Guest Blog: Dominic Biddle On THE ANIMALS AND CHILDREN TOOK TO THE STREETS

Dominic Biddle is a Creative Associate of theatre company 1927, and Assistant Director of 'The Animals and Children Took to the Streets' - which combines performance with music and animation - currently playing at Lyric Hammersmith.

In a 1927 show, the large calico thing behind you is your friend. In The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, all the action happens in front of these three screens, with a small spill, perhaps a foot, onto the floor in front.

Or else the actors have no feet at all. Chopped off at the ankle, floating across the stage. And as soon as you step out, creeping towards the audience, a shadowy double of you emerges on the screen, breaking the illusion of our shared cartoon, cut-out world.

It's a wonky world as well, and the three performers inheriting it obviously need to understand and feel this ghostly atmosphere if they're to embody it. So we don't focus on the technicalities of lining up precisely with the animation until later in the rehearsal process.

Instead, the makers - Suzanne, Esme and Lily - share their various influences and inspirations for the original making of the piece, from John Cooper Clarke's Beasley Street to Betty Boop and Minnie the Moocher.

Paul Barritt's stop-frame animated cockroaches, cityscapes, bedrooms, laundry rooms and gentrified parks provide a wonky and full world, plus a whole cast of animated characters we don't have to rehearse into the show.

So, as directors, we can offer much more time to each of the three individual living, breathing performers, who all play at least three different characters. And as with all multi-role, we spend time finding a specific physical language for each.

Throughout the process, we also take the performers away from the flat plane restriction of the screens and improvise under other given circumstances: word limitations, cupboards, The Beach Boys. Discovering the pleasure, feel and style of performance and learning to love the restrictions.

If you look at a 1927 projected scene, you see a human-sized pool of light within the animation, created by Paul, for the actor, so they don't have a strip of flowery wallpaper on their face, or a lamppost in their head. When 1927 are developing work for the very first time, physical sequences, beats and moments from the rehearsal room must be communicated to Paul so the animation can correlate and merge the live actor into the animated scene.

For instance, when Rowena plays the Caretaker, a mute, sad clown of sorts, she only has a certain spill of light within which to exist. Which is why she needs her 'spikes'.

In a 1927 show, our glow tape spikes run along the stage space directly in front of the screen. Helping the actor know exactly where to stand in correlation with the animation.

When all the spikes are in position, to look at them from above, they are a strange constellation of stars, or secret code of hieroglyphics. Or, to give it away, two little arrowheads means put your toes in here!

But these 'spikes' tell you a lot about the characters. The Caretaker, the reluctant dry, drab, accidental hero, cringes away from the world, taking up as little room as possible, and so do his spikes.

You'd be pretty foolish to try and direct any actor in this process without first standing in front of the projector yourself, seeing nothing but a single source of light coming at you, knowing an animated world is occurring just behind you. It's a vulnerable place to be, at first, and it would be fatal to perform for 70 minutes fearful you were getting it wrong.

We're now six months into touring the show internationally and the actors know each character physically, intimately, like a dance. But in every venue, we spike. It's a ritual, and entirely necessary to get the image just right. To create a magic trick, like Etienne Decroux ringing an invisible bell.

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets at Lyric Hammersmith until 16 March