The advent of a new decade...

...was actually last year, since the naughties began on the 1st of January 2000. But never mind, let this be the start of a new decade of peace and unity. But I fear we are far from it folks. Our piece currently in production, Lidocaine/ Helmand: A B-Movie is a bilateral exploration of state control and influence, at home and abroad. The former, an interactive installation allows the audience to play at being a state, designing CCTV networks and coming up with laws to post onto the community clock tower. It also aims to challenge polarised views of how to run a state, intimating how thin and elastic the lines between anarchy and totalitarianism are, and how our own government dances in and out. We'll do this in quite a few ways, from the interactivity to real stories of power misuse and underuse.

The latter meanwhile is a standard seeming show operating within the comfortable confines of conventional theatre...one I really believe to be outdated for our own aims. It is a sufficient disguise for the Afghanistan/Horror flick narrative tie that we'll put up for tasting. Our objective is to highlight that the Afghan war follows an age old narrative governed by its fractious history and one that regularly matches that of the familiar horror films of Vincent Price et al. And that regardless of the moral objection to the outbreak and continuation of the war, it cannot be won in a total fashion. In a colossal underestimation of the consequences and requirements of the post-war government, we do more than rally for good against evil. We explore how we made every facet of the show, from hero to antagonist to dilemma - all except the resolution of course. For this show we're going to use as many different kinds of theatre as possible in an attempt to forge a multi-format message, one that survives through them all to discover a universal performance language between audience member and performer. What sticks? What's going to echo? What'll last in the heart and mind?

Our desire is to reignite interest in politics and the exposition of truth given the wide array of deceptions, half-truths and cover-ups the last decade has brought us.

On a practical level, our rehearsal week in the Creation Space at The Point starts and it is such a good space to inspire creation. Already the beginnings of an opening sequence and several movements have been choreographed. This'll be heavy, it'll be light, it'll be total.