To write or not to write? That's the question that has weighed on some of the winners of the Standard Bank young artist award for theatre. Not all of them are polished or experienced scriptwriters and the prize money - unknown but said to be generous - and the attention the award generates encourages the recipients to create a new theatre work from scratch.For some this entails stretching themselves beyond their speciality, whether it's directing, or in Janni Younge's case, puppetry and visual production.Previous winners like Greg Homann opt for a creative adaptation of a known work, like his Oedipus @ Koö-nú! , a South African take on the classic Greek tragedy.All eyes are on the debut of the winners' creations at the National Arts Festival.This year's winner, Jade Bowers, who made her name as a director, has decided not to try her hand at writing a script for her work, which will debut at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown next month. Nor will she present an adaptation of a text."I am not a writer," declares the 29-year-old Capetonian who, after a stint working at Dalro (the dramatic rights organisation), "gained too much respect for authors to adapt their work".Her allegiance to playwrights is admirable, but how can you create new theatre if you don't write a script or adapt a work?As a celebrated director, known for her rendition of Neil Coppen's Tin Bucket Drum and Hamlet, she wants to show how directors can shape a work. Her approach is "collaboration with the writer".Scorched , her new work, is based on Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies , a play written by a Lebanese-Canadian writer that sees two siblings travel to the Middle East to trace their roots.Bower gravitates towards works that deal with reconciling identities, allowing her to tease out some of the strands of her middle-class, ''coloured" identity."I'm interested in how South Africans of all cultures use storytelling to define ourselves and to find the links that unite us," she says.Bowers selects manuscripts she can relate to and through workshops with the cast they figure out ways in which the text resonates with them and how to exploit this.It's not that Bowers wishes to side step the South African context, instead, she wants to use other texts to prompt us to reflect on it from the outside looking in."The role of art is to deal with where we are now, although we are a product of our past. We need to figure out how the past informs our present," she says.Presenting a theatre work that's not set in South Africa on the main stage of the National Arts Festival is ballsy.The proof will be in the reaction of the regular festival-goers. They can be a tough crowd.Scorched will show at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown from July 8 to 10..