Why do the wise men have no shoes?

The whole day today at Gayhurst school, showing the results of two days' work on the first few pages of the play (very scary for the actors, who were fantastic, even in parts they'd never looked at before today) as well as working on dance, music, character, drawing and writing stimulated by the piece.

It was heartening to see that the style we've been exploring seems accessible. We're creating specific, vivid images - visual, physical, musical and verbal - to stimulate audience members to imagine the epic journey of the play. It doesn't spell things out, and I had some anxieties that it could prove inaccessible to a first-time theatre audience. In fact one of the school groups achieved a beautiful sequence of dance chorus pieces depicting the Amazon itself, loggers felling trees, wary Indians and then a menagerie of screeching, screaming beasts. All simply through movement - no words.

And the themes: friendship, loneliness, family, voyaging, communicating across language barriers, living with more than one family heritage - they were alive for this group. It was great to feel that this is a story and characters who really resonate with the children for whom we'll be performing - which is a huge tribute to Eva Ibbotson's original vision.

[The title for this piece is one of my favourite lines from the writing work the children did today.]