The Big Move

We moved house last week. Hence the silence. This is being typed in an internet cafe somewhere between the Wood Green office and home (which is also the registered office, postal address, and home of the internet connection - except that it's not up and running yet). It's more complicated to move a business than a home. Hopefully, if the Consortium takes off (and all the signs are that it will), then we'll be able to devolve these functions to Wood Green. At present, I just don't know there will be somebody in that office often enough to be sure. It was even a relief going in today (for the first time since the move) to see that there weren't hundreds of messages on the answering machine.

As I worked, the phone went: Denise Namura for a bi-lingual conversation. She's going to come and do a workshop for us; although she's disappointed that we can't pay to bring her partner along. If only the Laboratory didn't have to be self-funding - but it does.

I've been teaching at Rose Bruford between unpacking boxes: a design project on Troilus and Cressida. Always helpful to go back to the classics: as Ariane Mnouchkine said about her productions of Shakespeare and the Greeks, these great texts are our models, and by working on them we can learn how we might create a new theatre for our own world. T&C feels especially wonderful to me - full of strange moments of shocking resonance. Like when Achilles suddenly breaks a scene of comedic prose with:

"My mind is troubled like a fountain stirred
And I myself see not the bottom of it."

Amazing. So much of our work is about trying to create multiple realities on stage: about searching for ways in which we can plunge underneath the banality of everyday existence and touch something numinous. And here Shakespeare does it in one simple shift of style.