This is a lovely video of Micky et Addie, directed by Nathalie Bensard and translated by Serverine Magois. The show was co-created with Andy Manley and the French productions have been lovely. Catch it at the Avignon festival if you can.

Or buy it here. HA!

Happy happy happy that Mikey and Addie has been nominated for a Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland in the Best Show for Children and Young Peole category. 

Little Red, a dance show I co-created and co-directed with Barrowland Ballet will be closing this year's Edinburgh International Children's Festival. 2nd - 4th June 2017 at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

Last year I made a new show called Little Boxes with director Amelia Sears and Theatre Centre (in London). The show was based on conversations with 10 and 11 year olds that took place across England (and I mean England, not the UK). 

The show was a first attempt to try and question what gender is, what it helps us to do and when it stops us from doing. And how are the social structures in the wider world using gender to police the behaviour of little people. 

​It was an amazing project. There's a page on it here. 

And sometimes I found it wholly depressing. I started to see the whole world as one big attempt to police the behaviour of little people and the people that look after them. Even the people that don't look after them, but just sometimes come into contact with them, or were once one themselves. So, basically, everyone. Unless you were born 56 years old, which I suspect some people might have been.

Then I got to take part in PUSH; a European funded project exploring gender and sexuality in work for kids.

And my brain exploded.

Especially when Yvon Bonenfant came and explained that in every child there is a desire to have what is extra-normal in them recognised and then celebrated. And that as artists we should be making work that is in itself extra-normal. Not reinforcing the social restrictions that are always put upon children and which by adulthood have often become rods of steel that will not bend, even when it makes us desperately sad; when we feel dead from it all. 

And so I am on a mission; to find and try and theatricalise the extra-normal. This might mean I have to fall over in the supermarket sometimes, or make strange noises in the park, or dance in clubs and celebrate all that is weird and refuses to be normal. 

Mikey and Addie is doing great-guns at Summerhall this August. Andy Manley has even managed to learn every single word and say them in the right order, which is impressive considering how many of them there are. It got a good review, just here.

​It's also part of the Made in Scotland showcase. 

Finished a 1st Draft of D of E, a play about alien abduction, lizard illuminati from Alpha Draconis and a Duke of Edinburgh hike gone wrong. With any luck it will be in the National Theatre Connections festival in 2017 and I will get to see the madness on stage.