Day One – Sunday 5 August

Day One – Sunday 5 August

I arrive in Eastleigh with a fuzzy head after a party in Brighton. Aurora flies in from Poland with a slipped Disc, leaving her kids behind for 5 weeks. Alex flies in from Costa Rica with Andrea and little Liuba, jetlagged and with bad knees. Janusz arrives after a 3am start from Posnan with a beer in one hand,  a fag and a packet of crisps in the other. Nik  arrives looking exactly like he did 2 years ago on our US tour. Dom arrives clutching a coffee on one hand and a revolting looking high energy drink in the other. Nigel and Elaine – our new intern – have brought a van load of stuff down from my warehouse in Sheffield and slept over night in Eastleigh to help us out today .

We lay two dance floors, build a wall, paint it white, upload graphic software, stabilise a piano, construct a sound system, project images, set up video cameras, hang costumes, stack boxes, hide flight cases, open a bottle of wine, collapse after 12 hours of sorting and fiddling and fixing and moving stuff around. I clean the floor last thing at night when everyone has gone to bed. It's a ritual that I have repeated for 20 years that marks our arrival in an empty space that we will fill and erase and refill and repaint and re-order and wash down again and again, until something sticks.