I Would Walk at Night R&D Blog Post 2

I Would Walk At Night is my first experience of theatre making on zoom and I was a little worried with how it would work. A rehearsal room is such a special place, and my concern was that the connection and freedom that you get from working with a group of people in a creative environment was going to be lost when we are each sat in our own homes and not taken out of that environment.

However, after the first morning of working together, I felt completely transported into our new type of rehearsal room and the other people in my house kept commenting on how much they could hear me laughing!

Today, we each spent the morning researching and reading through various resources that Cat and Rachel had sent through to us and, by mid morning I was feeling pretty down. Due to the content and themes of the R&D, we were reading articles and statistics that are difficult to digest and it really made me reflect on my own experience as a woman. After lunch, we reconvened and we all agreed that we felt knocked by what we had been reading. The Brilliance Bias and Systemic Sexism became the centre of the discussion and each person shared stories and opinions very openly. The conversation then moved towards our bodies and the taboos surrounding the female body along with the idea of being “lady-like”. This allowed for many hilarious and silly stories and we certainly ended the day on a high.

It is only the start of this project but it has made me so appreciative of theatre making and being creative with such open, honest and supportive people. It is amazing how creative we can be when we are just sat in front of a computer in our trackies and speaking to a camera. It was a situation that I thought would be stifling but has turned out to bring me so much creative flow and inspiration. What I love about working on the early stages of a project is that your possibilities are endless. Our stage can be anywhere and what, and who, is on it can change constantly. I am so excited to see where this project ends up as there are a thousand different avenues it can take, whilst still coming back to a very simple provocation: What would you do if there were no men in the world for 24 hours?