Ok - so it's like this. You empty out the bag, you go digging in the back garden for old shards of crockery, you get a handful of pebbles and chuck them into a bucket. Then there are the ones that just descend on you: if you are lucky, dreams in the night, bird shit on the window, a scrap of wind-blown litter...
You start with anything and everything. Yes, undeveloped of course. There's not much creatvity in developing it otherwise. This fish-netting in creative rock-pools is my favourite of all times in the devising process because here you are utterly free and nothing can be wrong. Wrong gradually creeps in on you like a cynical spector from the wings... the long-dead theatre-goer who was never satisfied with what she saw and casts a warty, long-nailed finger at you hissing 'when will you do anything that's any good?' And the trouble is you can't help but believe her.
Yes, yes, I am tempted to look for that overall extended metaphor, the returning motif, that framework, an element of structure already - because time is precious and rehearsal rooms are money and my seventeen month old daughter's world rules my butterfly brain most of the time so mind space is at an all-time premium. But hold on, hold on, hold on. As Emma Rice once wrote, 'hold your nerve'. The work must have time to breathe, to be slow, boring, dull, ridiculous... there must be time for the crystal to be found at the bottom of the bucket, for the balloon with its message of heart-ache to fall from the sky. You can't make it happen at three minutes past eight tomorrow evening. You have to dance the dance, fishing net in hand, get ready to dig, sing, play with all your might - and then of course when you are least thinking of it - it might just happen.
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