It's been several days since ISDF ended and I limped, exhausted and with an inadvisable ratio of alcohol to food in my system, back home. 

In short, it was incredible. I have a newfound fondness for Sheffield (which I'd only visited once before, a trip which mainly involved some expansive/expensive club with women-shaped mirrorballs) and for trams as a form of public transport. I also have a much better understanding of how difficult it can be to transfer a production (particularly its technical elements) to a new venue - particularly when said production was devised with its original venue in mind. Plus I have a much clearer image of how horrendous it can feel when you're essentially the director, stage manager, producer and sound op for a production. Lots and lots of learning curves were frantically scaled at the festival. 

The other shows at the festival were astonishing. Granted, I didn't love all of them (Zombie itself was apparently the compulsory 'show that divides audiences' for this year's festival) but I fell head over heels with a few of them, which is in itself brilliant. My favourites - though doubtless I'll rethink this list many times - were If Room Enough, Good, Stains and CryHurtFood. If Room Enough was a reinterpretation of The Tempest, focusing more on Miranda and Ferdinand's relationship than the other strands of the play. It was absolutely joyous - if I had to say anything about it that was short of gushing, then it would be that I wished they used less of the original Shakespeare for the drunkard and Gonzalo scenes, with these scenes feeling a lot more traditional and familiar than the Miranda/Ferdinand ones, which really exploited the company's creativity. 

Good and Stains were both from Israel; the former was my favourite play at the festival concerning Nazis (the other was Mephisto, which in my opinion had a strong cast and wonderful design, but I couldn't get past what was, for me, a script with too many metaphors and not enough subtlety) which featured some wonderful performances and great staging, often involving props appearing from behind a piano. Stains followed an injured soldier's physical and emotional rehabilitation, the staging focused around a double bed and layers of sheets that were ingeniously used. 

CryHurtFood was quite possibly my favourite show though (granted, when pushed to pick a favourite for the 'fest goers award', I chose this). There's so much about this production that I could praise - the use of water balloons as food for Lucy (a chimp being raised as a girl, brilliantly performed both vocally and physically) to smash, the costume design for the various chimps in the show, the sequence where Lucy mentally tortures another chimp by playing an unfinished child's tune on a piano, the tiny moments where the humans' movements become ever-so-slightly chimp-iike, the beautiful sequence where Janis tries to get Lucy standing on her feet. I could easily go on. I'm just so glad I got a chance to see this show - there were many others at the festival which we missed due to tech/dress/performance. 

Of course, there was much more than the performances. There's everyone I met, each one of them kind, friendly people; the workshops I went to, which have helped me get a little closer to shaping the idea of the kind of work that I want to make; the one professional show I saw there, School of Night, which was both hilarious and impressive. And there was Last Orders, something I missed completely last year - it's an hour-long event on the last day of the festival where anyone can sign up to perform whatever they'd like to: new writing, poetry, songs, mime, dance, absolutely anything. A masochistic streak, the opportunity to perform on the Crucible stage, and a scrap of writing I'd developed in a workshop prompted me to sign up for it.

I'm so glad that I did. Despite the quiet horror of being first on (and only knowing this when I was called to the stage), I loved it. It's been about a year since I've performed onstage and it was also the first time I've ever performed any of my own writing (and an actual memory of mine) and, thankfully, I got a good response and actually enjoyed doing it. So this year's festival has probably shaped the kind of work I'll produce in future far more than I'm giving it credit for.

There's probably one other way in which it's influenced me. There were some shows at the festival which were very, very polished. And I found that I preferred the ones that weren't (fortunately my own very definitely fell into the less polished camp...). When shows are so polished (perhaps I'm using the wrong word, but it's the only one that comes to mind right now), to me it feels like every footstep is choreographed, every breath timed. And that makes it less exciting for me. I find there to be something more endearing, more charming about something that's a little rough around the edges - if I want polish, I'll watch some TV or a film, something of which I've only been allowed to see the finest cuts. I want to make things that don't feel like TV or films, I want to make things that feel spontaneous and new and unplanned (I'll hopefully get better at expressing it as time goes on). Now all I need to do is try and create opportunities for me to do so. 

I really, really hope I'll be able to visit the festival next year.