Rehearsals for 21:13

After the end of term in Paris Valentina and I threw ourselves into rehearsals for 21:13 almost without a pause. Because we had been thinking about the subject for such a long time and knew that we had our first performance in little over a month we made quick progress, writing and rehearsing the whole show in about four weeks. We started with images, both ones that we imagined and ones we found; in magazines, museums, on the street. It was from these images that we started to construct the feel of the play and from there we improvised ways of transposing the images onto the stage. At no point did either of us say ‘here we need a mask piece’ or ‘here we need something with geste’ but we found that each idea quite quickly proposed a style of transposition. We didn’t have a director or an ‘exterior eye’ on 21:13 but found that we could tell quite quickly (and usually agreed) on what was working, or could work, and what wasn’t. Importantly, both of us trusted the other with ideas and images, and had confidence that, with time, all of the separate components would come together to make something richer precisely because we didn’t always stop to think about how, for instance, swimming linked to two mobiles moving in space.