woof woof

laryngitis, sell out opening night, lots of cute feedback, antibiotics, steroids, sleep during the day, sell out second show, everyone loves the dog, everyone loves scout, everyone loves terry. bumping in, bumping out, our awesome teenage tech ladies smiling quietly in the corner, rewriting the show in my bed before the third night and a sudden sense of releif and understanding: this is the show, big crowd even on grand final night. Raucous kids, smiling grown ups, quiet sunday night crowd. Thank you Northcote Kids Festival. Tomorrow we open at Gasworks and i think the laryngitis has gone away.... at least i sound like a human again.

near death experience with a sewing machine, a caravan and a handstand chair

Today is Saturday-set-building-day. I spent the morning dealing with my ailing computer with my dodgy computer-man and dropped by GJ’s on the way home. GJ’s are the dance fabric specialists and the glitter, spangle, tulle element there is very high. I bought cream cotton drill and ended up needing to go to spotlight for the right red gingham. I got round to Pigeon Hole by about 2pm. Luke was building the hills hoist, Christy was finishing up emails and developing a shopping list, Flick and EJ were there with friends developing their caravan show.

I set up the sewing machine next to the caravan and started on the doona’s and pillows for the bunks. Christy set off with her shopping list. Flick was on the roof of the caravan where they have built a little wooden stage and had her heavy handstand chair up there. I could hear their conversation and the little creaks of the chair just behind and above me.

I’m fine now, just a bruise, but the next moment was a scary one. I heard a gasp and a bang and must have put my hands up to protect myself because the handstand chair hit my wrist and shoulder before landing on the floor. I had a moment of sick, sick feeling in my stomach at the how hard the chair had hit my wrist. To everyone else it looked like the chair had smashed my head. Luke was there with his hand on my back in a second. Flick looked terrified. I had a moment where I thought ‘the first thing you do when you’re in shock is tell everyone your ok, I just need to check in with my body’ so I sat there at the table, still, breathing, checking my head and my arms.

Then I thought it wasn’t fair to leave them all that scared and said, ‘I’m fine. It didn’t hit me on the head, just my arm and my shoulder.’ Its hard to reassure people when all you want to do is cry, but I managed to convince them I was ok and then put my head on my arms on the table and sobbed the shaky, shocked fear sobs. Luke stayed right next to me with his hand on my back and his face right next to mine and the others got ice and water and talked about rescue remedy. I thought, ‘I don’t need rescue remedy, I just need to cry.’ After a while I stopped and hugged Flick who felt awful and together we moved the sewing machine table away from the caravan.

I spent the afternoon and into the evening sewing the long doona and pillowcase seams while Luke finished the hills hoist and moved on to the fence and Christy made laksa for us all, painted metres and metres of rope silver, fixed elastic on her kneepads and helped me think about the doonas. A big sense of satisfaction putting each doona and pillow in its cover and then folding the big pile of creamy linen. By ten o’clock at night I was feeling a tickle in the back of my throat and the bruise on my wrist and I kept standing there looking at piles of things that needed sorting and not doing anything.

Luke got the fence up – though not on castors or its proper feet – and we looked at it. It suddenly looked very tall. How are we going to get Christy over it? We looked and then stood with our hands high and compared our height made suggestions. Christy said, ‘lets try it now!’ laughing in the cold dark warehouse. No way we were up to trying tricks. “We’ll figure something out….” I left her beginning to tidy up and went home. I sat up in bed with my laptop and corrected and formatted and added to the script. Christy rang me at 11pm to say, ‘Let’s not go to Artplay in the morning. Let’s rehearse at Pigeon Hole…’ The idea of loading and unloading the set again was pretty daunting.

dogalogue

Today is a post tumbling rehearsal at Westside and Kate arrives early as we are setting up the bunkbeds. There is a whole lot of cute chatter that happens with Kate and circus trainers and tumblers gathered around the kettle.

Kate sits us down and asks how we are. We are all tired and it shows in our laughter at the question.

She says that the plan today is to do a timed run and then to work on some of the looser scenes. Christy suggests that we do a walk through before the timed run to get it into our heads and we all agree. The walk-through becomes the time to work on the things we needed to work on, so Christy pulls out the gadgets and we create the gadget scene. We realise that fighting the bad guys should come after Terry gets his costume and need to do a bit of renegotiating. we create the training montage number three. I realise that I still have a hurried feeling like it's the walk through and we should be getting to the end quickly to do the real work - and actually this is the moment of creation right here as we make the scene. I slow myself down.

Pete emails us a track for moving towards the fence and we all pause to listen to it and to email him feedback.

Its getting closer and closer to one o'clock and christy will need to run at 2pm on the dot to her next reahearsal.

Kate asks us all how long we think a timed run of the show will take '40 minutes' '38' '32' we laugh and go to beginning positions.

Kate stands by the computer on the rigging box, running the sound and prompting us. Phoebe and Briar come and watch moments. Briar snorts with laughter when Scout says 'He's thirty five and he does a paper round.' Phoebe watches my dogologue with bright smiling eyes.

As we are nearing the end, Amanda arrives with the costumes for the last trial. We push through the run with her watching and grinning. Christy has ten minutes and needs to run: she whips herself into her costume. Luke and I dither into ours and the three of us line up. There is a lot of hilarious cuteness. Amanda sews a tail onto my schooldress. Christy's costume needs new tights, Luke's needs buttons. She has brought a sample table cloth swatch but didn't get the full amount so needs to get more.

Christy is on the phone explaing that she's going to be late, Kate is waving and leaving, Amanda is sorting piles of things she can leave and things that still need work.

I go to the bathroom and look at my cute doggy costume in the mirror. It makes me very happy.

Luke and I are left with the set and the scattering of costumes and props. We pack in slow motion. Hauling ourselves from task to task. For some reason it takes forever. I think of Christy at another rehearsal and am amazed that she has the energy.

'we're too good for OH&S'

Loading our stuff in and out of the northcote uniting church hall- Christy and I are carrying hundreds of kilos of equipment across a narrow road, through a gap between two parked cars and then up an insanely high step (how did anyone think the step should be that high?). I laugh about safety regulations and Christy says "we're too good for OH&S."

Kate sitting rugged up on a stretch of astro turf, taking her gloves off and blowing on her hands before typing the script as we improvise. Ania emailing us MP3 files which arrive on the i-phone so we can rehearse to them. Googling a courier to get the costumes to st Kilda. The constant round of phone calls, scheduling, rescheduling and date checking that needs to happen.

The to do list. We need gadgets, a cornflake serving device, sheets that also look like a doona for the bunks, the astro turf for the pole to be cut and fixed, a fence on castors, a letter box on an angle, lots and lots of balls...

We are rehearsing a show but we are also producing it and Luke and Christy are doing the set design and build. There is a lot that needs to be done by Monday - tech run.

passing the milestones

Today Christy got her driver’s licence, and did a pike press. I did six handsprings on the mats. Luke held a handstand for 45 seconds with no spotting. We stumbled through the show from start to finish - with some gaps and discussions, but definitely from beginning to end. Today was a milestones day.

Fourteen Hours of Asking for Trouble

Luke called me at 7am about the Ian Potter submission and then came round with a DVD showreel of previous work while I was making tea in my pyjamas. We pulled the pieces of the submission together and Luke signed the final letter, practicing his signature first on the back of an envelope while I laughed at him. I gave Jono the envelope as he raced out the door to hand-deliver it to Collins St in the city.

We rehearsed again at Kingston today and, like a miracle, the set was already set up and ready to go. As we warmed up, jogging and stretching on the polished floor, I could feel the difference in my body of not having just lifted a heavy bunkbed and freestanding pole. My shoulders felt looser and everything felt easier to warm up.

We have a regular warm up hour now which goes newspapers, stretch, bunkbed play. I started to get the bunkbed play choreography, watching Luke who often throws the toy to where I’m supposed to go. We ran the training montage we made on Saturday and remembered it with only a couple of blank moments. It was still hilarious and Christy’s face was red and laughing and Luke said “What? What?” She said, “It’s you’re eyes. Your face is neutral but I can see the smile in your eyes”

I did a coffee run while they worked a couple of tricks they want in the slapstick and came back to the list of tricks. Watched and talked and watched and talked and wrote the routine order down as they made it up. Came in and spotted a layout throw that they were less certain of. Then we scripted. This scene comes straight from Luke’s brain. He thought of it, thought of the tricks and pretty much had the dialogue scripted in his head before they ran it. I typed as he spoke and Christy added moments of Scout into the mix. Stubbed toes and bandaids and stingy stuff for grazes.

We worked on the moving towards the fence scene – which felt a bit funny, the tricks aren’t really spectacular but they felt hard. The melting, the slowness, Luke and I both flying things and all of us negotiating the costume situation. Luke won’t have bare knees and Christy will be wearing shin pads. The two and a half high felt like it would be difficult under those circumstances but we tried it. It’s a good one for me – every single time I do it there is a moment when Christy steps across onto my shoulders and I think my feet will slide off, but Luke shifts the weight and it is totally solid. I always remember, after a moment of panic, to trust him. “Trust Luke,” runs through my brain.

We raced to Amanda’s studio in St Kilda to pick up the undyed costumes before she left for Blackrock. She hasn’t finished them yet, but are really feeling like we need to try all the tricks in them in case they need some serious adjusting. Tomorrow we’ll work in them and then possibly courier them to her so she can finish them. It feels like all our time is too precious now to do costume driving.

In the truck on the way home we talked invites. Arts Vic, Ozco, circus industry, physical theatre companies we love, presenters, producers, who do we want to see the show?? Northcote Town hall has the dates wrong on the website, gasworks need to let us know how many comps we will have.

Back at Pigeon Hole, Flick was standing in front of her caravan with a paint roller dripping ‘latte’ coloured paint. They had decided that ‘mushroom’ didn’t quite work and she was redoing the whole thing. We unloaded the set into the Pigeon Hole front yard and Luke started angle-grinding the spikey bits off the bunk bed welds. Christy was on the phone about One Trick Pony things looking grim. Apparently they can’t put up their tent on the balcony where they had planned because they don’t have an engineer’s report about the load. This will change their show a whole lot and mean a bunch more organising.

I left Luke and Christy in goggles and overalls, spraypainting the bunkbeds. Told them how much I like them and our show and got on my bike.

Just spent the last couple of hours sending out email invitations and now its ten to nine I realise I've been working on Asking for Trouble things for fourteen hours.

Not tired though...

In the Age!

Christy texted me at 9:06 to say we’re in the paper – M-magazine. I go buy it on my way to work and read it to her from the tram and laugh.

"Run Terry! Run!"

We go down to Kingston and set up the set. We do newspapers as a warm up and then bunkbed play. I’m still learning the pathway of the bunkbed play and now we add throwing a toy. It’s pretty fun. We stop and start, stop and start, figuring out when the toy can be thrown where. A whole other level on top of the previous choreography. Christy and Luke have it down and I’m still a bit lost. Standing at the end of the bunk bed unsure what I should be doing next. When its smooth its really fun - feels like a really nice opener to the show.
Then we start making the training montage. We brainstorm ideas out loud and there suddenly comes a point where we realise that we should be writing them down. Christy gets her computer and we try to remember all the thoughts we just had. Then we play the music Ania wrote us. We sit there on the table, bobbing our heads and looking at each other. We like it – just the bobbing is great. Luke is listening for changes in the music and calling out suggestions. The scene builds itself steadily. This is the scene where Terry is going to be transformed into a superhero. When it gets to that point Scout starts getting emotional. Luke says, “you should grab my collar and shake me and do a bit of that tough love thing.” Christy is clutching Luke’s lapel and collapsing with laughter trying to yell, “It’s under your suit terry! The costume is under your suit! Run Terry run!” We are all in hysterics. We watch the footage back and say. “It’s a scene. It feels like a scene.” Amanda sends us a text late that night that says “I love Terry!”

Fringe Festival at Pigeon Hole

After tumbling we drive down to Amanda’s at Blackrock in my ute. It takes forever in the Punt Road traffic. When we are almost at the river one of us realises that we forgot all the costumes we’ve been rehearsing with. Damn.
Last night Christy and Luke asked their teenage class what her character should be called and one of them suggested ‘Scout.’ We like it. A lot.
When we get there, Christy and my outfits – in unfinished forms, are hanging from the backs of her dining-room chairs. The peter pan collar uniform and the little shorty overalls. Christy and I make appreciative noises and then try them on, scattering our normal clothes all over the loungeroom and then standing on tip toes in front of the mirror, trying to see our whole selves. We try out cape ideas on Christy and do acrobalance on the shag pile rug to see what happens when the cape is upside-down. Then we all turn to Luke. He’s worried about a football jumper under his suit because its going to be so hot.
Suddenly Christy says, “I wonder…if you’re imaginary then you can be totally superheroed. You can just be what I think a superhero should look like.” We all agree and it shifts a little. Yes. Natalie can wear superhero things but they are things ‘Scout’ has found and dressed her dog in. Scout will be the same. But Terry’s costume will be the full lycra shebang. It makes us all very happy. The only downside of that is that I don’t get to transform into a magic dog with red ears instead of brown ones. But I’m pretty happy being a dog anyway.
We drive back to Pigeon Hole where Christy is going straight into a rehearsal with One Trick Pony. Annie is locking up her bike outside, the One Trick Pony tent is all set up on the grass and Joh is inside chatting to EJ.
Inside, EJ and Flick are putting a show together too. They have an old bubble caravan they have painted mushroom coloured sitting inside the warehouse. EJ is rigging washing-lines up all around it and hanging frilly white washing everywhere. Raku has a projector set up for Piano Boat rehearsals and is doing shadow puppetry. “It feels like the Fringe Festival is at Pigeon Hole,” I say to Luke and we grin at each other. I sit with him for a while and help out with his Ian Potter application. Christy runs in with Kate on her mobile phone, hands it to us and runs back to her rehearsal. Kate likes ‘scout’ and she likes the Terry as full superhero. We text Amanda and give her the go ahead.
I come back later in the evening and we sit under the doona with the butcher’s paper in front of us speaking the script.
After a couple of rounds, Christy suggests that we type it, so as they speak I type like a torpedo. When it’s my go to speak, Luke records me on his i-phone and then plays it back, pausing while I type. The truck is warm and Christy has almonds in a tea-cup which we eat.

the fence...

Towards the end of tumbling Jess sets up a drill for layouts which I stand looking at. “Can I try this one Jess? Nothing bad will happen will it? I just..just go?” She keeps nodding and grinning at me. After about six goes I do a layout. I am completely surprised. It’s the fastest I have ever done a tumbling move from being shown the drill to doing it.

We spend more time scripting “what’s over the fence?” playing with the things we love from the impro we did at artplay. Once it’s scripted we read it all through and it’s way too long. We cut some and then start to think about how we will move physically into and out of this bit of dialogue.
The fence is feeling like a problem. If we imagine the fence but we have a real toy there is nothing to throw the toy over – and we know our venue doesn’t have wings. If we have a fake toy the throwing really might not work. Christy suggests we build a fence and add it to the set. Kate says, can we disappear the toy? Luke suggests that he runs backstage and we hear him throwing and losing the toy. We revert to the flashback idea of us mining the story of how we lost the toy yesterday. We talk around in circles until Kate stops us. It feels to me like the one thing we don’t have a solution for. I’m home now and cooking risotto while I type. Getting half a sentence in at a time while I stir rice and add stock.

scripting

We come in early in the morning while the Westside staff hip hop dance class is happening. They do hilarious moves to ‘bootylicious’ on the other side of the wall. We have just over an hour until Kate comes so we warm up quickly and do the carrying Christy tricks.
We have to think about moves that travel towards the fence where we are pulling each other forward and then retreating again. It happens quickly. Luke has a thought from something he’s seen me do in the past- melting thighstands. I want to climb up a little stepladder of backs. We’ve been practicing the surfing on bluebird. The tricks are all the ones we were training before we had the bunkbeds so they aren’t hard. Acro choreography is something we all love and by the end of the hour we have the basics of a scene.
We whip the set up quickly and are ready to go just as Kate arrives. She says that today we are going to script the show and pulls out pages of butcher’s paper. We impro the opening and she gives us notes and we impro it again and then we all sit around the butchers paper and write and talk and write. I watch the words go down and think – this is the storybook, these are the words of the storybook that I sell with the show. It feels like we are watching the show forming on the paper. Kate apologises for the torturous nature of the process but I don’t feel tortured. Like choreography, it’s a lot of devising time for two minutes of product but then you have it, the show, created exactly as you want it.
We workshop a dog-focussed monologue, look up prehistoric dogs on Wikipedia, and decide that the paperdance comes earlier than the bunkbed play and how do bring in Terry’s uncle who he thinks is a ninja.

handspring day

This afternoon I do a handspring from a powerstart on the crashmat run. Which must mean I can do it on the floor. I get claps and smiles from the people and when tumbling finishes I just want to do more. But by eight oclock we pack away the tumbling mats and set up for Kapow! While we are warm, we run the bunkbed play over and over. I write down the moves I have to remember. After five runs of the routine Luke calls a halt and we run newspapers and then it’s ten o’clock at night. We talk through what the slapstick might be and then push the set to the side and go home late and physically exhausted. Stay up til midnight looking over Ian Potter grant for Luke.

spring at Artplay

This morning we are at Artplay. It’s a whole set transporting extravaganza. I meet them at Pigeon Hole and we drive to Westside to pack the set and then through the city in rush hour traffic. We find the confusing back entrance to Artplay and have to tell the security dude that we have no hazard lights. Christy and I get out and walk alongside Nona through the playground and past the Yarra. Eelin waves and welcomes us and Kate arrives just as we have finished unloading the set and bumping it in.
Artplay is wide with polished floorboards and big windows that light pours through, even on grey days like today.
Christy says “I think I’d like to try being called ‘Dodge’ today” We all like it. We play a little on the set. We talk about the imaginary friend idea. Kate runs an impro where we are superheros being interviewed about our daily lives one at a time.
We sit for a long time and Christy pulls out snacks. Humous, wraps, nuts. We talk and talk and talk. I go and get a tea tray from upstairs and we all sit on the floor drinking tea and trying to solve the problem of the journey.
We want Dodge to be overcoming something and we write a list of the big things that happen to little children. Moving house, starting school, having a teacher who doesn’t like them, their parents fighting or splitting up, someone dying. Nothing seems quite right. We come back to the controlling idea, ‘we are more powerful than we think we are’ someone says, “Maybe it’s a scary neighbour” “maybe something goes over the fence and we don’t know what is over there” We like it. We like that it is overcoming a fear of the unknown. We like that it means we aren’t dealing with greif which is a whole other show, or bullying which is a whole other show. We run with it.
The sun comes in in bright gold squares on the polished floor and heats the astroturf amazingly. We shuffle into the sunny patches and keep talking. Later it rains buckets and torrents and we sit and look up at it gushing past the windows. Melbourne spring at Artplay.
Kate writes things down in her little book in scrawling biro full of crossings out and arrows and added words on top. There is a sudden sense that we have a narrative. Christy says, “this is like the moment by the Vic Markets for Bubblewrap” and there is definitely a sense of discovery and a sense of realisation. Something has coalesced today.
Then we try an impro of the show from the start. It’s funny because we can’t remember our choreography and it feels pretty loose and messy, but we get to a point where we are imagining the garden fence and the good things that might be on the other side. This is gold. Dodge is totally random like, “maybe its just all sparkly” Terry’s is crazy philosophical “maybe when we get to the other side of the fence we aren’t us anymore, but we’re still there” I am just all on about the dogs which is pretty fun.
At one point Kate says, “In my head, Natalie is a girl, but she just really wants to be a dog.” And later “but if she’s a dog…?” The identity crisis is hilarious and makes me giggle, we keep coming back to “maybe she is a dog?” “maybe she’s an imaginary friend and she’s both?” “Maybe she’s a girl?” “Oh no, I think she has to be a dog.”
We realise Christy’s character can’t be called Dodge because it sounds so much like Dog.
After Kate leaves we run newspapers and the bunkbed play and then race the pack down because I have a meeting to get to. I leave them with the set in pieces on the floor and run for a tram.

"What if Terry is my imaginary friend?''

My plan was that by the end of tumbling this morning I would do a handspring. I did a lot of drills, but no cigar on the actual handspring on the floor. Still, I feel like it’s a doable, close-by goal. Kate came again with more questions for us, what do each of our characters need to overcome? How can we show the journey? She did a fun warm up with charades she’d written on little slips of paper in an envelope. We got silly and competitive and pretended to gloat and sulk and bribe her. I had to do a happy penguin eating a meat pie and watching the football which seriously lowered my score. Otherwise I was the winner for sure. Kate smiled at us while stowing her score pad saying, “now this is so serious that I’m going to take it away and add up the scores and I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
She gave us instructions on slips of paper and asked us to read them as our characters and then follow them. ‘you must save Pink Lightning (todays name for Christy) but be wary of Terry’ Terry of course is saving me and being wary of Pink Lightning and it’s the same game as heros and villains except Terry’s version of saving is to crash-tackle the victim in order to carry them away from danger – so Luke and I have these hilarious running wrestles and meantime Pink Lightning is having a fine old time just toodling around the set and occasionally joining in a game with me.
The next exercise is just ‘the baddies are coming, watch out!’ Christy, with those ridiculous goggles on her face again, is rambling around trying to make booby traps with kitchen implements, while Terry and desperately try to get her up off the floor and onto the bunkbed into relative safety. Christy is still a little injured from the bike accident so we don’t actually lift her – which I think makes the scene more funny, because she just hangs around in danger and we are unable to save her.

After Kate leaves we pack up the set and as we stand there by the bunk bed Christy says, ‘What if Terry is my imaginary friend?’
It sticks straight away. If Terry is her imaginary friend, then he is a part of her. It explains all his absurd qualities. A thirty five year old paper boy who wears a suit and only eats cornflakes. He is often frightened and overwhelmed – maybe he is her fear. Instead of the imaginary friend who is your naughtiness and bravery, the imaginary friend as the fear is kind of nice. But then what about Natalie/Mr Dog? Is she imaginary? Is she a girl who wants to be a dog or is she a dog that Christy’s character pretends is a girl? And if she is a girl, can she see the imaginary friend? What if we went for most of the show with me not seeing Luke?
We stand talking by the half packed up set for about an hour. Excited, exploring ideas, retelling other stories we know that are similar. Christy texts Kate.

Yay, Kate is back...

At 5 in the morning I woke up with a headache. Usually if I wake with a headache I don’t tumble but this morning was my handspring week, so I took panadol, slept another hour and a half and then, after breakfast took prophylactic ibuprofen before cycling to tumbling. Today, Kate was back from Switzerland and working with us for the first time since really early on. We set up the set, with her helping, making too many banging noises for the people sharing the space. While we held bunkbed parts and turned allen keys she told us about Switzerland and clowning – inspiring, thinking about our own Europe adventure plans
Then we sat at the messy westside sharehouse table and showed her footage of our work. She’s really great for the encouraging approval: “Beautiful, ohh, great, ohh beautiful” Definitely keeps me feeling like our work is worth doing. She asked and asked and asked. It was at least an hour and a half of catching her up to speed on what we’d been doing, showing all Amanda’s designs, playing her Ania’s music, picking the bits of impro we wanted to show her.
Then she set us some impro tasks. We started out the three of us on the top bunk, playing with being a boat, a spaceship, a tall building and telling superhero stories. Then we did some solo impro around our characters, just sitting with Kate asking our characters questions.
There was a lot of gold. Terry only eats cornflakes, the dog is called Natalie, Christy’s character, with the goggles on her face, just gets more and more hilarious. It felt very useful lots of thoughts came out of it for me. It seems like maybe we don’t slip between modes. Maybe we just are our characters