Guerrilla Gardening RnD Phase 2 Rehearsal Week 13-17th June 2022
Deborah Pakkar-Hull and The Prototype Pigeon made by Kathleen Yore from Odd Doll
What a week. It felt magic to be back in a real room with my dramaturg hat on. Being with real people, making work together again. It was intense and exhausting and wonderful. Guerrilla Gardening is a devised show in development, directed by Deborah Pakkar-Hull for Theatre Blah Blah Blah. It’s about healing, friendship, connectiing with nature and making community. It’s also a show about isolation, the refugee experience and food poverty. So, it’s not a surprise that making this work entails surfing big waves of emotion. The story is deeply fun (its for 5+ children and their parents) but deeply moving too. So, all in all? It was a big week of brain and heart work. And quite right too. It deserves that kind of care.
After an initial RnD week last summer, where we found the characters of the man and the boy (and fleshed out their emotional journeys), this week was all about putting detail into the narrative, finding how the languages of the show work/interact + experimenting with staging and music/sound ideas. We dug in deep. There were moments of challenge and stutter as well as moments of flow and YES. But mostly, we flowed and found our yeses. That feels like a brilliant way to spend a week, to me.
I wanted to capture some moments of everyone involved, but I missed seeing Kathleen Yore from Odd Doll and the awesome folk from Mafwa Theatre sadly. Hopefully next time, I’ll get to doodle all of their faces too.
At the weekend we’re taking some moments from this process to share with children at Princeville in Bradford, to get their feedback and thoughts to take into the 3rd and final phase of making this wonderful show. That’s it really. A moment, marking the week that’s gone and the work we’ve done. It was brilliant.
Dermot Daly
Matt Hooban-Sykes
Jason Patel
Iain Bloomfield
Lee Affen
Jim Bond
A warm up image - Matt, Deborah and Jason talk.
Funny how often a warm up image, quickly scuffed out, ends up being my favourite drawing.