bamboo sticks

Photo: Gregory Guida

A discovery in the rehearsal room today harnessed and articulated three modes / styles of communication:

• documentary
• durrell eccentricity
• animal spirit

These states of being / storytelling / narrative have enabled us to navigate through the non-fiction, the heightened drama and the animal behaviour.

Menagerie Manor, after only two days and in its short 20 minutes, now has greater breadth. It’s now more serious, witty, comedic and embraces greater animal physicality. The balance between these is going to be intricate and delicate; it is too early to fully realise what exactly might be experienced at the world première on 25 June…

But: Louie, the gibbon, did swing on an eight foot bamboo stick today; Oscar and Bali, our orang-utans, were hysterically funny with their pot-bellied-pillows; and actors urinated and wrestled on the floor!

We also got ahead: a psychological bonus.

We started to explore the elements of The Aye-aye and I (first published in 1992) and an expedition to Madagascar.