Dyad 1909 (In The Spirit Of Diaghilev) - 2009

I've just had a meeting with my Costume Designer Moritz Junge. He's done lots of productions with me and really understands the body in a unique and wonderful way. We've been looking through sketches from the make-up artist, Kabuki, who is designing the dancers' faces. Kabuki is a world-famous designer of make-up... he started off by doing the make-up for Sex And The City - he does incredible things with faces. One of the dancers will wear what looks like a survival mask or gas mask, something you could wear in an Arctic environment, but it is made out of black jewels; these have just come in from Swarovski. These designs are amazing; I will be very interested to see how they translate onto stage.

Jane and Louise Wilson and Lucy Carter (my long time lighting designer) come to the studio tomorrow to watch some of the sections of choreography and to plan the visual content that sits alongside the dance itself. It's rather complicated to see a moving body next to a moving image which may be reflected into numerous mirrored surfaces and lit from above; this stage of planning will be critical. But until we do the actual projection tests in the technical rehearsals it will be hard to imagine. So often in the technical rehearsals things change dramatically - we exploit to the best advantage the dynamics of the staging that really are discovered in that moment. I love this bit of the process. It's like a huge jigsaw with an overwhelming amount of options that you need to select down and create one version... but that can always change!