Sharing the Yoghurt

The final day of workshops seems to have arrived extremely fast. The actors arrived fresher than yesterday, and had an hour or so to get ready, while we made final preparations for people to come and watch. In the end there were 30 kids from the two schools sitting at the front and about fifty adults, plus all of the company, so the room was full, but fortunately a crisp day of autumn sun had taken over from the stifling heat of earlier in the week.

The presentation went really well, with the actors impressing everyone, and the children really deeply involved. The response was overwhelmingly positive - with some people extremely impressed and no really major criticisms at all. Plenty of suggestions and minor queries and criticisms, but the company was overall delighted, relieved and pretty proud. After the presentation, there was a lavish lunch of sushi, and then the actors went out into the square for their 'impromptu' musical performance, which was great - with Young Ju predictably stealing the show by involving half of Birmingham in an elaborate korean Hokey-Cokey. The children and staff from Chandos and Reaside joined in, before taking a long backstage tour. After that there was only time for a brief Q and A before they had to go home. Chandos had prepared some beautiful question sunflowers, for the Japanese and Korean parties to take with them, and they had obviously enjoyed their day, with great support from Rachel from Brightspace.

The afternoon was taken up with a meeting about music, where we worked out our overall approach with Minatosan. Mijeong has finished korean lyrics for the theme song, and he has ideas for music through the piece, which he will finish when we have finished the first draft of the play. He then led a workshop, showing how the mixture of percussion and melody may work. It all ended in a song.

Meanwhile, the producers had a meeting, thrashing out the terms of our process of longer-term touring, very amicably, and then even more amicably, we all gathered at the Kababish in Moseley for a well-earned curry, hosted by the Rep. Not for the first time I was struck through the day by how uniformly nice a group this is in which to work. Nice, and talented too.