We Like Saturday Mornings...

One conclusion from our first week is that the decisions we made on the saturday morning at the end of the Tokyo workshop week have stood up very well. On that morning, we mapped out the charcter sketches and synopsis, and nothing that has happened this week has made us chnage our minds about any big aspects of this. The shape and focus of the stroy feels about right, and most of the work has been consolidating and fleshing out.

So we decided at the beginning of today's big creative team meeting that we like Saturday mornings.

In rehearsal room two, there are two radiators which we have not been able to switch off, so we have to switch on an air conditioning unit to counteract them. But everything else is remarkably efficient. OK so we do allow ourselves the odd tangent, but generally, with Ayako acting as chief translation referee, and giving the yellow card to anyone who speaks for too long, we keep to the task that we have set.

That task for this saturday morning , is to re-do the synopsis, identifying the individual scenes in the play, and to cut a three-hour story short, we achieve it pretty well. Much of the debate is about the beginning, and the idea that has now emerged of Blue being present from the beginning, as an Ariel-like spirit in the building site, visible as a shadowy presence only. There are also break-thorugh decisions around the order of events later in the play, with the sequence in which they find a machine-monster now inserted between the digging sections. The new synopsis will be drafted over the weekend and should appear here shortly afterwards.

The writers had lunch together at Woktastic on Saturday, and then went our ways...with everyone who is staying in Birmingham going to watch Birmingham Royal Ballet later....