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The Land of Green Bread (Rice, Embroidery and William Shakespeare) At Rugby High School we like a challenge, so when it was suggested that we might like to lead a project which involved taking a production of a Shakespeare play to the 11th China National Yao Pan Wang Festival in Ruyuan, Guangdong Province, we immediately said, ‘Yes’. As anyone who has ever taken a show on tour knows, rehearsing in one venue and performing a play somewhere else completely different is hard. Make that place a twenty four hour journey away; add in a 20kg baggage restriction; draw the cast from four schools; give them four days to put together the performance from scratch and expect them to stage a televised performance in front of a crowd of ten thousand and the task becomes Herculean. However, daunted we were not and so it was that sixteen students from Kingsbury School, Queen Elizabeth School, RHS and Stratford High School together with nine members of staff (including two from Long Lawford Primary School) found themselves on a plane to China.  The Yao people are scattered across several different Chinese provinces. There are also Yao communities in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, France and the USA. The Pan Wang Festival revives an ancient tradition of honouring through song and dance on his birthday Pan Wang, the forefather of all the Yao people. Pan Wang was a highly successful king whose life was brought to a premature end during a goat hunt when he fell over a cliff. The festival is an important occasion for the Yao to worship their ancestor and to celebrate the rice harvest. Supported by the Chinese government, the national festival also attracts tourists providing an important boost to the economy of the town chosen to host it. This was the first time that Ruyuan, amongst the twenty poorest counties in China, had been selected to host the national festival. Yao culture is transmitted orally: the Yao do not use the characters that other Chinese people use to record their words. Intricate embroidery is a feature of all Yao costumes. Dance and music are particularly important and are taught to children from a very young age. Dances and songs celebrate the seasons (especially the spring and the harvest), fertility and love.  As anyone who saw the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics will know, ceremonies are things that the Chinese do particularly well. Having been privileged to be a part of this smaller scale project in Ruyuan, we had a taste of how this is achieved. We sat in the broiling sun all afternoon whilst a large lady in a pink cardigan (the director) harangued various performers. It was impossible to understand what she was saying but you could tell that none of it was complimentary. She was a formidable lady: everything had to be inch perfect or else! Gradually we watched a performance take shape. It was full of stirring Soviet style martial music, quaint folk melodies and strange East/West fusions. Who was it that thought that combining the theme tune from ‘Dallas’ with Chinese Techno music would be a good idea? We eventually secured a rehearsal slot on the enormous tiered stage but without radio microphones which we were promised that we would have on the day. We were grateful for the run through and the opportunity to do a spot of re blocking but somewhat apprehensive that the technology, on which being heard depended, was going to be completely untested. There’s always a possibility that feedback or poor reception with radio mikes will result in horrible squeals and buzzes and intermittent communication. We realised that we were just going to have to cross our fingers and hope that this didn’t happen and that the students were not going to be phased by a sudden meeting with kit that we don’t have much access to in school.  Any visit to China involves some element of the bizarre, partly because things happen so differently there and so it was that we found ourselves being taken back to the hotel from the rehearsal by the police when it was clear that jet lag had kicked in and the students were too tired to walk the two miles back to their rooms. Apparently, because transport is still quite scarce in this part of China, they quite often help out in this kind of way. The next evening, when we were on our way to a feast, they turned out again this time in a squad car with blue flashing lights to clear the way through the traffic (which by English standards is chaotic but very light) just as though we were visiting heads of state. When we arrived at the feast, we were given the full red carpet treatment complete with a dancing lion: amazing! Over a thousand people sat down to eat together in a school hall before joining a crowd nearly nine times that size to watch a singing and dance competition in the vast performance arena. The students coped very well with their new celebrity status in an area that rarely sees Europeans much less young Europeans. Mobbed by people wanting photographs and autographs wherever they went, they became experts in smiling and producing sound bites for the television crews that seemed to be ever present during the festival. Next time, we will include in our risk assessments strategies for extracting students from crowds of over enthusiastic admirers and I will be writing a briefing on etiquette at small private government lunches for any Warwickshire officer who, like me, suddenly finds herself unexpectedly thrust into the role of international diplomat.  Everything in China happens in twos: for every role there is a government official and a Chinese Peoples’ Communist Party official. All official speeches in China whether they are made by foreigners or by Chinese people have to be approved in advance. The more important you are, the longer you seem to get. At the official opening ceremony of the festival, there were a lot of officials and there was a lot of listening to be done before the leader of the Yao community followed by all the significant members of the provincial and local government and their Communist party equivalents got to pay their respects to Pan Wang. As the British Consul remarked, this is a significant development: in the China of the 1980s officials would never have endorsed these kinds of rituals, much less participated in them. Concealed behind a red curtain Pan Wang’s giant image suddenly appeared as smoke canisters produced plumes of purple, green, blue and white smoke and horns brayed. Candles and incense were burnt in his honour, prayers were said and offerings made and then the whole arena erupted as flag bearers streamed onto the stage to perform an energetic routine.  ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was one of two guest performances at the festival: the other being singing contributed by the Californian Yao community. We were honoured that the British Consul, who is responsible for the whole of South China, came all the way from Guangzhou to introduce us which he did very wittily speaking in both English and Mandarin. In the process, he nearly gave his hosts a heart attack as he departed from a pre agreed script and spoke without notes. Both we and he were amused by the way in which he was very swiftly brought back on track by the festival announcer who, unbeknown to him, had been given a copy of what he was supposed to say.  Mr Grady, who assisted by Becca Murley Year 13 directed this play, had watched Yao performers when they visited Warwickshire in September, very cleverly used the Yao love of rhythm, giving the performers sticks with which they created a rich counterpoint rhythm in which you could hear the Capulets challenging the Montagues even if Shakespeare’s language was impenetrable. For this event, the students staged the prologue and the fight from the first scene using their sticks as swords and also as props to create a series of tableaux which perfectly illustrated this tragic tale. During the course of the week, the students staged two abridged versions of the complete play: one at Ruyuan Senior High School and another at Ruyuan Middle School. The focus and the energy which they brought to this production were tremendous and they should all feel very proud of their achievements. On both occasions, the afternoon was transformed into a sharing of different skills and cultures. At Ruyuan Senior High School the students performed the trial scene from ‘The Merchant of Venice’, showed us dances and demonstrated Kung Fu using swords which would have reduced any English Health and Safety inspector to a state of apoplexy. They taught us bamboo dances and we gave them a drama workshop.  Teaching a class of Chinese students Shakespeare is much harder than it looks, as Mr Grady and I quickly discovered. Firstly, very little active learning occurs in China so all the skills that we take for granted in our students of a similar age just aren’t there. Secondly, Shakespeare’s language is very challenging. The Chinese find ‘th’ very difficult to say so simple words like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are very difficult for them to pronounce and this is before you throw in a completely new vocabulary in a foreign language. Chinese teachers told us that it is difficult to get students to participate in lessons: they like to listen to the teacher talking to them. We found this too. Students needed a lot of encouragement to speak and to move. However, just as we were feeling that somewhere on the road to Ruyuan from Guangzhou, we had lost the power of teaching, suddenly and thanks in large measure to our fantastic students who modelled what we were trying to achieve, order began to appear from chaos and recognisable pieces of script began to be acted out with some meaning and conviction. Our eight days in China were packed with a rich variety of experiences: we learned to eat new foods and to love green bread as well as green tea. We visited the Yunmen monastery (one of the most famous monasteries in China) and Bibei a traditional Yao village. We learned to master bamboo dancing and chopsticks. We learned that what works in an English classroom doesn’t necessarily work in a Chinese classroom. Most important of all, we learned that although our cultures and our political systems are very different, we can work together successfully and that the similarities of our common humanity are much greater than what divides us. We are indebted to our Chinese hosts whose hospitality, warmth and friendship we very much appreciate. We are also very grateful for the support of the government of Ruyuan Yao Autonomous County, the British Council, Warwickshire County Council, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, the Department for Education, HSBC and the governing bodies of Kingsbury School, Queen Elizabeth School, Rugby High School and Stratford High School without which this visit would not have been possible. We look forward to continuing to develop the links between students attending Rugby High School and Ruyuan Senior High School both virtually and through exchanges and visits. In a globalised world being able to understand and to work with others in a variety of different cultural contexts is essential. Charlotte Marten Headteacher Rugby High School
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