The City of Lights

Don’t you just love it when you find a well-hidden gem in a familiar place? Well, I had one of those discoveries a couple of months ago.

I’m telling you, one of the best distractions when you’re waiting for important, life-changing decisions, is visits from friends. This time, it was Sophie who came to visit from the US. I first met Sophie back in our beloved Edinburgh in 2012, when she was out busking with her smokin’ squeezebox. I loved her rendition of Lady Gaga and Queen songs so much I invited her to perform live as part of my Fringe show that year. As it happens, both Sophie and I had to leave the UK shortly after that, going back to our respective native lands. But another thing we both have in common is the complete inability to spend long periods of time in the same geographical position, so I received an email from her saying she was planning to travel around South America  for a few months and would like to come see me. Yay!

So after trekking across the continent from Ecuador to Peru to Chile to Uruguay (apologies if I’m missing out any countries you’ve been to), Sophie arrived in my border hometowns for a few days of relaxed fun. I’ve got an already established tour route to show people round Livramento-Rivera, but I always try to find something new and exciting (which can be really hard sometimes). This time, I thought we could just tweak the route a bit and take her to a vineyard that no one in the family had been to yet. We have quite a few vineyards around here, so there are plenty to choose from. After doing a bit of research, my sister and I opted for this small, family-run place on the Uruguayan side.

We had a quick look at the map, shoved Sophie in the car and set off. And this is how we found out that the FlavNav does take wrong turns occasionally. The road signs were unclear, and we got to a dirt track ending at a crossroads. I suggested going left, we did. After driving for a few miles of nothing but empty fields, we spotted something to our right side. We were driving right on the border line and this thing was on the Brazilian side of the road. As we approached, we could see it looked like some sort of newly-built condo. It was fenced off, which wasn’t surprising as it’s a common thing to do around houses and flats here. What was unusual about it was that each corner of this isolated area was *ahem* decorated with a red spike with a cow’s skull, also painted red with black horns, on top. We slowed down to have a better view of the place. We passed a few houses and a small gatehouse with something written in German across the top. We continued on until we saw a large gateway with a futuristic-looking tower flying the Brazilian flag, and an arch which read “City of Lights” in Portuguese (Cidade das Luzes). The strangest thing was the last big building we saw near the other end of the fence, which looked like a temple, or place of worship. Its architecture seemed to mix and match Islamic and Judaic characteristics, but it also featured a cross in there somewhere. And outside on the porch and all around it, there were hundreds of garden statues of everything you can think of: gnomes, happy frogs, Snow White, saints, Orishas…

Anyway… we figured out the vineyard was NOT there, took a u-turn and eventually found the right way. We got there and woke up the poor owner’s son, who had decided to hide in his car for a siesta and was startled by seeing three random girls wandering into his wine-making sanctuary (he’s probably trained to identify alcoholics), and ended up giving us a lovely tour. Word of advice: book your vineyard tour in advance if you’re ever in these parts. People like to be prepared for visitors.

No, we never found out what the “City of Lights” actually was. Not even after the wine. Suggestions on a postcard.

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Windmills and Visas

(This is not a post about Holland)

In October 2013, the UK Home Office published some small changes to the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa, adding the ‘Exceptional Promise’ subcategory. That gave quite a few of us outcasts a teeny weeny smidge of hope. Instead of convincing the powers that be that you are a BAFTA-winning director, now you have the chance to prove that you have the potential to become one someday. Ok, then. They also split the process in two: first you apply for endorsement from a “competent organ” (in my case, the Arts Council of England), and only if you are endorsed you apply for the visa itself. On the one hand, this made the process a bit fairer, as you only pay half the fee when applying for endorsement (that’s £420 – yes, this is half), and the other half only at the second stage of the application (so you don’t lose £840 in one go, like I did in 2013 when my first application for this visa was refused). On the other hand, the process became longer and slower.

Now, I am stubborn. And I’m a lover of lost causes, someone who functions on high levels of hope and denial. Don Quixote is one of my favourite stories (maybe because we have some stained glass windows depicting Quixote, Sancho and Dulcinea in my parents’ house and I grew up looking at them) and I have always been fascinated by windmills and wind turbines. Therefore, although I knew that this would become a quixotesque saga, I decided I was going to try again.

Recapping: I came back to Brazil from my last European trek (Edinburgh > Bristol > Lisbon > Paris > Metz > Basel) at the end of September and then had two Scottish friends visiting and went travelling a bit around South America with them (Buenos Aires > Colonia > Montevideo > Cabo Polonio > Riveramento > Porto Alegre > Cambará do Sul > Torres > Capão Novo). Then I went to Brasilia in December for a residency with my hero Eugenio Barba. It is now January 2014, when I sit down to work on my new visa application.

I analyse the guidelines and what is needed. Reviews, features, anything that shows you’ve been given attention from the media. National and international. This visa is aimed at people who are moving to the UK for the first time, which is not my case. I have media clippings related to my work in Scotland since 2010, already organised. I add clippings from Brazilian newspapers about the project I did in my hometown(s) in 2013. Now, it’s one thing to get national media attention in Scotland, and another thing to get national media attention in fucking Brazil. Scotland is smaller than my home state, and I lived in the capital. Brazil is a gigantic country, and I live in its southern borders, a forgotten place. As cool as my project was, and as much attention as it received locally, it wouldn’t make national news, it’s insane to think it would. So I just added what I had from local newspapers. The only other thing I could attach to make a stronger case was an email exchange with the editor of Performatus, an ejournal about theatre and performance, confirming that our project would feature in a book curated by them about interesting performance pieces that happened in Portuguese-speaking territory between 2010 and 2013. I thought it looked good.

Ok, next: awards and nominations. I just used the same as last time, as I haven’t been nominated for, or received any new awards in the past year. Sorry.

Then: three letters of recommendation. They say these will carry more weight, and one of them must be from a UK individual or organisation. These referees must be carefully selected. Last time, I had lovely letters from ZENDEH and the Forest , but they weren’t considered ‘international enough’, as per my first rejection. So I asked for letters from the Centre for Integration of the Mercosul, which represents the International Relations course of the Federal University of Pelotas, in Brazil, with whom I worked in Explorers; from my friend Jen as the UK individual, an extremely competent theatre director and writer whose studio theatre has been getting a lot of attention in Edinburgh; and from Eugenio Barba & Julia Varley, representing the Odin Teatret, possibly the most global of theatre companies, and who are celebrating their 50th anniversary as a theatre in 2014. This looked like a very strong and promising line-up.

Finally, and this is NOT a requirement, just something that occurred to me as a harmless thing to do and potential bonus points: I asked everyone who had ever worked with me and wanted to help to write me a short testimonial. Obviously, not everyone did, but I ended up with a good compilation of 20 pages and a really warm heart.

I worked on this application from the first days of January until mid-March, and I posted it (yes, in this day and age we are still using postal services for that kind of thing) on St Patrick’s Day. And then we all waited.