The Webs We Weave and Working In the Matrix

Good morning.

So for the last few days I have been in gathering mode, building possibilities for new projects - in a cerebral space really. (well not too cerebral actually!)

But today I am in rehearsal with Mullered by Clifford Oliver and I am really excited. Going into the rehearsal/imaginal space is warm and familiar, but also stark and sharp. It embodies the imagination, and as such can offer up many goodies, but it also the empty space. Its a playground and a factory.

Today though I am not starting from scratch as I have made this piece already - it just hasn't been out for a few months. Today is about revitalising and igniting the material. Finding it freshly. 

And the other great thing about today too is that I don't have to worry about budgets, persuasive outcomes or targets. Hurrah! (Don't get me wrong - I do LOVE targets!). Yesterday's blog was all about that really - in fact my friend Amari told me it was a bit boring, which made me laugh, because sometimes that searching for a connection/narrative bit of my job can be like looking for a needle in a haystack and it takes a while to spot it. Its technical.

But today its about four actors in the imaginal space and me. As you will know if you regularly pop in on my blog, I have been writing a bit about emotional access recently and the steps to releasing character. So in anticipation of today's rehearsal and the reorientation of the actors into character, I am thinking about webs and matrixes.

Webs and matrixes are beautiful and complex structures - the dictionary definitions say:

Web: 
Noun
A network of fine threads constructed by a spider from fluid secreted by its spinnerets, used to catch its prey.
Verb
Move or hang so as to form a weblike shape: "an intricate transportation network webs from coast to coast".

Matrix
Noun
An environment or material in which something develops.
A mass of fine-grained rock in which gems, crystals, or fossils are embedded.

And that pretty much sums up the job. I will spend time today with the actors revisiting and building the character's web of relationships within the matrix of the play. This is always a great process as it produces fertile networks and connections.

We all live in webs, indeed the invention of the world wide web is merely a mirror image of this probably  - its an exquisite architecture. 

If you think about your own life and the web of family, friends, work colleagues etc imagine just how many relationships you live in and with? You manage this physical and  emotional landscape on a daily basis and you are different in each of them. At any one time we might be engaged in several hundred complex emotional relationships and we have to adjust to each as we need to. Depending on who we are with, talking to, the intimacy or formality of the relationship will determine the energy we use, the tone of voice, the physical proximity. Its a dance.

Its pretty easy to manage that one on one (is it?) - but faced with a room full it can be daunting. Is it any surprise that the bride and groom fall exhausted into their marriage bed after a wedding day full of "managing" relationships.  Its no surprise that these hot house occasions are wonderful settings for life's biggest intimate dramas!

Making these rapid emotional shifts is what we do. 

Have you ever had that experience when you are in the middle of a heated  argument with a family member and the door bell rings and you have an unexpected visitor? You invite them in for coffee and both you and your family member have to perform emotional gymnastics to change the mood in the room and cover up the previous antagonistic energy! Its life isn't it?


So to the actor. In creating character I work with the web. I ask the actor to place themselves (their character) at the centre of an imaginary web. This is done physically, so the symbolic web is set in space in the studio. The actor employs visual and emotional imagination to 'people' the web with all those others he conjurs to life for his character. The web is as big as the actor wants to make it. The people closer to the centre are those very 'present' in the character's life at the moment in which the play is set. This does not mean close in an easy trusting way necessarily, or even alive at the time of the setting. Sometimes a person in the life of the character might be huge and very close, but extremely intimidating or dark and dominating.

Working with 'summoning' these relationships into the space does a number of rich things. It deepens the emotional work needed by the actor, references the narrative arc fully, but perhaps most importantly embodies the inherent emotional and rational contradictions and incongruities in the character's life. 
This is where lazy character work can let the actor down. It can be too neat, too systematic and linear. People are not like that - we are full of contradictions. 

And so in creating character the actor must learn to imagine and tolerate things that don't fit nicely together. For example if you had to play Hitler, how would you approach him? You couldn't just play evil. In fact you would have to work hard to create love from Hitler's perspective.

So it is with character as with the people that we base them on - the same person can be loved and admired by one person in their lives, and hated and reviled by another. But of course they are still themselves whichever "face" they choose to reveal at any time, or on which others project.

This work on relational webs in creating character is very useful - and a tool I use unfailingly. You can do it in lots of ways and its useful for the actors to capture it in a drawing that they can take away with them for their character portfolio at the end of the rehearsal day. 

So excitedly off to the studio- catch you tomorrow.

What Qualities Would The Glass In Cinderella's Slippers Need To Have In Order For Her To Walk And Dance Safely?

Good morning!

I really like this so thought I would share it with you! 
Carole 

What Qualities Would The Glass In Cinderella's Slippers Need To Have In Order For Her To Walk And Dance Safely?



Antariksh Bothale, Mechanical Engineer & Amateur Linguist, http://www.linguistrix.com/

It is delightful to have my masters degree in Mechanical Engineering put to use in resolving age old engineering problems.


(Not photographed: Her feet)

One can never know the exact shape or size of the slippers that Cinderella wore, but one can hazard a guess that they must have looked something like this:


Now, let’s talk about failure. No, not about Cinderella’s failure to keep her shoes on her feet, but about mechanical failure. Whenever we design something that needs to bear force, we test for various possible modes of failure and try to ensure that our object is strong against all of them.

Now, one possible way the slippers could break is by yielding to the compressive stress arising due to Cinderella’s weight. But will that happen?

We can safely assume that Cindy didn’t weigh more than than 50 kgs. I mean, her cousins were fat and ugly, so we have to leave them some room on the top, right? Let’s assume this weight to be applied uniformly across the shoe. Note that the toe region of a heeled shoe bears almost thrice as much force as the heel region, but it won’t matter for our purposes.


Using a rough estimate of her foot size, her foot area comes out to be about

If 50 kgs of weight were to be applied uniformly across this area, the compressive stress developed in the material would be



The Yield strengthof ordinary glass for compressive stress is approximately, which is three orders of magnitude more than what Cinderella’s weight can produce, so we can safely conclude that any regular glass can sustain it. Since the stress is so low, we don’t even need to worry about the uneven loading on the shoe.

So, is she safe now? Can she safely dance at the ball without fear of tiny shards of glass cutting her skin and ruining her dress?

Not so soon, buddy!

There’s another way her shoe could break, and this is due to the compressive stress due to the bending moment applied to her heel every time she walks.

Now, I don’t want to be here all day, and I don’t want to model her shoe in ANSYS, so I will make a few simplifying assumptions. Let her heel have a diameter. and have lengthfrom the tip to the point where it joins the rest of the shoe. The heel can now be modeled as a simple cantilever beam of circular cross section.


I’m in a bit of a hurry, and I have to get back to reading The Casual Vacancy (2012 book), so I will defer to http://www.efunda.com/formulae/s… for the actual calculation of the maximum bending stress. I will assume her stepping angle to be about 30°, which means that only half of her weight () would act in the normal direction to the heel (causing the bending). Pluggingas the bending force and the rest of the figures in place, we get the maximum bending stress in the heel to be. Note that this is dangerously close to our critical stress of. Even if we make a few more allowances by making the heel thicker or the stepping angle smaller, we cannot let our little princess veer so dangerously close to disaster.


In order for her to be safe enough, we would take a safety factor of at least 2, and also assume that the bending stress can go as high as. This means that her shoes need to be made of glass that has a yield strength of at least.


Safety glass (thermal toughened glass) seems to be a good bet. It has a yield strength of about and a higher Young’s Modulus too (http://www.matbase.com/material/…), so I imagine Cinderella can use it safely without fear of it breaking just when she is shaking a leg with our awesome prince. Ideally, we would also want it mixed with something to make it less brittle, but I don’t want to make it too different from glass or the answer becomes meaningless.

But what happens when she starts running out of the castle at midnight approaches?

When Cinderella runs, I expect the impact force to be three to five times that of the regular walking force (this is somewhat supported by the paper
Ground reaction forces at different speeds of human walking and running,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubm…). The shoes should be safe for these values.

We must also take into consideration the fact that Cinderella’s dress would probably not let her take long strides. This would mean that her stepping angle would remain within safe limits, further ensuring that her shoes don’t break.

Most importantly, she would be well-advised to develop a toe-first foot strike,which would totally solve the problem. This cannot be maintained for large distances, but would certainly take Cinderella out of the danger zone.

What if the friction between her shoes and the ground/floor is so low that she slips? Well, we can assume that the flooring is either made of stone or is carpeted. The coefficient of frictionfor Glass on Stone is about 0.42, which is not very high, but is high enough for her to not slip. I couldn’t get a value for the coefficient for glass on carpet, but I imagine it to be similar.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

(I am well aware that Cinderella’s shoes were most likely made of fur and that the glass in the story is mostly a result of mistranslation. I am also sure, though, that this is a rather lousy reason to not attempt an answer.)

The Actor Gets Ready: Blog February 23rd

Good morning!

I have been on a bit of a roll here over the past few days, looking at routes of emotion and how to access the actor's palette. So today I am thinking about the move to deepening character, and finding a truthful imaginative reference point that absorbs the creative mind in bringing a fictitious character to life.

I was chatting to a colleague about the relative time spent on the different aspects of creating character in a rehearsal process. How much time to spend on developing the 'back story' and how much on repeating and refining the dialogue!

Its a fine art actually, and there are no simple answers. In my process however there are some absolutes in terms of territory to be covered, and in this there are no short cuts. Once upon a time, about 15 years ago in another land I used to get 5-6 weeks of rehearsal on a show! Imagine that. Indeed I believed that it was impossible to make a good piece of drama in anything less. After all I grew up in the shadow of the stories of my great heroes, like Peter Brook who could secret himself and his actors for months on end. And then dear old Mike Leigh! Total immersion being the only answer. And of course the results were usually great. How could they not be? 

2013 is a different country indeed. Thanks to the squeeze on money, we, like many other industries have had to work faster, smarter as they say, be more productive, dare I even say cut corners? can these economic rules really apply to making art to? Surely not? 

Well like it or not, and in spite of our precious sensibilities, the answer is 'do or die'. Its uncomfortable and distasteful maybe, as we are mostly purists perhaps. But of course the converse is also true. 

I love the story of the plumber and repeat it often. You call her out because you have a blocked pipe. She arrives, taps the pipe and knows exactly where the block is and unblocks it. It all takes precisely 3 minutes. She wacks a bill for £90 in your hand and leaves. You reluctantly pay up and then stand there looking at the bill with your mouth open, she was only here for three minutes! How can that be worth £90?

In my book its actually about the recipe and the ingredients, and less about the exact apportionment of time to each area of concern. Basically these are the elements that I include in my process and believe are essential. You can take a week on each one, or an hour, but you need them all to make your character. 

The Actor Gets Ready! (Nod here to the Great Master Stanislavski whose book An Actor Prepares is a key text)

1. Familiarity with text: Do your homework before rehearsals. An absolute MUST
2. Research the territory. Go on a little 'look see' on the internet, amongst friends, anywhere, to locate a model of your character, ie; someone who you have a hunch may carry some of the characteristics.
3. Prepare your body, mind and imagination and emotional tools ready to work.
4. Let go of resistances, or at the very least make them conscious so you can work with them.

The work of the Director and Actors in Rehearsal

1. Emotional and physical mapping
2. Storytelling - the character's history
3. Physical landscapes, the character's territory (literal environment) excursions.
4. Archetypes - the collective access to character, decision making.
5. The physical dimension  - body changing.
6. Character and relationship web
7. Voice and tone, the language in the mouth and in the body.
8. Metaphor
9. Carving the energy.
10. Sharing the space and tolerating dissonance
11. Making the dynamics work
12. Defining and setting.
13. Repeat, repeat, repeat!
14. Share and criticise.
15. Present. And watch the audience for feedback.

A little cryptic I acknowledge, and each point is full of many others, exercises, conversations and questions. But I guarantee if you go through all of these in a process you will almost certainly unlock character and dynamic in response to the narrative arc of the piece you are making. You could spend ten years going through each stage  or a week if you like me are now constrained by time! There's nothing like a deadline to focus the mind.

Finally to return to my colleague's comment about rehearsal process. If you stay in the 'back story' part of it for too long, you will end up with egg on your face as the actors won't know their lines, their motivations in practice in a scene, and it will all look like a load of self indulgent twaddle! So make sure that the greatest amount of time is spent in shaping, reviewing and repeating for goodness sake!

Have a great weekend.

Importance Of Early Work With Text

Good morning

A number of blogs ago I wrote about the value of learning poetry by heart and the impact it had on me as a child. Its quite a loaded subject in educational terms. It certainly went out of fashion in the seventies, on the premise I imagine that it was too restrictive a practice and stemmed freedom and creative imagination. 

Its virtually unheard of now for a student to be encouraged to learn a poem or a piece of prose for the pleasure of the repetition, the feel and sound of the words in the mouth or the emotions revealed. Sadly its a clear case of having thrown the baby out with the bath water. So it was that I was encouraged yesterday in chatting to a friend to hear that he had been watching a drama lesson run by another colleague in which the students were working on a piece of text from The Importance of being earnest, interrogating it, fitting it on for size and at the same time learning about plosive consonants. Sounds more like it. I bang on about it all the time, but we are failing our young performers if we do not give them the technical acting skills they need alongside the ability to analyse and understand motivation and action in a text.

I remember as a child listening to my mother in times of sorrow or tenderness, lovingly recite entire poems and passages from books she studied at school.

We all know that practice makes perfect, but for some reason perfection is not one of the goals of learning in most schools. In today's classrooms, students practise a lot, but are not required to retain knowledge perfectly.

The M Word

Somewhere along the way, rote learning got a bad rap. Memorisation (there, I said the M word) became anathema to learning. How this came to be, I am uncertain, but what I am certain about is that this shift away from memorisation has undermined the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process.

The total emphasis on critical thinking has it wrong: Before students can think critically, they need to have something to think about in their brains. It is true that knowledge without comprehension is of little use, but comprehension requires knowledge and it takes time and effort to acquire.

Bloom's Taxonomy maintains that the highest order of thinking occurs at the evaluating and creating levels which infer that the thinkers must have knowledge, facts, data, or information in their brains to combine into something new, or with which to judge relative importance or value. Therefore, effective knowledge acquisition has to come first.Students deserve to know how to learn and teachers do them a disservice when they do not teach them useful learning skills. Here are some underlying concepts that need to be accepted before we can continue:

The brain is a learning tool. This might seem obvious, but the brain is not a passive sponge. It requires active effort to retain information in short-term memory and even more effort to get it into long-term memory.

Learners need to know that the longer an idea can be kept in short-term memory, the more chance it can be pushed into long-term memory. This is where practice makes perfect makes sense.

The body is another learning tool -- another often-ignored concept. The body is connected to the brain and if you engage the body, you are engaging the brain too.

Learners feel an addictive sense of accomplishment when something has been memorised completely.

With these concepts in mind, I would like to share some of the memorisation learning methods that make it effective and enjoyable:

Learning Aloud

Just as we use our mouths to repeat a phone number over and over to retain it in short term memory, other things can be learned in the same way. One key point here to remember is that the cycle of repetition must be short and quick and no less than three times..
Using Rhythm and Breath

Learning text is done quickly, but since the order of learning the words is important there are some effective ways to chain them together. Learn the passage in breath groups, or what can be comfortably stated in one breath. Students using their mouths, because it is part of the body and a learning tool, repeat the breath group until it is firmly in short-term memory, then go on to the next breath group and do the same. When that is done, put both groups together and repeat them.

This is best taught to students using choral repetition. The key here is to be enthusiastic and energetic, praising the students as they practise. Printing the first letter of each word in the breath group can help students remember the words as they learn them.

Jigsaw Strategies

A creative teacher can have groups of students learn different parts of the passage and then switch parts, or stand up as they say their passage, or even move to a different part of the room with each phrase. Since the body is connected to the brain, it is effective to have students do a hand signal or body movement to symbolise the content of the breath group as they say it.

Sometimes it is helpful to start at the end and add phrases in reverse order known as reverse chaining. Its also effective to have the students perform the action of the words they are trying to learn as they told a story. 

Memorisation is not a bad thing. Students have to memorise the alphabet, sight words, vocabulary, times tables, and many other things and have fun doing it.

There's countless ways to help students learn how to memorise quickly, efficiently, and enjoyably. You can use music, song, dance, rhythms, patterns, competitions, and games. Once they know how to learn, or memorise, then students can acquire knowledge about anything they want to learn, which is in direction opposition to what critics say about rote memorisation.

The other great thing about learning a poem or piece of prose by heart is that inevitably there are new words to learn and understand, so vocabulary extends almost without effort. And such words are often imbued with the meanings and feelings felt by the reader as they become acquainted with the text and thus carry extra power. There is also a wonderful confidence that comes with the certainty of the learnt text. 

I am reminded of our Youth Theatre who did a great production of A Midsummer Night's Dream a few years ago under the excellent direction of Natalie Smith and Andy Rogers.  It was interesting to watch the group of 25 or so young people balk at the idea of Shakespeare and to recognise their fear of speaking this 'funny' language that they said they did not understand. And then gradually over a period of about 3 months to see their confidence rise as they learnt their scripts, and by inhabiting them physically gained a greater understanding of meaning. The final performance was very special. It was great to hear the text flow out with ease and clarity of meaning and connection. Here we had 30 young people from Barking and Dagenham who had not only learnt the text, but through the process had come to understand and love it and by the end were able to say honestly that they thought Shakespeare was writing about them! And of course he was.

My Curiosity About Polish Readers

Good morning Poland! 

Well good morning to my many readers in Poland, and everywhere else of course.

I am writing this for you today. I am curious that this blog is still getting 100-200 hits a day - and the highest readership is in Poland!  I am keen to know why!  Why does an obscure blog about a regional pantomime in East London get attention from you guys out there? Also do you read it in english or press the translation button? My guess is you speak english!

What's intriguing is that I only update here about once a week, and usually only if it pertains to something panto related. And yet it is still being read, which of course is deeply gratifying!

The thing is that there is very little about Poland in this blog, and that's what provokes my curiosity. Now having spent a good bit of time doing theatre in Poland in the eighties, I could put it down to that maybe? I also know that the Poles are some of the best theatre makers out there. They had to be. Times of severe state bullying and oppression through the communist years and then the military take-over time meant that the imaginations of artists were given an ever bigger invitation to expand. If you can't say something directly for fear of imprisonment you are forced to find unique and new ways to express the human condition, both its universality and its personal manifestation in the drama of your own life. That's what artists do, but in a state of fear their work is even more vitally and expression of  soul, self, politics, love, war, loss, liberty, intellect and much more. This oppression and limits on the freedom of speech led to some of the most amazing work by artists across all the art forms. I will never forget being at a performance of Dead Class by Tadeuz Kantor at the Riverside Studios in London in about 1985. I was mesmorised by this then ancient man with a walking stick directing about 20 actors in their late 60s,70s and 80s on the stage. He was a performance in himself, marching around the stage as the actors performed this soul baring show about age and death. If he thought they weren't serving the play,or simply didn't like a particular moment, he would bang his walking stick on the floor or tap them on the back of the legs, stopping the action to make them do it again the way he wanted it! I'd never get away with that with my actors....... maybe I could give it a go sometime? So a bit about the man:

Born in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, Galicia (then in Austria-Hungary), Kantor graduated from the Cracow Academy in 1939. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he founded the Independent Theatre, and served as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków as well as a director of experimental theatre inKraków from 1942 to 1944. After the war, he became known for his avant-garde work in stage design including designs for Saint Joan (1956) and Measure for Measure (1956). Specific examples of such changes to standard theatre were stages that extended out into the audience, and the use of mannequins as real-life actors.

Disenchanted with the growing institutionalisation of avant-garde, in 1955 he with a group of visual artists formed a new theatre ensemble called Cricot 2. In the 1960s, Cricot 2 gave performances in many theatres in Poland and abroad, gaining recognition for their stage happenings. His interest was mainly with the absurdists and Polish writer and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (also known as "Witkacy"). Stage productions of Witkacy's plays The Cuttlefish(1956) and The Water Hen (1969) were regarded as his best achievements during this time. A 1972 performance of The Water Hen was described as "the least-publicised, most talked-about event at the Edinburgh festival".

Dead Class (1975) was the most famous of his theatre pieces of the 1970s. In the play, Kantor himself played the role of a teacher who presided over a class of apparently dead characters who are confronted by mannequins which represented their younger selves. He had begun experimenting with the juxtaposition of mannequins and live actors in the 1950s.

His later works of the 1980s were very personal reflections. As in Dead Class, he would sometimes represent himself on stage. In the 1990s, his works became well known in the United States due to presentations at Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club which inspired Lower East Side cultural leaders such as theNuyorican poet Giannina Braschi.[1]

Throughout his life, Kantor had an interesting and unique relationship with Jewish culture, despite being a nominalCatholic and having a father with anti-Semitic tendencies, Kantor incorporated many elements of what was known as "Jewish theatre" into his works. Kantor died in Kraków in 1990.

I have spoken often on this and my other blog about the influence of Peter Brook on my practice. Well here's another! I feel very privileged to have seen this show. It was deeply affecting and in fact very shocking. It was authentic and shot through with a real quality and sense of Polish culture and history. The ensemble of actors had worked together for many years and it showed. They had gone from being young to old, and with that all the physical and emotional toil. They were inspiring. Young actors could do worse to look up Kantor's work. If it were to be performed today it would be as fresh, intriguing and disturbing as it was 25 years ago! 

And lastly - I would really like to hear from my Polish friends out there what attracts them to this blog - and also to signpost you to my newest blog: A Life in Theatre: Towards the Simple and the Sacred: A Daily blog about life, theatre and the arts of directing and acting. http://carolepluckrosealifeintheatre2013.blogspot.co.uk/ where there are accounts of my time in Poland with Triple Action Theatre in 1981 at the time of the military takeover. That's partly why I am curious - as that's the one with the Polish references. But maybe I just don't get it - I look forward to finding out!  I will be publishing this post on there today too in the spirit of collaboration! 

Miłego dnia! 

Accidental Conversation with Tim Major: Broadway Panto Producer 2004-2009

Hi

I said that I would post on here anything that might be relevant to the Cinderella project - and so today I am writing about a chance meeting I had with Tim Major who produced the Broadway Panto from 2004-2009. 

I would like to say that I was very productive. Instead of which I ended up spending a couple of hours having fun, drinking too much coffee, chatting and watching people coming and going at the theatre. There was a lot going on - I had a meeting with Chris Mellor, the Creative Producer to talk about ideas for co-producing and closer working relationships between the Broadway and Arc.

The theatre was hosting a workshop for a new musical, and there was a team of about 10 people working in the auditorium to come up with some new songs for it. It looked like they were enjoying themselves experimenting and I think the event may even have been streamed.

I also met Phil and Tim there who were dismantling the door they borrowed from us  for their latest Finch show. Tim packed it into the back of his car and headed back to the Malthouse. The building works make access a bit of a challenge at the moment, the whole of the front car park is a big hole. So I met Tim back there and we got the door back into the studio.

Tim Major

Tim (Major) http://www.timmajor.co.uk/

I don't know Tim very well, although our paths have crossed many times as Tim and his partner Mel produced the pantomime for the Broadway Theatre from 2004-2009. He and his team rehearsed at the Malthouse a few times. And indeed our MD Phil was composer and MD for Tim over those years. Tim's productions at the Broadway were the bread and butter of the theatre in those years and I was just checking out some reviews from those times and read this on the British Theatre Guide in 2010 (the year it was taken back in-house).

The key difference between this year's pantomime and last year's is that Tim Major and Melissa Waudby are nowhere to be seen. They really were the Broadway panto; producing, designing, writing, choreographing and directing the annual festive treat between them for six years on the trot. Major's Dame had become an audience favourite and it seems that his high heeled shoes have proved too difficult to fill. This year, they are sadly missed.

Tim is a bit of a renaissance man, writer, producer, director and actor and is successfully producing feature films as well now! I hesitate to call him a wheeler-dealer - but he is definitely a canny one!  I had only had snatched conversations with Tim until yesterday.  I had been really pleased that he had come to our panto, as I imagined that can't have been easy with 6 years of building it behind him. 

We started chatting as we were taking the door through, about empty spaces, directing and panto - so I suggested Tim leave the door and we grab a coffee and have an impromptu chat. I had mentioned to him about this blog and that led us to talk about how paranoid directors are sometimes about other directors coming into rehearsals. We are not brilliant at sharing practice generally. We talked about how its probably because we know that if we are in the making process things are going to look awful and not work as well as the magic moments when things come together. It can become very self-conscious if someone comes in we don't really know or trust. I have one very trusted peer director, our Associate Director Joss Bennathan. We can be helpful to each other as critical friends and it always prompts new ideas and thoughts. 

Tim and I found ourselves talking about Peter Brook - sitting in the 'gap' on the comfy sofas and chatting about all things panto and theatre. Tim is a panto officianado, unlike me! He is also an accomplished dame ( I have seen him in action!).  I had been quite nervous about him coming to see our Cinderella, as he could have been rightly bitter. He admitted that he was worried too, not from bitterness but in case he didn't like it and as we now shared an MD that could be quite tricky!  He's like me when it comes to feeding back on a show - just can't lie. I can lie about someone's cooking, but a show -no. 

Fortunately he liked the show. But the thing that touched me most in his feedback was that he said he could feel the love in the show, which had been missing for the past couple of years. Of course that's true. Whatever the differences might be in our individual signatures and visions, the process is driven by the same shared values of love, co-creation, collaboration, generosity and fun. That doesn't mean that Tim, like me doesn't crack the whip - we agreed that we most certainly do!

I loved the unexpected hour I spent talking to Tim, and began to wonder whether we might find ways to work with each other in the future. I am really looking forward to more chats with him and to share practice. Its been a great couple of weeks in terms of talking to other directors.

My relaxed and funny day ended with watching Natalie's rehearsal of Crossing Over. It was lovely to have Letitia and TJ back. I had to say to TJ - that his time away at the National and the Riverside has really sharpened his acting - its very noticeable, and very exciting. They're doing a good job with one more day left (today). I made notes and need to write them up now and send to Natalie for the start of her rehearsal day today. 

I went off then to stay at Abbotswick in Brentwood  for a bit of a retreat - and to do some thinking and writing for 24 hours. 

I think I might also go for a lovely long walk in the 14 acre grounds.