We have had a busy week... mainly on my part, trying to get my head round an R&S process that requires planning and mapping and logging and consultation when all I used to do was sit at my computer, smoke endless cigarettes and throw things on paper with wilful abandon.

Tom has been a saviour in trying to get me organised, in trying to get the project organised, in trying to do what we said we would do in our application and interview. Me? I am just champing at the bit and can't understand why we can't get on and just do, do, do. He gives me a wry sideways look and reminds me that we are supposed to be doing this together. That we are supposed to be testing how two practitioners from two diverse backgrounds and disciplines might be able to come together and make a new piece of theatre. He has produced the most amazing spreadsheet on how we will spend our time and what our measurable outcomes are - and I am grateful that he knows what is required of us. But I have to sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut as I am bursting with ideas and am wanting to just jump in, even if the water is over my head.

I find this process endlessly fascinating. Where once I would have steamed ahead solo I now have to stop and consider. I have to think of my collaborator and how we can share the thought processes, the ideas, the world we want to build. I have never worked this way before - ever. I word alone and in chaos. Now I work with a collaborator in order.  

And today we had a session entitled "Themes" in which we were to identify and explore the themes of the play and what we are trying to achieve. I thought this might not work as I rarely think of a piece in terms of themes. The themes tend to come organically out of the piece and are never specifically identified early in the process. I wondered how it would work.

We kicked off... with pens and flipchart paper. I decided we were going old school in the way we mapped out our thinking. The themes of what we had read and absorbed (i.e. the past canon of Angela Carter) came out easily and we agreed on most aspects of the work. Hard not to as her themes are not so much overt as screaming in your face. But it was when we got on to how we look at the world of the play that things started become startingly transparent to us both but furthermore I could feel both of us becoming nore and more excited by the ideas of this joint thinking we were doing. I have not done joint thinking before (hmmm.. let me rephrase that one). I had always immersed myself solo into a new world that I had built. Now here I am building a world with someone else.

We charted the world and the environment - we have always known our environment would be a character. It would need to be. But we spoke of the two different environments we wanted to build, how one was naturaly and one synthetic, how one was lust and one love, how one was seemingly gentle, soft and safe and the other dangerous, wild and predatory. And then we thought about what would happen if we swapped this around during the progress of the narrative.

And then we thought about how we could... and then we went completely off piste, and all our planning and strategy went out of the window as the idea took hold and we just got excited. We prefixed everything we were saying with "I know we aren't talking about this bit yet but what about if we..."

Tomorrow we are looking at how the technology will help us create those worlds and make them tangible. I know I shouldn't have any ideas on this yet... but I am becoming progressively more obssessed in how we are going to use the creative technologies especially in terms of taking the very old theatre conventions and re-inventing them. I am particularly obssessed with the raising of a curtain.... and I am equally obsessed with a solution I think I might have.

 Today or tomorrow I know Dan is going to post photos of the work we have done today and the recording of the session. I know I will play the recording back and everything may seem pedestrian, over-simplified, but I feel today we had more than a couple of 'Eureka' moments that will take us forward, just that little bit more.

Posted by sharonclark