All the Blank Spaces - Exploring Duck, Death and The Tulip

Presentations of workshop tasks are a pretty standard thing. They are by all accounts muted affairs. A 2 minute whirl of what will hopefully be the faintest whiff of an interesting idea. We watch a rough outline of a piece and feedback in a polite and constructive way. Tuesday was different. As all three pairs prepped their ideas we agreed on 25 minutes for each group allowing for a second try and mixing things up. Laura and Harriet went first...

An hour later we stood belittled, giggly and enthusiastically confused. The other two groups would not be showing tonight. The girls transformed a function room above a bar into a totalitarian, unquestioning school house with the only stimulus being one word, 'compartmental". This got me thinking. First of all how certain people do not like being told what to do. Even in a controlled environment amongst friends people still rebel and become to put it coyly, naughty. Exercise caution in control experiments, should you ever decide to mount one. Secondly our experience with Duck, Death and the Tulip really felt that it had stepped up a gear. This sparse, lean and reserved story touches on so much in scope it would be quite easy to fill up all the empty space on the pages with images, questions and our own readings and that's exactly what we're doing. One of the best features of the book when you're coming at it creatively is how it lets you fill in the blanks or, indeed, let you leave bits blank and just accept them as they are. It has a transformative quality and allows us as a Theatre company to go anywhere, anytime, anyhow. That goes for an audience too. Can't wait to see if there is anywhere it can't take us. Gotta do that small presentation first though, politeness and constructiveness and stuff.