Day 5 - Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Making A Family-Friendly Puppetry Show (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Today's show was brilliant and I'm very proud of everyone involved for pulling it out of the bag...or should I say, the box. We had to dig deep after a long few days of getting acclimatised to Edinburgh and the new space. This was definitely fired up by a wonderful re-writing of the beginning of the show by Lisa, Max and Liz - which made me sad because I didn't write it! It's very good, and, as is the EmptyBox way, very clever. Thank you Max, Liz and Lisa!

Dan, our producer, has been rushing around making sure everyone knows about our show. Today he and Naomi went to "Meet the Press" at Fringe Central - apparently a number of the press representitives (and other companies!) were interested in meeting Norman, and were keen to know more about the show and the possibility of attending.  Hopefully some of them will come along, and will love the show as much as we do.

A good day's flyering on the mile with Norman. Lots of wonderful and weird people wanting their picture with the star of the show! Then some exit flyering at Underbelly. We're in flyer wars with Charlie and Lola - the goliath to our David - but that's the way we like it: Epic. We're the underdog, but Norman Shadowboxer's packing a slingshot - so watch out, giants of Children's Entertainment!

Talking to Leof Kingsford-Smith of "Mission of Flowers" (another show at C-Aquila) and he said about promoting a show: "ye just gotta get out there...it's hard but ye just gotta do it." He said it straight and that's just it. It's gonna be tough but when we have our puppet and hero Norman out there we're gonna get audiences in.

Excitingly, we also had a child reviewer for Primary Times come in to see our show, so we're looking forward to seeing what they say! Hopefully they'll provide us with a few juicy quotes to stick to our flyers...

Excited about tomorrow because we have a good number of people booked in, and a photographer coming to snap some nice shots of Norman. Then a few Sunday night pints! And next week we're going to start going to watch some THEATRE! Looking forward to seeing Clever Peter, Les Enfants Terribles, and Frantic Assembly next week. Bigs fans of all.

Happy that we've started to get our show to the top standard we're used to, it's gonna get better and better the more we do it!

- Ronan

Day 4 - "He's big now!"

The blog title is a direct quote from one an audience member today (Friday). Norman Shadowboxer "is big now!"... Ok, that quote may have been taken out of context but it's a sign of things to come. We had a lovely audience today. Thank you!

- Ronan

Hi there, this is Naomi, the director for Norman Shadowboxer. Today was a big day. God, this festival is so tiring! It's my first time doing a show here, and what I wasn't prepared for is how physically tiring it is. Every day we walk from our place to the venue in about 30 minutes, then literally run up and down stairs with piles of boxes (our set) for 5 minutes. Then we do the general running around that setting up entails. We welcome the audience and do our lovely show, which is tiring for me because I'm sortof mentally living through the whole thing as I watch it, and must be properly tiring for the performers - physically, mentally and vocally. Then we immediately spend 5 minutes running up and down the stairs again with our boxes, and another 5 putting things away and getting changed. No space or quiet for notes or much chat, so we leave that 'til later in the day. Lunch. Flyering. (Flyering is enjoyable because you get to talk to lots of strangers, but it takes it out of you!) Occasionally a meeting with someone - today, for example, Dan and I met Megan, who plans the events in C Venue's Urban Garden, and we arranged to lead some children's workshops in the garden over the next few weeks. Occasionally we might find ourselves walking all over the town for some reason or other! Later, 30 minutes walk home. Somebody, or bodies, make dinner for the group. (Today, in case you're interested: Fajitas.) And in the evening - so far - at least an hour talking through how the show is going and planning any ways that we can make it better.

We've always been very hands on, all of us, throughout this most loving of rehearsal processes, and we're not yet ready to sit back and just do the show, without continuing to tweak, discuss, glue, note, cut, even write. The show is really quite personal for us, and aims at an intimate, detailed experience for the audience, so we're eager to adapt to the new performance conditions - aiming to retain our intimate relationship to the audience and our lo-fi, offbeat simplicity in this new, rather formal playing space (which has a raised stage, black drapes around us, etc.). We've been doing very well, but tonight we made some changes; Max, Lisa and Liz had tentatively re-written the opening, and they read out their idea to Dan, Ronan and I. It got a serious thumbs up and some group re-jigging. And there was more glueing and clever cardboard action from Liz and Max, who seem to have mechanical reasoning coming out of their ears. 

I'm really looking forward to seeing the show tomorrow.

And now, good god, I must sleep. Goodnight!

- Naomi