Workshop Audition

Just got home from a very exciting morning at English Touring Theatre - who in their loveliness as our mentors provide us with free rehearsal and audition space when they can. So we've just been auditioning around a dozen of the country's top aerialists/dancers for the forthcoming Research & Development week for WELL. The session was mostly led by Shreya Kumar, our Choreographer for the show, who taught everyone a short sequence of fusion contemporary and Indian Classical dance. Stunning as that was we then got some of them to translate that onto an aerial hoop. We also got them to try and balance a copper pot (sourced from Southall only yesterday, thank you Will) on their heads - which I think may well become a recurring motif of the show. It was so exciting to see the beginnings of what we might make for the piece and also to meet so many amazing performers. Plus this is our first collaboration with Shreya so a great opportunity to see how we might work together over the months to come. And I'd like to think the addition of a 10 month old baby toddling around the rehearsal room also gave the auditionees both an insight into the way we we work at Metta (i.e. in a very open-door fashion) and also made for a more relaxing environment.

Our First Interview

Today we started the interview process for WELL. We're talking to a whole range of scientists, development economists and specialists in arsenic and the contamination of groundwater. Our main scientific collaborator and partner on the project is the eminent and lovely Professor Stuart Reynolds who is in fact Will's dad, and has been teaching students at Bath Uni about the problems of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh for the last 10 years. What a coincidence! In fact it was Stuart who sparked our interest in the project in the first place. So we whipped out our fancy new microphone and began - sat round the kitchen table - exploiting nap time to avoid additional comments from our 9 month old baby. As a seasoned lecturer of over 35 years Stuart is wonderfully eloquent - and dare I say it - poetic speaker and I'm really excited about incorporating the recordings into the eventual soundscape and musical score for the full production. And baby Noah stayed asleep for the duration!