With Daniel I began to work on developing a show from a seed of a myth that has been bubbling away in my mind, growing story by story, leaf by leaf, for the last three years until it reached an improbable height and needed a good prune to make it audience ready. This tree is the saga of Binderella, the Anti-Goddess of the dispossessed, of the homeless outcasts, the punks and squatters, travellers, refuges and all the lost lonely scavengers that live on the edges and hide in the cracks. The story tells the tales of Binderella, found as a lost baby in a bin, and her struggle to overcome the Faceless Man and his insatiable greedy desire to consume the world, one forest, one mountain, one river, one people at a time.
Daniel is an incredible composer of stories and his advice has been invaluable, jumping between referencing the Odyssey and William Blake, to the Lord of the Rings and punk music, he has been instrumental at helping me see the mass of stories I’ve generated as a single piece rather than a bunch of interconnected but individual tales, and guiding me in making the changes needed to weave them into a single powerful narrative that invests more into the journey arc that sees Binderella grow towards the empowerment she needs to reach in order to face her oppressor.
As an oral storyteller I’ve had an aversion to writing anything, anywhere, ever, however, with Daniels encouragement, for the first time ever I put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and wrote the whole of Binderella down. Thirteen thousand words, twenty three stories (finished, unfinished and unstarted) and sixteen pages later the first draft summary was finished. After cutting out the unnecessary side branches and prologues and merging some of the tales together, the next draft is a page and three hundred words longer, despite being eleven stories shorter. I’m really looking forward to finalising the composition with Daniel so that we can move onto workshopping the performance and talking about how to add in music.