Today is Toby Day

At the beginning of the day, I said that we had earned a bonus day for good behaviour, and for being ahead of our schedule. The fact is that the day had been planned all along, but it seemed to fit, because we had managed to get to the end of our process of working through the play in time to leave it behind for a day, and work exclusively on physical aspects of the play, with a visit from hugely experienced physical theatre guru Toby Sedgewick.

We had talked about presenting him with specific sections of the play only, but in the end having started at the beginning, we worked all through the parts we had mapped out, presenting them to Toby, discussing and then working through possibilities. It was a fun, and extremely useful day, with some great new ideas, and it was a good moment at which to get an outside eye on things, from such a positive and inventive person. There were some great routines emerging, around diving down to Brazil, and the machine monster, and some of the principles of how we are presenting reality and fantasy were much clearer too. The whole day also reinforced the value of the way the set is evolving into lower-tech and simpler approaches.

In the evening we discussed our approach to Friday's sharing, coming to the conclusion that we should present the majority of scenes that we have prectised. We decided to leave out the 'Brazil' section, since it would give us a useful opening to discussing ideas for inclusion there, withg the children from the two project schools, who will be there for the sharing.

After running through the prolonged extract we will show, there was another long conversation with Minato, this time centred around whether the play contained too many key words and themes. His philosophical and abstract approach is proving quite a challenge at times, but there is a lot to be said for these kind of challenges. If we all worked in the same ways, would there be such richness in our international collaboration?