Is this room getting smaller?

We had a group of 7 today - and I have to say the room is feeling rather small.  I can feel another move coming on!  Although this room is cheap - which is just as well as I pay for most of the room hire, we are going to have to get somewhere larger before too long.

We did more work on the Badger Kettle today - finally casting it, with as many parts as we can.  This enabled people to be able to work on the characters they will definately have, and further develop the roles, sculpts.




The work that we have done previously, on movement, voice, embodiment, role, rhythm and image, will be revisited periodically over the next few weeks, so that it will continue to feed the final pieces.

Gabi has kindly offered to do us another workshop around Commedia, as this is a major influence in the creation of the Badger Kettle.  Lauren has offered to do a workshop on Astrology, which I think will feed into Urashima, and I am going to contact a Tai Chi person (thanks for the contact Sara), to see if they will come and do us a workshop on Tai Chi, as this will influence the style of  The Thunder Good.  These elements will help the fact that each piece, when performed, will very much have it's own style, thus the evening should be lively and entertaining.


Next week we will do some more work on body and eye contact.  This is a very important part of all of the performances, as the actors must be working together as one unit - connected at all times in space, purpose and flow.

Each piece will have it's own narrator.  The narrators characters have to some extent been set already, and over the weeks these will be further defined.  Each narrator has a very individual style of delivery and interaction with the audience.  The fact that the narrators have their roles allocated means that they can start to learn their lines, and work without the script, which will free them up to work more on expressivity and movement.


The Badger Kettle, like the other stories, will be told by an animated narrator, and illustrated by a series of sculpts.  The narrator will pause their story telling for long enough for the actors to move between sculpts, so that either the narrator, or the actors are moving at the same time.  However there will be some exceptions to this, mainly around the Badger herself.  The Badger and narrator move together at some points - where there is a refrain, or chorus in the script.  Also, there are parts where the Badger moves - energetically, leaping and dancing - whilst the story is being told.  At these points, the narrator will leave the performance area and join the audience, still speaking, but remaining physically out of the picture.

As always, I would encourage the actors to look up Japanese theatre styles on You Tube and check out the images on Google images, these are very interesting and will feed very much into the spirit of the performances.  This is also important for the music.  We are very lucky to have Chris from Standing Tone working with us, who is beginning to form ideas around how to describe the characters with music.



(A plug for Chris - he has just bought out a new album, which I will be hearing for the first time later today, but I just know it is going to be fantastic - so here is the link to the website if anyone wants to check it out http://gurusoul.net/ )