From Scratch

Success!! We did it, Arts Council England have awarded a grant to bring YMMV back to life. After several months planning, organising and much form filling, we are back being creative. Thank you so much to the Spark & Grow programme from Doorstep Arts and to all the venues and organisations who believed in us, helping this dream become a reality. Special thanks to Nat Palin for patiently talking me through every aspect of the complex algorithms and wordy questions that constitute an ACE application.

Don't worry... the last cinnamon swirl didn't last long!!

So a successful R&D with the full company represented by depleting nibbles as seen above!

So many new ideas and exciting rethinking of the original. We had some interesting discussions around the voice and heartbeat of YMMV. Discussions started with 'what must we keep from the previous versions and scratches?'. We kept turning back to this question as a really useful tool to help rein in brilliant yet 'too far from the tree' suggestions. It is important when the creative process has gone through much development, scratching and sharing, that voices are honored throughout the process.

It is great having a firm starting point on this devising process and realising not only what the company is precious about keeping, but also the feedback and what our audiences wanted to see more of will be vital to the integrity of YMMV. Whether it is a comment from an audience member during a Q&A, a piece of advice from a personal mentor (Sandy Akerman) or an external outside eye shaping the dramaturgical structure, every piece of feedback connects someone to our process.

With a real community feel around the piece, and each scratch inviting audiences to take a degree of ownership, this version of YMMV must be careful not to lose its essence of a semi-autobiographical, story rich, 'sort of' one man show on the topic of voice, communications and how we listen... I guess the piece itself has to continue to learn how to listen!