16.07.2012
Once upon a time in a grey and cloudy land called Kingston Upon Thames, Little Cauliflower Theatre Company embarked upon yet another day in rehearsals.
Things are now looking a lot more structured in the final stages of the development of The Night of The Big Wind. MJ and Gemma from Red Threaders dropped in on us for one last dramaturgical session before the first performance at The Rose for IYAF on Friday 20th. The session saw yet another painful game of 'HEP' (Which I still can't quite get!) and a whole host of varied production tasks for me and Louise. Whilst the cast and Co cracked on, we popped out to do what us gals do best... shopping for set materials at a builders yard! You can keep your Mulberry bags, we much prefer a 25KG rain moistened sand bag...
With some very fiddly magnets now glued in to the little house and a starched up sheet attached to the wind-machine, me and Louise have headed on home to get some sleep before the 6AM start for tomorrows 'get in'. I think even Cinderella got a lie in..?

Speak to you soon!

Thomas x
Production
Intern

14/07/2012
Today I started work on little Finn’s costume which proved rather more tricky as it is a teeny-tiny scaled down version of the ‘life sized’ Finn’s costume. Plans were also made for curtains and more costume was sourced. Carly and I worked on and composed several more sections of music as other cast members explored the relationship between Finn and the seagull. We all worked on the villagers in the storm and how to make physical movements fuse with the rhythm of the music.

Ceri
(Music and Costume)

Today in rehearsals the company worked on the development of the largely anticipated 'storm' scene! The first job was to mark out the floor in the studio with our performance space for 'The Rose' - So off I went into town to pick up some LX tape and a storage box for the smallest member of the company (A puppet - Not Becky…) whilst Tom popped to take some measurements at the theatre. After a morning full of some very positive production meetings & some world class stage marking, the rest of the company arrived in good spirits from a trip to a well known DIY superstore (can't say which one... but ends in 'Q'…), grabbed 'Fin' and began blocking.

The rehearsal went well seeing the creation of some very strong visual images for the storm.
Off to the land of nod now,
So long my lovelies,

Louise (press and marketing intern)

Today was our last day in Canterbury before we head to a rehearsal residency at the IYAF (International Youth Arts Festival) in Kingston. This meant a seemingly endless list of workshop tasks to complete, but the satisfaction of being able to tick them all off was immense! After three days of hard work, and invaluable help from Lucy's dad Derek, we finished the table (and my word it looks beautiful), remade the cottage, and built the worlds smallest puppet. Okay that may be a slight exaggeration but at only 11cm tall he really is teeny tiny!

Becky
Assistant set & prop maker

10/07/2012
Little Cauliflower have been met with many a bemused face recently as we have been raiding charity shops for wooly jumpers on sunny days. The cast are now all kitted out with one set of costume making us look like a wonderfully awkward family portrait and we are on the look out for more items of clothing to ammend and adapt. A fully handmade costume for 'Our Finn' is in production and research is now going into ways to make little shoes for him.

Ceri (Performer and Costume maker)

The Table. No not the critically acclaimed production by Blind Summit, but a section of the set we have been building today for 'The Night of the Big Wind'. The plan of using stair banister posts for the table legs started with trailing around Canterbury. Time with the invaluable carpentry help of Derek Western had almost expired so we needed them today. Aghast we discovered that acquiring reasonable priced banister posts without ordering them was tricky.  However in the last little timber merchant we found some very reasonably priced table legs. These turned out to work quite well as legs, better than banister posts (believe it or not!). With these fixed we sailed through the day and started on the beading to frame the edge of the table.

Peter

Cast and Construction

So today saw the Cauliflowers performing a 10 minute snippet of our brand new show at the International Youth Arts Festival in the beautiful Rose Theatre. We had a fantastic response which has given us an extra burst of enthusiasm for some further research and development. From this we have been exploring and researching the life of a fisherman and using this to create some really interesting and exciting visual images for the show. We also continued playing with our victorian wind and thunder machines to really re-create a storm within the theatre. Exciting things to come.....

Lucy
Cast

1st-2nd July 2012
We have got off to a good start with developing The Night of the Big Wind! Will & I have been shopping for some new chemicals and reading a few books to get fresh ideas on how to build our puppet, Finn. The company has been reading The Big Wind by Peter Carr for inspiration and research into the affect the storm had on 1839 Ireland, especially on the Ards Peninsula in the North. This is a brilliant book with really interesting detail, so we're on the right track! 

We've also bought an Ulster-Scots dictionary called The Hamley Tongue by James Fenton- I speak Ulster-Scots, so I'm trying to get the English members of the company to learn a new dialect as some of our songs will be sung in Ulster-Scots. It shall be interesting!
                            
                            A think sae! A think sae, sowl! (Exactly)

                            Carly McConnell (Joint Artistic-Director)

Clowning around...
Today saw a successful session in the Little Cauliflower rehearsal room. The Night of the Big Wind begins to take shape! Today Mary-Jane & Gemma from Red Threaders popped into our rehearsal and seemed very pleased with what we had to show them. The rehearsal itself focussed largely on the use of clowning in the performance of the villagers in the story. Crazy, high energy warm-ups (which Ceri couldn’t quite get her head round – Plenty of punishment press-ups there) soon turned into some very amusing, and largely successful character development tasks. With the roles of ‘Whiteface, Auguste & Grotesque Auguste’ allocated, the contemporary clowning aesthetic emerged in the opening of NOBW!

Meanwhile in the workshop the puppets have caused Will & Peter a slight headache – Luckily all is fine and dandy now and with the completion of the set and prop build scheduled for tomorrow’s 8 minute showcase at IYAF’s Raise the Roof, Rose Theatre, we should just about make it! 

Tom

Production Assistant
Intern