rehearsal without so much sleeping

Amanda wants to meet us early in the morning at her house in Blackrock. I cycle round to Pigeon Hole at 6:45 in the morning and we pack the set into Nona sleepy and ridiculous. We watched Inception together the night before so we are driving and sleepy and laughing and saying, “But do you ever actually see the spinning top drop?” and “the moment where she jumps out the window, she’s actually in the same hotel room isn’t she?” and “so do you think he actually goes to a deeper level?”

Punt Road is Punt Road at rush hour and we stop start through the city and all the way to Amanda’s. She pours us peppermint tea and we all talk longingly of coffee. Christy peels oranges from her green bag. We look at Amanda’s drawings and talk through the designs. We look at swatches of colours, at tea towels and tablecloths, hold up orange, green, blue, red and make decisions about the colours we like together. Green and red, but is it too Christmassy? The pale blue is nice, nicer than the darker blue, no, not the orange…. Until we have four swatches of colour laid out next to each other that we like. We all take it in turns to cuddle and entertain Tarlo, who is crawling, standing up and falling, surprised onto his bottom.

Drive back to Kingston with only peppermint tea and oranges inside us and set up the set. We love café sana big breakfast and coffee. We run newspapers sleepy and full, and the newspapers fall all over the floor and our brains scramble and we laugh. There are so many moments when we freeze with newspapers held in the air and our faces eyes wide and confused. But the choreography is slowly getting more solid.

Then we play on the set. We put together the moves we did last week into short sequences, filming each little series of tricks that we like and then moving on to make a new set. Then we look back over the footage and begin to link it into a longer routine. By four pm we have two minutes of a routine which we film and edit, film and edit each time we run.

On the way home we are exhausted but happy. There is something so fun about the set and all our moves on them, about choreography that flows, about just missing each other each time and learning a pathway.