order from chaos

It's been such a mixture of stuff recently - sadly none of it in the workshop (mind you, that is still a bit chilly, so perhaps not such a bad thing!). A lot of my attention has been put into working on designs for the Christmas show (ah, the mystery....!) - a mixture of budding excitement at chatting with Bob and Jonny about design solutions, neat little ways of portraying big ideas with simple, quirky visuals, and frustration at not actually being able to realise any of them just yet. It's great to have a long inroad into a project, a time for talking over possibilities and not feeling pressured into taking the most obvious path, but sometimes the best solutions to problems are found whilst in the workshop, in the wonderful state you enter when carving, sculpting or papier macheing that lets your mind wander in creative circles, hovering around an idea, looking at it from unexpected angles and then swooping down on a solution your conscious planning mind would never have come up with. I got a wonderful present for Christmas from my son, Joe. A book of cartoons by the delightful Steven Appleby. He writes about the blessings that come from having a messy mind. It really struck a chord with me. Sometimes when I try hard to think about something, it eludes me. But when I'm layering on the brown paper and paste the elusive clever bit of my mind, the bit that I'm not in full control of, swoops down and scores a goal.

The other big piece of work has been programming the last bit of the spring season and trying to shuffle around the possibilities for the brilliant Puppet Festival on July 6th and 7th. In some ways its not dissimilar to making a show. Sometimes all the little bits of paper with names of shows and companies and amounts of money have to sit, apparently at random, on my desk and through time, whilst thinking about something else, a brilliant thought will come that ties things together and makes it feel like a festival.

Well, the puppet festival isn't fully formed yet, so I won't give anything away about that, but some of the wonderful surprises for the Spring season are that we have 3 international shows coming up -  Doudou Cissoko, a fantastic Kora player will be here on Friday May 10th at 7.30 thanks to Spot On Rural Touring, La Baracca, an internationally renown company creating work for early years audiences will be binging Spot, a playful interaction between a performer and a moving light on Sunday June 9th (don't worry if you look at the link - it's in English!), and...late breaking news...Slapdash Galaxy, a silly and wonderful shadow puppet show about the wonders of the Universe for older (though not mature...) audiences, will be here on Thursday June 13th at 7.30. Christina, Mark and Jonny saw it at the Edinburgh fringe last year and Chris has enthused about it ever since - but then she does have a bit of a thing about Outer Space (and Brian Cox...)

I've been feeling terrible that I haven't had a camera with me at key moments in the Boo calendar recently. I love to be in the studio in the slightly chaotic yet delightful making sessions before every show, and see delightful interactions between parents and children, astonished at what they've been able to make.I wish I could take pictures with my eyes and look at the joyful faces over and over.  We made really beautiful knot-doll cloud babies when DNA were here in January - parents who are firm wonderweb believers, re-learning how to sew and teaching their children -  and then just recently, when the Tinderbox from Norwich Puppet Theatre came to visit we took on the most complicated project to date - crazy dog puppets with giant eyes! Luckily Joel the amazing photographer came to the rescue and sent me pictures of  the puppets his family made on the day - pretty fun!

Last, but certainly not least, the new WEBSITE is live and lovely. Hooray, Bob!

work-in-progress

Joy! We unexpectedly found a couple of days free in the tour schedule for Mark and Aya that hadn't been filled with schools workshops, and decided to use the opportunity to tweak bits of The Nightingale that didn't feel they were working so well. It's very hard when they're away on tour to do more than give occasional notes, so by the end of last year I had quite a list of niggles that would take rehearsal time to rework. It was the first opportunity that Chris Davies, the musical director, had had to see the show since it was in Manchester at the very beginning, so it was really useful for him to see how it has progressed, and also an opportunity for him to alter things himself. It felt fantastic to add in a new piece of music for the end, shorten some parts and lengthen others, and - most exciting - give the set a fresh coat of paint!
The set has been through a few incarnations - in its first outing last Christmas Bob made painted sculptural reliefs in earth-tones, then for this tour he rebuilt it with a shallow relief of trees and painted it in Chagall-like colours - but it felt too bright. Now its final makeover is complete, it looks just lovely. Here's a detail:

Now Mark and Aya are off on tour again, and our minds here are turning to other things - the new website that Bob is building (live tomorrow - HOORAY!), this Sunday's (Feb 10th 3pm) show at the Boo of The Tinderbox, by Norwich Puppet Theatre, programming for our small-but-lovely Puppet Festival, which will be on the 6th+ 7th July, and continuing the design work for the Christmas show - what a brilliant mix!