So here we are...finally made it to Edinburgh Fringe 2010. My post to this blog is rather late so I feel there's a lot of catching up to do. We now just have 10 days left of the festival and it really feels like I haven't stopped for breath. Ever since Monday 2nd of August when we teched and got in to our venue it has been a very hectic few weeks. Our tech was extremely unusual for the Fringe, in that it was 8 hours long... an average tech in the fringe is about an hour, I have been informed. But we needed every little minute of it. At times it felt slow and at times we got frustrated but at the end we got what we were all hoping to achieve.

Last week, I made the journey down to Easingwold, North Yorkshire to record the soundtrack to The Last Miner. It comes as the culmination of two months work composing the music and soundscape alongside the devising process.

When Tortoise in a Nutshell started this project and began bouncing ideas off each other, we were committed to making a world come alive for our audiences. We want the setting to have as much character as any puppet in our story. This is why we settled on setting a play in a mine. The underground labyrinths intrigued us, they are alien to us and we could find mystery in the shadows and danger in the rockface.

Well, here at Tortoise in a Nutshell we can really feel the leviathan that is the Fringe looming into view. And we can't wait. It's hard to imagine that the show we had as a seedling of a thought is now almost ready for an audience. But that doesn't mean we don't have loads to do. And it's easy to let the tasks mount up. 

So here at Tortoise in a Nutshell it is all systems are go!! Everything is gearing up for August. It is a challenge to even decide what to talk about in this blog. We could chat about marketing strategies, set construction, the process of selling a show, budgets and production schedules, the best materials for shadow screens, the best way to make a canary with a ping pong ball, what a mine really sounds like and the challenges of performing with a torch on your head.

There’s been a definite increase in pace here at Tortoise in a Nutshell. As we head into the week of the Fringe programme launch the deadlines start coming thick and fast.

Today, I woke up with the anxious feeling any director gets on the first days of rehearsals. We are beginning our first of a series of development days looking at the physical creation of space with our show 'The Last Miner.'  There is always a small fear when I lead a workshop that I have not evolved a process and that the particular tasks I have set out will not help us achieve our goals. There is no  fixed way of creating theatre or looking at space creation and any time I have ever read step by step processes I find them very prescribed and somewhat limiting unless responding directly to the production in hand. So I'm sure this fear of the unknown will remain throughout the rehearsals and may even breed creativity in the artists.