25th-7th January/February

We've made a lot of progress in the last two weeks with contacting people and getting responses so we can chase the responses ans start workshops. We had our first meeting with Tina. What a lovely, clever and helpful lady. We gave her our ideas of the procession and she gave us some ideas with the different blocks of colur for the pieces of grass and the "community rainbow" procession. Our ideas just seemed to bounce off one another. So far, we've got ideas of masks, flowers, different groups in different coloured t-shirts, big puppets like a chinese dragon. Then we also thought of ways of decorating pushchairs or wheelchairs and to have different blocks of grass for different performances in Ham House. We thought of simplistic things such as all the red block to have a red belt. So last Thursday we put our ideas to the group which they loved.

We all have our set roles. I'm inthe design team. It's absolute madness. We are doing 2 events and organizing 1000 people to parade into Ham House, see performances and then sing a few songs including Happy Birthday to Ham House. We all agreed to keep to the recycled theme and make costumes out of recyclable material. Tina helped us with where we could get everything. already we've got 42 school choirs. I'm getting scared now!!! On Monday we didn't really talk about much. Karina gave feedback from Georg and Gary. I really like the drama in the community group as we all are close and can co-operate well so I feel confident this project is going to be a success.

Last Tuesday we had a making masks workshop with Tina. All the design team can back me up on this by saying how useful and fun it was. I think we all got a bit too carried away. Now we can put our newly found skills into teaching mask workshops to peers and children in schools so the children have their masks for the procession.

Also, I've been cracking on with finding contacts for Kingston and Richmond schools and churches. I'm so busy. I'm helping Charotte with Arabian Nights plus other lecture requirements so I must go and crack on with some more work and teach the drama in the community group how to make masks.