Im still here

How do we select material when there is 1000's of moment to choose from?

How can our choices be congruent with a sense of ourselves, our values, our beliefs, our lives, our experience, our time?

Is that important?  

How do we make choices when using the intimacy of the body as the main language?

How do I offer an outside eye when so many different eyes will be watching?

What are we looking for? 

What is Charlotte looking for? 

What are the performers reaching for?

What is the audience looking for?

What am I actually seeing when I see this material for the first time?

How do I read the signs, the symbols, the movements, the moments, the shapes, the pictures in front of me?

How will an audience?

What are we playing with here in this white box of monochrome interspersed with red liquids and dark soil?

What am I seeing; men, women, sex, babies, lack of babies,  generations, tradition, gulfs and divides, protection, care, abuse, growth, procreation, emptiness, fullness, a landscape of beautiful contradictions.

I see a search to find something beyond the stereotype. 

I see stereotype.

I see truth in stereotype and I react against stereotype.

What is there to say about the future, about Hope, about whats going well ? Words fail us when we try.

I wonder if this show might have words in it at all. 

What happens when children are in the frame? What happens to how we read what we see when they are there? What happens to us when we know the child is off stage and can't see what's going on? Do we feel less responsible as performers, as audience? 

And then there is the soil.... bags of it waiting to be opened...

Some has made its way out into the space and it draws me in, resonating with me on a deeper level.  We see  babies eating soil,  wild love making on the soil, soil turning into dirty words.

Soil is deteriorating, has been contaminated, taken for granted, like many other things that humans have done. Andrea repeats many times as she falls and falls,'Im Still here' ... soil is a bit like that... it's still here.... just....

In the fresh bags of soil, full of potential for me, there lays perhaps the gateway to how hope might find its way into this show.

I leave in a sea of images and questions and that's just after being in rehearsal for one day.....

(Ruth Ben-Tovim - Dramaturg)