It’s a strange experience returning to this show. I wrote and created it, so I might expect to understand it. And in one sense this is true: the outward form, the text, the songs, the movements are all still there in my body after a break of 5 months.
But in another sense the piece feels like a mysterious landscape. In rehearsals this week Ian and I have found that there are new nuances and depths that we had not previously suspected. The piece has moved and changed, it has its own life apart from me, and that life is slowly revealing itself.
The sensation I have is of pulling an unknown wreck up from deep and murky water, I’ve glimpsed its outline, but as it comes closer the weeds, barnacles, spars and broken masts of a pirate ship begin to be visible, and there, there, under the mud and weed, the bronze glint of a cannon…
Ewan