walkouts and a full-scale row in the middle of the show with audience members shouting ‘why are you showing us this?’ When the performers didn’t answer their questions they became very angry. One particularly fascinating response was a woman storming out shouting ‘what’s the impact of it all? Why are we being shown all of this?’ I was mesmerised by the irony of the fact that the piece had prompted such a strong reaction in her and yet she was saying that it was pointless.

By the way, I was working in Columbus, Ohio last autumn and someone asked me ‘how is your children’s show going?’ I told them that my shows are hardly suitable for most adults, let alone children and she said ‘no, no, I read it on your website. It’s a show about shoes.’ She meant Shopping For Shoes. She thought I was Tim Crouch, which I thought was brilliant. What a great person to be mistaken for.

Right. Enough rambling, dear reader. I must now go to be interviewed for something called Edinburgh Festivals Television. I don’t really know what it is, or where you can watch it. I do know that I’m being interviewed by Keith Bruce, the arts editor of The Herald, so that should be nice. Over and out!

EIF 'Three New Ideas' in rehearsals

Yesterday was the award ceremony where Sub Rosa was given a Herald Angel awards. We’re all thrilled about it. We’re also thrilled that Remarkable Arts, who run the venue, have been given a Herald Little Devil award for giving over the whole of their fringe venue to making Sub Rosa happen. I’m so glad they’ve been recognised for doing that as it is a rare thing to find a fringe venue who really want to help and artist to make the show as good as it can be.

Also good was the fact that our friends got awards too! I first saw 2b theatre company’s show Invisible Atom at the PuSh festival in Vancouver last year and have been telling everyone in Edinburgh that I can think of to go and see it. As well as that, my dear friend Cora Bissett (though I know her as Tina Biscuit or Clara Basket) created Roadkill which got the double whammy of a Fringe First award yesterday and an Angel today. It was really exciting to be at the awards together, particularly as Cora was in the original production of Sub Rosa as one of the twins.

Within minutes of getting the statuette I had broken it, accidentally snapping the brass plaque of the front. I stuck it back on slightly wonky. It will join my other awards on a shelf in my parents’ house, much to the chagrin of my older sister. I think the exact words were ‘it’s like a fucking shrine.’

Claire Dargo gets over-excited.

Other news is that we’ve had two days of rehearsals for Three New Ideas at Edinburgh International Festival. This is a work-in-progress presentation of new ideas for shows, with actors doing a rehearsed reading of sample scenes from each. It’s all part of the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award that they gave me last year for White Tea. We had a great two days working in Wee Stories theatre company’s space at the top of the King’s Theatre. The presentation is on Tuesday afternoon, so I’m feeling pretty nervous about it. The show sold out months ago, bizarrely, so I hope people aren’t disappointed just to see me get up with a pile of cue cards and clear my throat.

Right. I’m off for a nap. Doing a late night show really screws you up, kids!

Coffee after the ceremony. Statuette has already been broken and repaired (!)