Learning to fly

Last week Metta Theatre ventured in the unknown and not a little terrifying territories of dance theatre and contemporary circus as we spent a few days developing a piece that might hopefully see the light of day in April/May 2011 - a devised physical piece inspired by Jeanette Winterson's Sexing The Cherry called Points of Light.

Where to start - where did we start - well I know very little about contemporary circus and probably even less about dance (in any formal proper way) so I started as I start everything just by jumping in with a spirit of wonder and a childlike grin. So far so good.

Finding the form

For the last 4 years I've been adapting Jeanette Winterson's beautiful and magical (I won't call it magical realism because I know she doesn't like that tag) novel Sexing The Cherry for the stage. Which makes it sound like a long and arduous task - artistically speaking it was actually one of the easiest or should I say most pleasurable/fluid things I've done. The hard part is getting it on. Several 'important' theatre people have read it now and they all say the same thing - it's very beautiful but it's not a play. And it's not, but neither am I prepared to make it one and sacrifice/compromise the mode of presentation - which is story-telling - by converting it into action and dialogue.

Directing dance and randomness

So last weekend we ventured into the unknown and not a little terrifying territory of contemporary dance with our latest piece 12 Dancing Princesses (an extract from the Jeanette Winterson novel Sexing the Cherry that I've been adapting for the last four years). Adapting Shakespeare/mounting a new play about Zimbabwe in just over 9 weeks we can do, surprisingly easily it turns out, but directing dance...well.