Aya's Insights: The Incredible Presence of a Remarkable Absence

Photo credit: James Robotham. Dancer: Aya Kobayashi

This is my final blog for the creation period of The Incredible Presence of a Remarkable Absence. Yes, the 6 weeks has gone. From Monday, we won't see each other until our preview in end of August. I'm already missing the team, not just because we worked together so well, Aya as in the character will be wondering around to find clues to meet her mates in the wilderness world. I'm sad now! 

I'm sad but mainly I'm exhausted! Came home and had a glass of wine to celebrate the completion of the work, I really was on the floor for a while. My body is reminding me everything I've done for the work now and how old I am! 

Here I'd like to write about the sharing on Friday. Thank you so much for all of you who came to see it and contributed precious comments. I didn't tell anyone, but I almost felt crying during the performance. I think the run was the moment I finally really felt my emotion and my character's emotion were totally agreed and poured into my body, I've felt the sadness of the absence, sadness of the loneliness, sadness of the fact that time is only move forwards. Another thing I found was the real development of the way I could treated the audience in the piece. I think I've learnt a lot at the last showing at The Point, how important to including the audience in our vision and not afraid of looking at them sometimes. To naturally convince the world we create to the audience I realised we needed a real deep journey of understanding of the work and simply... its confidence. The reaction we got after the sharing was warm. 

Through the week we made the tight joints with sound. Doug's skills were completely showed off. And this really helped us to drive each of our journeys through the piece. And today we've worked with Vince the lighting designer to play with ideas of lighting and some additional texture for the piece with ashy powder on stage. Quite suffocating ha ha but it worked! 

Photo credit: Cover image/photo 1 by James Rowbotham