Xuan said to me, over lunch, “I never dream I’m an …”, makes little creeping tendril extraterrestrial fingers, “alien …”, “Oh, no”, I say, “Alien like foreign, not …”, pointing at sky.

Yesterday I have a blood test at the doctor’s, for hormone levels. Three vials taken and three biscuits in return. I thought that was a great exchange. And alleviated my plummeting sugar levels too.

Now thinking of going to the markets. Eat maybe, sit in Cibo and let my brain fray on its own, entertaining itself while I get to be passenger for a while.

I’m feeling rather exuberant after rehearsal today, and commenced enjoying the kick I get out of apprehension, that maybe this time I couldn’t pull it all together in two hours, make the Alptraum scene respectable, do something with the Rape of the Sabine Women stuff we haven’t visited for weeks, and go from start to finish when we haven’t done that for some time either.

Everyone has been slightly delirious today, not just end of the week tired-silly, but that with the jump-up-and-say-yeah energy usually only visiting when sustained by exhaustion. I think this was the right enthusiasm to suddenly shuffle it all together and miraculously plop out a finished piece.

I said something like, “Can you do that, but with your heads facing that way … (points at back wall) so this is front … (points to side wall) even though I’m sitting at the corner … here …”. It possibly is as self-evidently stupid as it sounds, nonetheless…

We got through making sense of Alptraum and pulling it into something like a scene so quickly I thought the clock was going slow. And I love it, possibly my favourite scene in the entire thing, along with the geniunely creepy Throbbing Gristle, it has for me a believable nightmarish tinge. I get uncomfortable and twitchy, like I want to swim in this mess and also get far away.

Sabine Women though after all that work has been reduced to perhaps five berserk attacks and none of the accompanying phrases. I’d love to see this section done properly, ten minutes of hysterical rapacious clawing madness, and assembled in such a way that it was both visually coherent, and not perilous to do in the way it can easily be when there isn’t time to make it that. I’m sad this has become one of the deceased. Though admittedly it was one of the founding ideas for pestilence, so perhaps better it stays where it belongs, with plagues and insanity.

So, to running the whole thing.

Xuan says, “Sometimes I have rape fantasies …” Everyone stands there bewildered. Tara says, “What are we doing?” Daniel says, “This is a disaster”. We fumble through quite beautifully. I’ve never seen it all together, and never seen it knowing this is the thing it will be, minor adjustments aside (major ones also unless I’m taken by weird compulsion). I said to Xuan, “Oh, I have to change the script again”. She is perhaps thinking I’m doing this to torment her.

I was really touched by them all, doing this peculiar un-performance.

It’s only fifteen minutes too.