Dubai High: A Culture Trip

In early 2007, writer and theatre director Michael Schindhelm was appointed by the Dubai authorities as consultant on a projected opera house, and in early 2008 found himself with a broader remit as director of the newly founded Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. His diary of 2008 is a partly fictionalised account of his first twelve months of both working and living in Dubai. It is a meditation, from a cultural perspective, on the nature of this extraordinary city and its project to reinvent itself according to new rules of its own devising. From the outset there were profound cultural issues to be faced. Can essentially alien art forms be transplanted effectively? Can they be imposed top-down by the authorities?