A flying visit to Georgia

For us, going to Georgia was an amazing opportunity to take our work outside the UK. It was great for us to go to Georgia, which is not somewhere we'd have thought our work could go, and to see what we could do out there. We had lovely feedback, with people saying things like it gave them a chance to dream, that this kind of work hadn't been seen out there and that it was a pleasure to put our work on. It was a really beautiful thing for us, too, to meet some of the people and see their country. We are very happy to have done that.

"...this kind of work hadn't been seen out there"

It was our first trip, so in terms of what we learnt, there was a lot of technical learning about how we take this show abroad. There was a very steep learning curve within the group about how we take this show out to places, but that's just part of the piece and we knew it was going to be like that. In terms of Georgia itself and learning about the culture, we saw little snippets but it was quite a heavy workload for us so we spent quite a lot of time in a bubble. We did get out a little bit. There were a number of people there through the British Council, including a translator. Maya from the British Council took us out on the first night for some traditional Georgian food! We also ran into some locals who'd attended the workshops and seen the show, and it was a really marvellous thing to start to get into Georgian customs and understand some of that side of things.

We ran some workshops, which were really great. We fell in with some puppetry people at the puppetry school where the workshops were held. I talked to one of the professors there, and it was great to talk about puppetry generally. Their kind of puppetry is very much on the shadow puppetry side of things, so we had a lot of interplay through interpreters about different kinds of work. In that regard, there were a couple of key people we met, where it felt like we'd done something good in showing the interplay between the music and the images, ways to break out. They seemed to be very genuinely inspired by what we did, which is always a good thing.

"They seemed to be very genuinely inspired by what we did"

The amount of time that we actually had in the country meant that we couldn't get to see anything else, which was a real shame. The only thing I really knew of Georgian culture previously was about the polyphonic singing and I would have really loved to have seen that. We started making friends and meeting people out there, but there wasn't much time within our workload to see other work. I believe on other trips with the British Council we might get to see more.

Next we're off to Indonesia and Brazil. We're hoping in Indonesia to see some shadow puppetry and some Gamelan as well. We're in talks with Brazil at the moment to hopefully sort out our schedule so we can see more shows. We'll hopefully get to meet people on the ground. It would be great to be able to wander around and try the food and stuff. We've got Indonesia and Brazil back to back, and then we're off to Paris. Part of the idea of this is for us to develop as well, as we're hoping to have more interactions and explore local culture.

Paper Cinema was part of the 2013 British Council Edinburgh Showcase. It will be touring its show, Odyssey, to Indonesia and Brazil as a result of the relationships formed at the Showcase. Look out for future blogs! 

Nic Rawling was talking to Eleanor Turney.