A Good Place Within Utopia: In Search of the Dream

Utopias come, and utopias go.

In this series, we've explored these visions of a good place

as blueprints for future societies,

and as new ways of living.

Grand designs and experimental communities that have often failed.

But is there another path to utopia?

Smaller, more human in scale.

A spark of creativity, a moment of perfection.

A sense of transcendence.

Can we find utopia within?

Is utopia, after all,

just a state of mind?

In this episode I turn the camera on perhaps the most intriguing aspect

of our relationship with utopia -

how we relate to the idea as individuals.

This is not about the utopia of the future

but about the utopia of now.

I think it's really beautiful and very powerful.

You could call it the a-ha moment.

That moment where you go, "Wow."

The ways we've created to immerse ourselves in a better moment.

If I'm reading a crowd I can build, like, an entire emotion.

To push the boundaries of art and expression, to find authenticity.

People being more expressive, more loving, more argumentative,

more whatever.

It's about how the belief in better pushes us to be all that we can be.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

If we want to find utopia,

perhaps we first need to understand what happens

when grand utopian visions fail.

With the Velvet Revolutions of 1989

followed by the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,

it seemed to many Western minds that Eastern Europe had suddenly awoken

from the utopian dream - or nightmare - of socialism.

But I think that the toppled statues

gathered here in a park in southern Lithuania

reveal a fascinatingly complex story

about our relationships with utopia.

These are symbols of what was once envisaged as a paradise of equality

and the power of collective effort.

But it was a utopia that crumbled.

The economy stagnated, party power was often arbitrary and corrupt,

and many people felt that they were not given sufficient freedom.

And yet, as the old system was swept away, was something lost?

Deimantas Narkevicius is a Lithuanian artist.

Originally trained under the Soviet regime,

he gained growing international attention

when he captured the strange emptiness left behind

when Soviet landmarks were suddenly removed.

I was aware that the city would look different

when the objects will be gone,

and I wanted really to document

their last moment.

In his 2016 work, Doubled Youth,

Deimantas recorded the removal of 1950s socialist realist statues

from a bridge in central Vilnius.

This lack of cultural sensitivity

to understand that when the political regime is gone,

the art objects produced during that regime

does not automatically represent that regime.

It becomes cultural objects.

You seem to be suggesting

that we still need to respect the cultural output?

Through culture we understand history richer and more complex.

Deimantas takes me to the bridge

to see what's become of the now post-utopian space.

So when the sculptures were taken down,

the four plinths were standing empty

and they were looking really provocative

because they were suggesting that there was something there,

obviously, and it's something supposed to be there,

and, I think, for a while there was even an attempt

to use them for a car advertisement.

It didn't work because I think people started to protest

because it looked very vulgar.

And then arrived these pots, with the flowers.

I think there will be debates coming.

What to do with these empty plinths in the future?

So it strikes me that there's a kind of hunger now

for more socially aware kind of art to appear back on the bridge.

Do you see it that way?

Well, partly, yes,

because I think we should understand that the society

was pretty poor during even the post-socialist period,

and they were really eager to get, you know, better off, you know,

like get cars and clothing and houses and so on.

But I think now, 25 years later, they've got that.

And people think, what is next? What is the vision?

Because nobody was thinking about kind of the future.

They were thinking about the past.

-So, we're kind of missing utopian vision?

-I think so.

Plinths...

with flowerpots on top of them.

They appear to be metaphors for our society nowadays.

Perhaps a little short on grand shared aspirations.

Communal utopian ideologies seem to have failed or faded.

We're left to shape our own lives but we're still searching

for that good place, trying to find our own utopias

in our own countless ways.

Perhaps the most commonly held utopian dream today

is the idea that you can buy your way to happiness.

You can buy your way to a better place.

It's the utopia of consumption.

We've long been bombarded by advertising

with the simple message - purchases make you happy.

Buying things gives you freedom, choice and control

in ways that the socialist utopias could never match.

But is a consumerist utopia, in its own way, just another illusion?

How much freedom or control do we really have when our desires

are constantly stimulated but can never be sated?

As new products become available,

there's always something else to buy.

If only I had a bigger telly,

a flatter telly, a curved telly,

a 3D telly, a telly with surround sound,

then I would be in a good place.

But, of course, it's a myth.

The good place of consumption always lies just, just, just beyond reach.

We never quite get there.

This spectacle of capitalism and consumerism that we live amongst,

is cheating us into thinking we can find our way to happiness

through purchasing.

On the face of it, the digital revolution,

the massive technological shift we're living through today

seems to promise yet more of that consumerist spectacle.

More than 3 billion of us now live our daily lives hooked to screens

that are so often seeking to sell us ever more goods.

Now we can access the promise of a consumerist utopia

at the click of a button.

But is there a more positive story to tell about the digital world?

Can it empower us,

be about more than just consumption?

Many digital spaces have been imagined to allow us to create

and, just as importantly, control our own utopias.

So this is actually the computer we created Civilisation on.

Sid Meier, creator of Civilisation,

is one of the great innovators of the digital revolution.

You had to put eight different disks into your computer

and copy them over onto your hard drive before you could play.

He pioneered open world strategy games,

as personal computers filled homes across the planet

in the early 1990s.

Civilisation.

I'm ready. I can do it.

"BUILDING NEW WORLD." All in caps.

In Meier's game, you create your perfect world digitally

from the comfort of your own home,

leading a people from the dawn of time to the space age.

I'm very touched that you chose to call your tribe the English.

HE LAUGHS

You're welcome.

The desire to create perfect digital worlds has proved popular.

In the last 25 years, Civilisation and its sequels

have sold over 40 million copies.

And so it falls upon you to fill our people's true destiny.

Under your leadership, we shall surely prosper.

From the seeds of this small settlement

shall you grow our empire.

Our people await your command.

I think there are some real comparisons

between certain utopian urges,

the desire to explore, to contest,

to protect whatever utopian vision it is that one has

and the game Civilisation.

-Do you agree?

-I've never actually looked at it that way,

but now that you mention it I can see the parallels.

In a utopia, I think we'd expect technology to progress

and technology to bring us advances and a better life.

I think we'd expect nations to communicate with each other

and work together. I think we'd expect exploration,

I think we'd expect to explore our planet,

and, after that, explore the solar system and the universe around us

so, although Civ wasn't really designed

with the idea of utopia in mind,

I think many of the processes that are part of the game

would be part of a utopia.

To ensure the safety of our borders

we must defeat the enemy at its source.

In playing Civilisation,

there can be quite a desire to defend your ideal utopian society

that you're building. There's something very human about that.

I do think the players get invested in what they create

because they know it's unique -

they've designed it, they've built it,

they've made all the decisions that went into getting to this point.

So there's a strategy we call turtling,

which is just protecting what you've built because you're really invested

in it and want to keep it safe from all the forces of the world that are

trying to take it away from you.

There is aggressive expansion,

conquer the world strategy.

There are also cultural victories

or wonder victories.

If you can build these great wonders you can win the game.

Or if you can bring on world peace

that's another way of winning the game.

Truly we have achieved a golden age

of peace and cooperation.

Civ has gone from being just a game

to people really thinking that it represents a version

of the real world and now they start to think, you know,

"I'd really like the world to be a peaceful place and want to try that

"strategy because it's not just a game on my computer."

It's kind of a representation of what could happen in the world

and that brings a whole different type of thinking.

That whole new type of thinking

could be key to building tomorrow's utopias.

Look around you.

The monuments to the old ways of utopian thinking are everywhere.

Religious salvation,

empire-building -

the powerful have shaped our world.

But now perhaps for the first time in human history,

the common man and woman have been given the chance to design and share

their own utopias on a global scale.

Here in a refurbished tobacco warehouse in East London,

young people gather not just to get lost in their own utopias but to use

digital tools to make a difference in the real world.

I'm going to go and see the Northern Lights.

Oh, that's exceptionally beautiful.

It's really very mellow.

There's a stick on the floor.

I can pick it up.

So I am now holding a stick into a fire to see whether it burns.

That's amazing.

I think the word digital has been misinterpreted

in this age as something that's unreal or untouchable,

something you can't experience.

For us it's something that's just in another medium.

It may not be physically touchable

but the experiences that you can have with it are just as real.

James Delaney is an architect and entrepreneur who uses the most

influential game of the last decade to give individuals the tools

to rebuild their real environment.

Minecraft, originally a game aimed at children,

started as a kind of digital Lego.

Players place and destroy blocks in an infinite world,

limited only by their imagination.

When you're building, could it be the case

that another member of your team is building in the same digital space?

-Yes.

-At the same time.

-And I think...

-And can you see them working?

You can see them working and that doesn't sound like a big deal

but it makes the whole process responsive,

so every block you place then becomes a response to

what others are building around you. You're not alone.

It's not designing a building from the point of view of a God

or some kind of disconnected view.

You're actually in the worlds that you're building

and I think that really helps you think about how the space

is going to be experienced and used once you're finished.

In 2013, James Delaney founded BlockWorks,

his company which democratises the architectural process,

through Minecraft.

In this UN-sponsored programme,

BlockWorks introduced Minecraft to a poor community in Indonesia

so that they could work together in redesigning, and then rebuilding,

their town square.

So as part of the community consultation,

we discussed their priorities for the space -

a playground for the children who didn't have a space to play,

water fountains, fresh water.

The elders of the village wanted to see

this traditional Javanese hut.

This is all co-designed with the people

-who are going to end up living in the space?

-Yes, absolutely.

It comes from them. We... You know,

I give them a brief talk on the concept of public space

and different examples from around the world,

but ultimately it's up to them what they want to see there.

And I think, you know,

this taps into a completely new way of thinking about public design,

which is bottom-up. You know, the architect, as brilliant as he is...

..is often sort of autocratic in his design of public space,

and it's his vision of what that space should be.

But surely, public space which, you know, serves the community,

the design of that and the experience of that

needs to come from the people who are going to use it.

I can't help thinking that computing power and connectivity

are enabling extraordinary new ways

of engaging with and shaping the world,

especially among the younger generations.

New forms of digitally empowered utopianism,

with roots back in hack culture.

The idea of a bottom-up digital revolution isn't new.

Hacking started as a way to find workarounds and cut-throughs

because of the limitations of early computing in the 1960s.

Often unfairly stereotyped and bracketed with cybercriminals,

real hackers are not what you might expect.

Here at an international hacking event in Central London,

200 of Europe's best student hackers have gathered

for a 24-hour hackathon...

..to find digital solutions to real-world problems

in one packed day.

So, where are you guys all from?

-I'm from New York.

-I'm from Germany.

This event seems to be about the power of collaboration,

when it's unimpeded by power structures.

I'm from India but I study in Edinburgh.

What are you hacking? What's the theme?

Are you picking up on a theme?

We are doing automated search and rescue for disaster situations.

Essentially, the idea is to fly a drone over a big area,

and then we automatically recognise

where people are that need to be rescued.

So, I'm kind of trying to get that to work.

This is a recipe for real social good.

You're not just adding knowledge to each other,

you're multiplying knowledge, right?

Yeah. I came here with like, "Well, I need some..."

With the idea. And I felt like,

"Well, on my own, this will take quite a bit of time to do

"because I have to acquire quite a bit of knowledge."

By taking it to a hackathon, you have the opportunity

to meet people with different knowledge backgrounds,

and then putting everything together,

and I'm really accelerating this idea.

So you've got a brilliant answer for the good of humanity,

for social good.

Is there any interest - and be honest - in then trying to sell it?

The best part about this hackathon is we put all that aside.

We say, "Let's just fix this,

"let's build the product, and then we'll worry about, you know, money

"or jobs or prestige or merit or, you know,

-"acknowledgement."

-Essentially it's fun first, business after.

-Exactly.

The media often represent hackers as loners,

locked in their own obsessions.

In fact, real hacking is about inventive teamwork.

It's a revolutionary mode

of collaborative thinking and doing.

There is that thing of you're learning together,

you're building together, and you share it with each other,

and open source communities and every thing like that.

And it doesn't really matter

anything about who you are as a person,

how you identify or anything like that.

All of those things are kind of forgotten

when you're on a team together,

building anything. And that's really nice and it's not something

that I've seen many other places.

Hackathons, it's always...

You're all, at the end of the 24 hours, pretty wrought.

And then go off to your far-flung corners of the world.

To sleep. For a day. To sleep.

But everybody's in the same position and that makes it really nice,

and everybody's here to do the same thing and build something cool.

Hackers are no isolated example.

What they embody - the flattening of the world,

the belief that the individual can make a difference

and that hierarchies cannot constrain creativity

and personal expression -

is part of a rich seam of utopian culture,

a deeper tradition that has shaped our history.

Look closely and you see that the people have been revolting

for centuries.

In St Mary's Parish Church in Worley, Lancashire,

carved into the medieval choir seats,

you find a much older kind of hacking.

It's a bit of a weird puzzle.

Why have we got profane imagery

sitting in a parish church in Lancashire?

Here we see a blacksmith, replete with all his tools...

..shoeing a goose.

It's insane.

Under other seats,

we find a girl with a satyr.

A warrior being beaten by a woman with a pan.

The pagan and the pious are mixed up in absurd juxtaposition.

To understand these images,

we need to understand the significance

in the medieval mind-set

of the carnival.

Every year, at Shrovetide, before the abstinence of Lent,

normal rules and hierarchies were hacked

during a period of utopian excess.

It's a fleeting part of the year also captured by artists

like Pieter Bruegel the Elder

who depicts fun and frivolity

breaking out prior to the dreary grind of Lent

and the return to daily life.

However alien to today,

the carnivals turning the world upside down is something

that Thomas Moore, author of the disruptive fiction Utopia,

would have been very familiar with.

In the run-up to Easter,

the world WAS turned upside down.

Women would dress as men and men would dress as women.

Social relations would become completely unruly,

compared to the norm.

People would drink in excess,

they'd be out on the street,

they'd elect a king of fools.

The week of carnival was really important.

It was a steam valve that allowed tensions that have built up

during the year to relax a little.

But come the end of the week,

people were almost certainly longing for a return

to something a little more stable.

In nearby Middleton, Greater Manchester,

this tradition of the citizens' utopia survives.

# We will sing to you a song... #

This is the annual Pace Egg Play, a revival of medieval customs.

I am the bold Prince Regent!

-Oh, yeah?

-Yes.

I rule in this king's stead.

And so I am his only heir...

for there's none upon his head.

LAUGHTER

The players mock traditional authority figures.

I've come to fight for old England's rights.

Drop on the head, drop on the heart.

LAUGHTER

Arise, arise. Most noble knight, arise

and no more dormant lay.

It's a miracle!

TRUMPET BLOWS, CHEERING

At Easter, the play is taken through six local pubs...

Oh, is there a noble doctor to be found?

..becoming more and more slurred...

Champion of this deep and deadly world...

..more anarchic...

SLURRED SINGING

..and more ridiculous.

# They say As you very well do know... #

-That's the wrong song.

-It's the wrong song, yes.

LAUGHTER

-I love St John!

-CROWD:

-Hurray!

It might all seem frivolous, but there's a deeper purpose here.

CROWD CHEER

Well, watching the Pace Egg today,

it seems to me like anyone in authority is fair game.

-Oh, absolutely.

-Oh, yes. Things like this are an opportunity

for the downtrodden, as it were,

to just get a little bit back, you know.

It was always the case, wasn't it?

It was the holiday where

the people, the servants became in charge.

And the... You know, the lords of

the manor waited on the servants, and they had their special day.

And it's all that. It's turning things on their tail, and, you know,

putting it back at the authority.

# He's come o'er the sea Old England to view

# And he's come a Pace Egging with the whole of his crew! #

Well, Lancashire remains as loopy as it was when I was growing up,

that's for sure.

I kind of love this.

The world is turned upside down at least one day a year in Middleton.

The fools take over, the kings seem fall and rise again,

the doctors are mocked, and these guys who are doing this,

these Pace Eggers, they all understand that they are part

of a rich, old tradition of mocking power, laughing at authority,

just to let off a little steam

before going back to the usual relations.

The carnival is about coming together

and sharing a moment of freedom from everyday rules,

breaking through inhibitions.

It's an idea that has spurred counter cultures throughout history.

Music has often been at the leading edge

of this revolt against the mainstream.

In recent times,

it's through musical innovation that downtrodden minorities have found

moments of escape and transcendence.

MUSIC: Love Can't Turn Around by Farley "Jackmaster" Funk

In 1980s Chicago, that minority

was made up of often poor, black, gay men.

They found a creative release by subverting established disco music,

extending the best parts of songs

and mixing the beats with a distinctive baseline.

This was house music,

music designed to get you dancing all night long.

It was not just blazing hot, but it was damp.

You couldn't wipe the sweat away enough.

People were really dancing

like their life depended on it,

like there something in it for them beyond just a good feeling.

You had a moment of absolute freedom.

And as a teenager, that's a big deal.

You know? And you're looking for a real experience?

It was the most real thing that I've ever run across.

Charles Matlock was right there in the earliest days of house.

He explains how in clubs,

like the subterranean Muzic Box in downtown Chicago,

there was a new utopian search for authentic experience,

spawning the biggest youth revolution since the 1960s.

They're largely marginalised communities that were part

of the scene then. So black kids, Latin kids, a large gay community.

That was a gay club, so was The Power Plant.

And so for straight kids to be going there,

it really was something that...

You had gay friends and you knew it existed,

but going to a place where you were in the minority

and realising that they're just people,

and they're people that like partying the same as you,

you realise that these kind of artificial lines that we make

between straight and gay, and black and white, and what have you,

they're really artificial

and they're boundaries that are made up by us,

and if we don't choose to adhere to them,

they really, truly don't exist.

-So the dance floor becomes a kind of melting pot where...

-Absolutely.

..music that is a product of a melting pot is celebrated

and brings communities together.

It is truly one of those things that...

all you have to have in common with anybody else

is enjoying this music and wanting to dance to it.

Were these clubs a kind of escape for the communities of

young people who were colliding inside them?

Absolutely. It did provide an escape

and also safe spaces, such that...

Again, straight kids go into a gay club,

I'd never look over my shoulder and say, "Hey, you know,

"is anybody who doesn't like me thinking about doing something

"harmful to me?" But members of the gay community certainly did.

And so this was a place that they could have as their own

and be themselves and not have to worry about anybody...

Just the normal oppression that's part of the world.

So that was definitely an escape for them from this.

But for all of us, it was an escape from...

just this normal world that isn't worried about what might you want.

But it's a temporary release, right?

It's a temporary vision of a wonderful reality?

It is. It is. But...

better to have some time in this other dimension than no time.

MUSIC: Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald

House offered a temporary utopia

that could be revisited again and again

and that successfully mutated across borders.

Transnational, it needs no explanation or language.

When it made its way across the Atlantic,

it had a huge influence on British youth culture...

and on me.

One, two. One, two.

I don't really know any of them shouting poems the young...

young ones do nowadays.

This is one of my heroes of house,

A Guy Called Gerald.

His house hit, Voodoo Ray,

which he composed in a bedroom studio

and first played at Manchester's Hacienda club in 1988,

defined a new era of dance music.

It was an escape. It was somewhere I could go to

and people like me...

You go in through them doors, everything would just change.

INDISTINCT

Your music and house music took me to a better place.

-On the dance floor.

-Yeah, yeah.

-And everybody around me

on the dance floor was temporarily in a better place.

How do you feel when you see a dance floor erupt

and you see them come together and share this experience?

There's that part of a track and everyone is kind of getting it

at the same time, what it is.

Then, yeah, that is a utopia.

Yo, make some noise!

You're looking in people's eyes, and they're like, you know,

they're having it, like, the same as you're like, "Wow."

You can't really buy it.

It's just like this tipping point.

It's like this balance that everything,

like, kicks in at the same time.

If I'm reading a crowd and feeling what's going on,

then it's like, you know, I can build, like, an entire emotion

just from the sounds that I've got available.

Watching you on stage, you're in a mental space.

So it's almost like a personal utopia.

I do it on the bus.

Like, sometimes the person next to me wants to move,

you know what I mean? Cos I just like... I just go off, probably.

If I hit that sweet spot, eyes roll back and everything, I'm sure.

-I need to seek help.

-HE LAUGHS

A Guy Called Gerald.

The UK club scene embraced house music...

and added its own chemical enhancement.

With ecstasy prolonging the moment of euphoria, acid house was born.

MUSIC: Acamar by Frankey & Sandrino

With drugs and music combining

to create a form of individual and collective transcendence,

there were echoes of the 1960s counterculture.

Back then, the pot-fuelled youth rebellion morphed into a new search

for the self through Eastern mysticism

and ever more exotic drugs.

HE VOCALISES

But not all cultures have needed drugs to achieve

an out-of-body experience.

This is qawwali,

the devotional music of Sufi Muslims,

which has its roots in medieval-era Pakistan and India.

What qawwali singers do

is they embody the idea

of taking themselves and

audiences on a spiritual journey.

The central concept in qawwali is this idea called qalandri,

which comes from the word qalandar.

Qalandars are dervishes.

And the etymology of qalandar is those without limits or boundaries.

And in medieval texts, qalandars can read people's minds,

travel backwards in time and obliterate time and space.

And what qawwali does is makes this its central concept.

So the music itself can take you into a similar kind of state?

-That's the idea.

-Yeah.

So the idea is that qawwali is like trance.

During a qawwali concert,

one singer recites poetry and religious phrases,

using hand gestures...

..while a second singer improvises responses.

The music builds in intensity as the chorus sings a hypnotic refrain.

By entrancing listeners through being overwhelmed by the music,

their ego is dissolved, leaving a void.

And once the void is created,

it leaves space to be absorbed by divine dimensions.

Qawwali music is a cosmic quest

in search of the beloved,

and more often than not the beloved is God.

Now, to leave the material world

and to enter the spiritual world

requires you to go through a spiritual station called barzakh,

which means "no place" or "inter-space".

So, Sufis had a concept

and a word for "no place",

200 years before Thomas Moore came up with the word utopia,

meaning literally "no place".

Qawwali is utopian,

not just in the state it tries to induce

but in its communal endeavour.

Just like house,

this is music as individual and shared experience.

This was not religion with a capital R.

The Sufis were really about connecting with the common man,

with the guy working in the fields, the guy living in the villages,

to give the ordinary person some kind of spiritual nourishment,

some kind of way of understanding their place in the universe.

RHYTHMIC CLAPPING

But what if we don't have to escape via drugs or spiritualism at all?

What if the way to get to the good place of utopia

is to appreciate more fully

ordinary, everyday reality -

the wonder of the moment.

THEY CLAP RHYTHMICALLY

This is clapping music,

written and here performed by the American composer

Steve Reich.

Reich was inspired by traditional drumming patterns.

One performer in each pair is providing the rhythm

while the other is clapping the same pattern

but phasing in and out of tempo.

The result is one of the classics of pure minimalism.

APPLAUSE

To imagine what people will feel

when you write a piece of music is impossible.

Where you sit in a room, who you are, what you had for dinner,

all these things will enter into how you...

Even the same piece played...

The same piece played in another time and place.

Music lives when it's played.

Steve Reich has pushed musical boundaries

by encouraging audiences to focus on less.

He simplifies music to its purist form

using repetition and also real world sounds as instruments.

There is this constant set of astonishing innovations.

You've taken found sounds, you're looping,

-you are effectively proto-sampling using tape loops.

-Right.

Well, the word "sampling" didn't exist when we did that,

it was called tape loops, and tape this and tape that.

And now when most people say tape, they think of Scotch tape.

HE LAUGHS

Audio tape is something that they may or may not have heard of,

and certainly rarely seen.

City Life, Reich's 1995 composition,

uses found sound that he himself recorded in New York.

With it, he asks us to cut through the chaos of the city noise and find

music and poetry in the everyday.

The integration

of the sounds is basically the idea of marrying, if you will,

the found sound on the street -

the slam of the car door becomes the bass drum, say,

and the air brakes - kshh! - becomes a crash cymbal,

the Porsche horn becomes an oboe,

and so on and so forth.

And I think that kind of thinking is what's in City Life,

where you take something that's not a musical sound and you think,

"What's the musical, you know, correlative of that?"

Reich's work is meditative,

like house and qawwali,

but also technically demanding of musicians and audiences alike.

I get a sense with Reich of the restless explorer,

a utopian testing of what's musically possible.

Is your musical drive somehow utopian?

I think every artist who's the least bit serious...

..is slightly self-critical,

and therefore there is more in my trash basket

than there is in the finished piece.

So that's certainly trying to make sure that you do your best.

I think that striving to do the very best job that you can do is a very

good and fairly common human trait.

I mean, I certainly hope that the sound man is trying to,

and the cameraman, are trying to do the best that they can.

Whether it's Steve Reich's music of the everyday world

or the lure of qawwali's higher spiritual plane,

this pursuit of utopia is all about

more fully experiencing a fleeting moment.

It's about the utopia of the now.

How do we get the best out of each moment,

and, as a result, out of ourselves?

For the Japanese,

one way to connect with the pure moment

is to represent it and express it through haiku,

the ancient art of extremely precise and brief poetry.

"6am

"The cat's tongue in my ear."

LAUGHTER

Sorry, that's disgusting.

-It's really good, though.

-Yeah.

Maximum impact with minimum words,

perfection using the fewest syllables.

That's the utopian goal of these members of the British Haiku Society

meeting in Fleet Street, London.

"Apple blossom

"The clenched fist of her infant, opening."

The image of the child's hand opening

but also like apple blossom opening,

I think it's really beautiful and very powerful.

Haiku is a very short poem and its purpose is to capture a moment.

If you see something beautiful

and you describe that in some way

that lets the person who's reading it

know what you're feeling about it,

that's a beautiful haiku.

"First coffee

"The barista's overnight mascara."

That's a very sharp observation,

and you know there's an untold story behind it.

-Yeah.

-And we all just imagine.

-LAUGHTER

There are haiku that you just think, "Oh, of course!"

Or, "Oh, I know that feeling."

You could call it the a-ha moment,

that moment when you go, "Wow!"

"Bare, in your bathroom

"Another girl uses my rose petal mouthwash."

-VARIOUS:

-Oooh!

Achieving the a-ha moment comes with limitations.

"The sky is bluer

"Always on the other side.

"Up-chucking homeless."

The only problem with it, of course, is it's not a haiku moment.

You've set yourself quite tight parameters.

Do you find that limiting or do you find it actually liberating?

It makes you think very hard.

And I think that's the joy of it, really.

So it's limiting, but it's limiting in a very thoughtful kind of way.

It's a bit like meditation.

You're focusing on one thing.

"At quayside

"The fishermen casting out shadows."

Oh, that's great!

It seems to me that this is really very, very much

about living in a moment and being aware of the fact that we are

living in a moment.

One of the problems people have, I think,

is that they have this running commentary on their life,

and so when they're out and about,

what they're doing is actually thinking all the time of,

you know, what the credit card limit is,

"What time is the train?", you know,

"Is that girl going to be there?" or whatever or whatever.

Now, the haiku writer has to step back from that,

switch off the running commentary of your life.

And I think that's why it's so popular with Zen Buddhists.

-Absolutely.

-Because the whole stuff about moments

and being in the now.

It's being in that state of being aware.

Do you feel that, after you're finished writing,

you go back into the real world...

..better, enriched, improved?

I think so, yes.

Because you're seeing things anew.

Every time you write a good haiku, it's a small epiphany.

You've seen the world for what it is.

Martin Lucas, who was

an outstanding haiku writer, who died recently,

he talked about haiku being the news!

You know, all the stuff that's happening on television,

that isn't the real news.

The real news is haiku.

If you read haiku, you get the truth.

It's time for me to pursue epiphany.

You need to bear in mind

I've never tried to write a haiku before this morning.

I've come up with my own haiku about utopia.

"No place, better place

"Imagine, contest, repeat

"The itch unscratched."

It's not... Well, it needs to be about a moment, really.

And it's not, is it?

-No.

-And it's got commas is in it.

We don't do commas in haiku.

-Oh, we do sometimes.

-Very occasionally, but not all those.

Yeah, but you're supposed to be listening to me read it, not...

You're reading over my shoulder!

OK. I might not be a haiku master, but I'm still struck by the haiku

writer's desire to record perfectly the moment's perfection.

Sometimes it's quite tragic what you're writing.

It's something quite sad and moving.

Sometimes it's hilarious. Sometimes it's beautiful and succinct.

But it's always looking for something better.

I think you're utopians.

That kind of glimpse of a fleeting moment or of something in transition

actually reflects our relationship to utopia in that it's never

something that can be experienced completely, it's always glimpsed.

Getting that glimpse of a better place that might just help us to be

better people.

It seems to me that we try to unpack the significance of an observed

moment in many ways,

not just through poetry but through other art forms.

We love to be transported by storytelling,

and no more so than through drama.

At multiplexes and in the theatres,

we're at home with our various screens.

I think we seek out the truth of other people's experiences

in ways akin to reading a haiku.

Here, we live vicariously through actors' experiences,

moving out of ourselves and connecting emotionally.

People go to the theatre.

People watch movies to see life in all its facets.

Sometimes life as it is, but also sometimes life as it could be.

People being more connected,

more expressive, more loving,

more argumentative, more whatever.

To have that additional intensity,

that additional lifefulness,

and I think improvisation can really be a way

that, if actors embrace it,

you can have a performance that just gives so much more

to an audience because it's so much more alive,

so much more rich, so much more felt.

A makes the shape, B joins.

Stay there for a moment, and then A says thank you.

Chris Heimann is an award-winning director

and an improvisation teacher at Rada.

You're not trying to create, I would say.

You're just noticing your own response to what you are doing.

Here in South London, he's running a workshop using improvisation to help

actors lose their self-consciousness so as to bring greater authenticity

to their performances.

One of the reasons why people act?

You get more permission to be angry or sad or whatever it is.

An impulse is also what we are looking for, right?

As an actor, between your impulse and your expression,

there is nothing.

Improvisation like this is inspired by the utopian performance ideas of

Jerzy Grotowski and the Poor Theatre School,

which revolutionised acting in the 20th century.

Overturning old-fashioned declamatory styles,

Grotowski argued for a transparent actor,

a kind of minimalism in acting.

The idea of being...that you have an actor who is so transparent

that any inner impulse is immediately expressed,

so there's no filter. There's no armour.

There's nothing in between the actual impulse happening within

and the outer expression.

That's something that I feel that is something very, very raw

and exciting also for an audience to watch,

and something to aspire towards.

These ideas have been hugely influential in experimental theatre

from Brecht to Brook. The key insight, it seems to me,

is that all performances are unique,

a collaboration between performer and audience.

And there is something very generous here.

The performer taking a risk, stripping back the mask,

bearing their inner selves to create

an empathic connection with an audience.

That was weird. We kind of had a... Wheee!

We're going to have a fight, and then it was kind of...

I'm being a bit submissive there.

Is this some kind of S&M thing? Then I was kind of...

"Stop my brain, stop my brain, what's going on?"

And then your face kind of changed into something like...

More grace in your face.

-So, yeah.

-What I would say, if you, as an actor,

have the courage to wait until something genuinely comes to you

as an impulse, you might become dangerous without even trying,

simply because you have the courage to wait for something

to genuinely trigger something.

It seemed to me that there was a kind of peeling away

of actorly conventions

in order to liberate them a little bit.

One of the things that I remember from...

reading Grotowski's works

is this idea of additive arts versus subtractive arts,

meaning that, in painting, you start with an empty canvas and you keep

adding the paint, whereas in sculpting,

you chip away stuff in order to reveal what's already there.

And that is definitely the kind of approach that I take

to actor training.

It's not about slapping more and more skills onto the actor,

it's about helping them to let go of unhelpful thoughts, behaviours,

expectations, to come back to something that is more pure,

that's already there.

Almost like a child.

Searching for authentic moments in drama and storytelling is, I think,

more than escape from the humdrum of daily life.

It's about something much bigger - connecting with others.

Every time we tell a story, every time we enjoy a performance,

every time we think we can feel someone else's feelings,

we are exercising one of the most important traits - empathy.

The more empathetic we are,

the more generous and tolerant we become as human beings,

perhaps the closer we get to utopia.

MUSIC: Ride Of The Valkyries by Wagner

This kind of generosity,

this sharing of moving and thought-provoking art

has a long and rich history.

For me, one of the most extraordinary attempts to connect

was made by a 19th-century composer.

Idealising utopian visions from Norse myth,

Richard Wagner tried to create a total reality in which audiences

could emotionally immerse themselves.

Total art - work that is complete in and of itself.

This might seem like the naive controlling dream

of a troubled genius,

but there's something undeniably generous in Wagner's desire

to share a fantastical vision that might inspire audiences

to reflect anew on life.

Wagner's passion has certainly shaped one man's life.

Nice to see you. Lovely day.

Builder Martin Graham connected with Wagner so much,

he dreamed of staging Wagner's work in his back garden,

deep in the Cotswolds.

Just in case I ever fancy building an opera house in my back yard,

how long does it take?

Does that count dreaming about it?

-Yeah, definitely.

-Oh, years, years.

MUSIC: Siegfried's Funeral March by Wagner

Over the years, Martin transformed the cow shed next to his house

into a fully functioning opera house,

complete with 500 hand-me-down seats

from the Royal Opera House refit.

His labour of love has now staged

the whole of Wagner's 15-hour-long Ring cycle.

Is there a parallel between Wagner's total work of art,

this vision of the full, encompassing experience

for the audience, and the vision that you had here?

Well, of course. I didn't think of it in that way when I started.

I just thought, "I want to build the theatre,

"and then we'll build the pit,

"and then we'll build the orchestra." But in fact,

as we went on, people modified their views and thought,

"Well, maybe it IS possible.

"Maybe he isn't completely nuts."

When you listen to Wagner, where does it take your mind?

It's fantasy,

and it's magical, and it's emotional,

and it really tears your inside out.

Perhaps it all comes back again to innocence.

Martin Graham's fascination with the magical started with something

we might all remember and recognise -

a child's curiosity.

When I was a little boy, I used to go out in the fields,

and the first thing I did when I got out of sight,

so nobody could see me,

is I put my hand over one eye...

..and I used to call that my dark eye,

and it took me to another world.

And it was a little bit of childish fantasy,

and it still comes back to me quite a lot.

If you just want to extract yourself

from the world and go into the arts, just do that,

in your own way.

What I find remarkable is that Martin Graham

has kept his curiosity and his enthusiasm for the arts

and has also had the self belief and drive

to share what he loves with others.

Do you feel that there is something utopian about this,

that you are building a better place here?

There is. There is something absolutely tremendous.

Because it's like a love affair.

Once you get going, there is a reciprocity.

And the sort of people who... Your customers who pay you good money

and don't mind the odd leaking roof,

they're the giants of it all

because they're just endorsing you and encouraging you

and saying, "Go on."

And then, of course, they are part of the joint enterprise.

It's a wonderful, magical feeling to think -

all those people enjoy themselves for a four-hour,

five-hour evening, and come out literally beaming with joy.

For some,

I think it's almost a religious experience.

In art, in life,

to believe in greater than ourselves is an act of imagination,

of closing the eye,

of temporarily letting go and moving into a better place.

From Thomas Moore to Sid Meier,

explorers to feminists,

hedonists to artists,

visionaries and communal pioneers,

the steps we've taken to improve our world,

sometimes in the face of great adversity,

have all started within our imaginations.

These dreams are deeply personal

and, at the same time, wonderfully communal.

And though utopias fail, although our gains can be lost,

I think that Thomas Moore would be proud that the urge

to hope for better, for which he coined a name,

has become something that humans show no sign of losing.