Shrinking and Expanding.

We're pushing through with The Shrinking Land of Kalku now - not that many days until the show goes up so this weekend has been fairly full on ensuring that we're going to hit all the deadlines and give the audience an fantastic time on the 21st May.

The company spent Friday afternoon in Chiswick Park, exploring routes, finding additional nuances prompted by the space and generally trying to carve out the shape of the work.

There are problems. Firstly we're being a bit compromised by ongoing landscaping work, which was meant to be finished by April 9th, but is running severally behind, and cuts off access to some of the most astonishing features of the park. On Monday we'll go back and beg that some of the closed off areas be opened, if only for the technical rehearsals and the day itself. It'll make a huge difference to our work if this can be made to happen.

Secondly the scale of the show is big and with assessments, other commitments and the general wind down at the end of term I'm concerned that the functioning of the work is relying on students, who are not yet signed up to the project. We are getting great good will from other year groups to steward, operate the huge puppets and play roles as tree tricksters and water nymphs, but there is a lot of quick learning that'll need to be done in the tech week.

Saturday was a hugely successful build day back on campus with everybody on board, sewing, unpicking, painting, gluing, rushing off to Kingston for more material and getting the look of the show spot on. I even managed to spend some time with writer Maria and directors Rosie and Emma clarifying the arc of the story and cutting some of the text.

We've a lot more to do... but it felt like a we'd leapt forward.