I forgot it was Saturday

Today was fun! It was Daisy’s birthday, which meant we had cake… twice! It seems that sometimes cake can help creativity in a mystical, magical way. Or perhaps the sugar rush coming just after lunch meant we bounced around a lot in the afternoon.
Either way it did the trick, helping us find something “else” in the material.
We keep returning to how stories are told, retold, found in other tales, stories and memories.
What happens if we float them across the stage? What happens if, in this hinterland, two voices breathe life into and drop. A princess in a tower, a man in a prison cell pacing round and round in a circle in his cell, no actually it’s just a man in a room, not a room a park and its not a man it’s a girl…and she’s crying, no… laughing and she see’s a man across the room…
If there are no true characters and only whiffs of the author's imagination, why do we still recognise them to some extent another?

We’d played today with a phone-call.
What does a phone-call mean? what does a phone-call mean when two people reach for the receiver, what happens if we show you two alternatives, what happens when you just see a flash?
What is the difference between the putting down of a phone and the slamming of a phone. What does it mean when someone else takes the phone and hangs it up gently, softly even, consolingly? Or is it maternally? Protectively?
Its interesting the difference that gender can play in the reading of images, two boys, two girls, two girls one boy, a boy and a girl? Is this reading based on our experience? On received wisdom? Something innate?

One of the most Zen like activities about this show are the lamps we have been playing with since we started this piece, was the lamps. I think the half darkness in the studio, using these floor-bound lamps sometimes makes us forget its daytime. I forgot it was Saturday, I think West Ham drew with Villa and apparently Red Bull are on two of the top three starting spots for tomorrows Chinese Grand prix… Today we got into something that Accidental Collective secretly like. Choreography. One lamp, two lamps, how do you bring an audience into a world , a abstract world where writers and stories, form and function can meet.
What does a lamp do? Light the darkness? Brighten things up? Illuminate? Expose? In a kind of link to the lives of our prehistoric forebears do we associate it with warmth? Comfort? Safety? Or is it reminiscent of archetypal images of sitting around the campfire and bedtime stories.
Two lamps, three lamps, four lamps. On and Off, flashes and co-ordinated displays. It can be really challenging to find a piece of material that comes out of rules and trial and error and find that it is something that will require practice, concentration and trust in each other.
Soon we’re going to stop generating new material and work to hone, build and structure the different fragments, flashes moments and stories. Eek!

Rick