DAY 10 - The Return of the Red Threader

Carly
Gemma from Red Threaders came back to rehearse with us today, only this time, we were on the banks of the Thames in the Gallery of the Rose Theatre, Kingston.

We started the session off by showing Gemma some scenes we had created in rehearsals yesterday:

• The Dr
  
• "Initial Symptoms Are..."
• The Physio Visits - leading into "puppet's imagination" sequence
• Dropping Glasses
• 7 Levels of Irritation - The Fish and the Puppet reading his newspaper

Gemma was able to give us some feedback, showing us our strengths and weaknesses and advising us on how to start working in some narrative structure. One issue Gemma did raise was our use of text. We all agreed after a brief discussion that spoken text was jarring with the visuals we had been producing. As two very visual theatre companies, who use very little or no text at all, it didn't seem right that we used spoken word, however brief, to carry the story. From now on we will always try and create a visual way of getting what we want to say across to the audience sans text.

During the morning session, we quickly came to the conclusion that for our scratch performances at the Blue Elephant and BAC's Freshly Scratched, we needed to give the audience a 10minute taster of a 40min show. With this in mind, we began to hone in on the scenes, developing and structuring them. After lunch, (which we enjoyed sitting in the sun by the river) we moved onto transitions between scenes and ordering everything to make perfect sense for our scratches.

I think we were all pretty pleased with how today went. Now for some fine tuning and puppet constructing!

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