Starting to fill in the gaps:

Photography: Nuno Santos (www.nunosantos.co.uk)

• We worked in our last week of rehearsal on integrating some of the excellent feedback we received at our Terry O’Toole sharing in Lincolnshire on the 20th August, particularly concerning the giving and receiving of weight, and the many implications of making physical contact with someone. In our research we became so accustomed to just dealing physically with an unconscious body that I think we needed reminding that this is not necessarily the strongest reaction someone might have to such a situation. Following feedback from the 20th, we’ve been encouraged to consider when we use different kinds of manipulation in the piece, e.g. when we look but don’t touch, when we touch but don’t manipulate, and when we make contact in order to manipulate.

• I have to admit that in terms of structure, this piece has been a real challenge to bring together:

1. because we had so much material that we were trying to consolidate into 20 minutes
2. because I was trying to create a non-linear logic that could shift between reality and imagination
3. because I knew that there was more about this work that I wanted to develop next year (which meant that, for me, the ‘first instalment’ we’ve created was going to seem incomplete whatever happened).

In making structural decisions, and the many changes of order which took place in the last 2 weeks of our research (which I’m not sure the dancers thank me for!) I took on board what Anna (Williams) said to me in our last mentoring session about really trying to find the most important things I wanted to say and bringing them forward. This often meant leaving key moments to settle for longer before moving on. As a company, we discussed the way in which these periods of less activity or of a single kind of activity over a sustained period of time gave people watching a chance to reflect on what they were seeing. I also found a lot of what Tom (Cornford) wrote in his notes on our London sharing useful when making my structural decisions – particularly what he described as ‘collage’, or placing ideas that had a similar feeling about them next to each other, even if they weren’t chronological, and also what he said about describing many possible aftermaths of a single traumatic event, without suggesting that any one of those aftermaths was what actually happened.

• I’ve been struck, as I always am, by the point at which the work becomes something other than what you thought it would be, and you accept that it has taken on a life of its own. This piece took me by surprise in the final stages, (e.g. felt much more eerie) but now I feel that that was just what was necessary to take a step in a new direction.

• About ending: this has been a real problem for me this time, and actually it’s always difficult to find a resolution; for now, with this work, the ending doesn’t feel like an ending and that’s important. I want to put forward the ideas we’re addressing in a cyclical way, so the audience shares in the feeling that something else could happen next.

Photography: Nuno Santos (www.nunosantos.co.uk)

Photography: Nuno Santos (www.nunosantos.co.uk)