The Last Miner and the Edinburgh Fringe (Space Cre

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.  

This is an ambience of play I felt we captured in today's workshop. As we set about creating small instillation sculptures in groups with furniture, lights and textures we slowly began to open up, listening to the group. Allowing our ideas to converge and mould into a singular remit for our set designer, Lucy, to play with.  These sculptures allowed us to examine what we each felt was important within the space.

I'm very glad we started our development looking at space as the environment of our performance seems to be emerging as hugely important to my company's ethos of work. We respond to each other extremely visually and we are often inspired by our desire to break down the traditional boundaries of the audience and the performer as so clearly defined in pros arch spaces.  A lot of this I believe comes to our desire to claim the space as our own and truly make our own unique mark on it. As a young company we have a strong desire to prove ourselves and one of the biggest ways we can do this is by dominating and controlling the world we inhabit. This does not mean we wish to intimidate an audience, on the contrary, we hope that by imaginatively using the space we allow the audience to relax into the safety that despite our youth, we know what we are doing and can navigate them through this  new experience quite safely. This is why space is important to us. And I believe this may be on e of the reasons a mine shaft captured our imagination. We could really respond to the environment imaginatively and create our own theatrical space within this context.

So as we leave today with a clearer grasp of what the space we are creating will look like, we will begin to examine how this space will influence narrative, puppetry, music and performance and perhaps stumble upon a thing we called process after all.