Day 4 - "He's big now!"

The blog title is a direct quote from one an audience member today (Friday). Norman Shadowboxer "is big now!"... Ok, that quote may have been taken out of context but it's a sign of things to come. We had a lovely audience today. Thank you!

- Ronan

Hi there, this is Naomi, the director for Norman Shadowboxer. Today was a big day. God, this festival is so tiring! It's my first time doing a show here, and what I wasn't prepared for is how physically tiring it is. Every day we walk from our place to the venue in about 30 minutes, then literally run up and down stairs with piles of boxes (our set) for 5 minutes. Then we do the general running around that setting up entails. We welcome the audience and do our lovely show, which is tiring for me because I'm sortof mentally living through the whole thing as I watch it, and must be properly tiring for the performers - physically, mentally and vocally. Then we immediately spend 5 minutes running up and down the stairs again with our boxes, and another 5 putting things away and getting changed. No space or quiet for notes or much chat, so we leave that 'til later in the day. Lunch. Flyering. (Flyering is enjoyable because you get to talk to lots of strangers, but it takes it out of you!) Occasionally a meeting with someone - today, for example, Dan and I met Megan, who plans the events in C Venue's Urban Garden, and we arranged to lead some children's workshops in the garden over the next few weeks. Occasionally we might find ourselves walking all over the town for some reason or other! Later, 30 minutes walk home. Somebody, or bodies, make dinner for the group. (Today, in case you're interested: Fajitas.) And in the evening - so far - at least an hour talking through how the show is going and planning any ways that we can make it better.

We've always been very hands on, all of us, throughout this most loving of rehearsal processes, and we're not yet ready to sit back and just do the show, without continuing to tweak, discuss, glue, note, cut, even write. The show is really quite personal for us, and aims at an intimate, detailed experience for the audience, so we're eager to adapt to the new performance conditions - aiming to retain our intimate relationship to the audience and our lo-fi, offbeat simplicity in this new, rather formal playing space (which has a raised stage, black drapes around us, etc.). We've been doing very well, but tonight we made some changes; Max, Lisa and Liz had tentatively re-written the opening, and they read out their idea to Dan, Ronan and I. It got a serious thumbs up and some group re-jigging. And there was more glueing and clever cardboard action from Liz and Max, who seem to have mechanical reasoning coming out of their ears. 

I'm really looking forward to seeing the show tomorrow.

And now, good god, I must sleep. Goodnight!

- Naomi