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.

Metta likes...Puppets

I blogged a few weeks ago about Handspring's wonderful Or You Could Kiss Me - which features wonderful almost life-size wooden puppet men. But it seems like there's a lot of it about at the moment - puppetry that is. Last week I worked on some research and development for Aerial Choreographer/Director Layla Rosa's new show Beneath My Feet, which will be featuring puppets as well as circus. That was a great (as in large but also wonderful) challenge because the tempo of puppetry and the tempo of circus are somewhat at odds with one-another - you can't ask an aerialist to hang from a rope for 5 minutes, while it cuts into their skin and their arms turn to jelly, in order to give time for a puppet to slowly swim across the stage.

Also I'm just about to open a show at Theatre 503 called The Prophets and the Puppets (which I've directed as part of their Coalition Festival), which stars a marionette operated by one of this country's greatest puppeteers Ronnie Le Drew (most famous for his role as Zippy in Rainbow).