It was just as well that I bought a packet of coloured chalks ahead of time, rather than as a last minute purchase. As the title of the play suggests, chalk is quite important for the iconic final scene, so it came as quite a shock, when I tried it out, to discover that the polished floor tiles of GekkoX would not take chalk at all. The Permanent Black Marker Circle did not have quite the same ring (no pun intended) and might in any case have ended up as just a bit too permanent. But a circle of some kind there had to be.
But constraint is the mother of creativity, as they say (I’m not sure they do, actually, but I think I’ve heard something of the kind.) I needed something that would show up well, but which could be dropped onto the floor. It occurred to me that the day-glo orange material of a life jacket might be just the thing, as well as having some symbolic resonance. What was more, there was likely to be a ready-made supply very close: Mosaik operated a workshop, called Safe Passage, which turned old life-jackets into bags and purses of all kinds – surely they would have scraps of material.
And they did, bags and bags of the stuff, as well as plenty just lying about on the workshop floor. I was quite prepared to pay for it, but they would have none of it, waving me away in a devil-may-care fashion. All I had to do was cut the small scraps into even smaller scraps, and the problem was solved. I just need to make sure the air-con in Gekko X doesn’t blow it around and I have a symbolically relevant solution. Better than chalk!
Sue
Very creative, Chris