In the room

Sketch a day - Day 27/365

Today was all about being over in Huddersfield at Laurence Batley Theatre, R&Ding a new show with the Odd Doll team.

At the moment, the work (for me) entails doing a lot of watching and thinking. Ideas are forming, emerging, changing fast. I love watching Kathleen Yore, Freddy Hayes and Natalie Bellingham take ideas into their bodies and let them live and move within them. It's a kind of magical thing to witness. And today Ed Heaton and Naomi Parker joined and were riffing up sound and visual sketches. It's very exciting to see people's creativity flow.

Sketching performers as they work is a way of creating little physical movements of my own, in response to theirs. It's a way of forming connections to the material which captures something important, which isn't intellectual. I don't have the language for exactly what I mean. I think it's something to do with somatic intelligence. Like, I am making little memory marks in response to what they are doing. I find when I return to pages of notes with sketches, it takes me back to a feeling or a memory. I think if I could actually describe it, I wouldn't need to sketch.

But I am also frustrated by live sketching. People just won't damn well stand still for long enough. So sometimes I want a drawing that feels more like how I want it (not how it turned out). This is why I take photos to draw from later.

More often than not, these - from photos - drawings end up frustrating me too. For different reasons. I can get distracted by things that don't matter. Like doors end up obsessing me and then I think ‘why were you so obsessed with that door? You totally nailed the door but you melted Freddy’s face’.

But here we are. It's all a long inky line that leads to learning.

On we go.