Rehearsing With a Stinkhorn

Rehearsal notes, take by take.

Take 1. The globe goes round the room. People hold it like a hot coffee. Too careful? No such thing.

Take 2. What if someone drops the planet? Decide that if they do, we keep the gasp.

Take 3. Stinkhorn footage at high speed. I swear the room leans back like it can smell it. It can’t. Yet.

Take 4. Circus and dance from The Dreaming Project come in, and the room stops being a theatre and starts being a grassland.

Take 5. The soundscape gets quieter and better. It’s almost always better.

Take 6. The show is narrated by a fungus, a paper daisy and a wedge-tailed eagle. The humans are the extras. Nobody has complained.

How do you direct a fungus? You dont. You set up the conditions and wait for something astonishing. Systems thinking, but make it theatre: nobody owns the story, it moves root to root until everyone’s part of it.

From the project: The Earth is in (Y)our Hands