At the beginning of rehearsals I start with the company on ensemble movement sessions. I need to get to know how the actors move; how they respond to movement, how they interpret movement and how they work together. 

The period a play is set hugely informs the ways in which the actors approach their characters' movement. It affects how they carry themselves, how they walk and how they interact. It impose a style on every movement they make, influencing ideas of status, ritual and rules within a society.

In this period of the Elizabethan era it's imperative to master gestures of curtesy and respect, performed through bows and curtsies. The actors must learn and execute these movements so that they become as habitual as a handshake in contemporary society.

In our gender reversed world these practices were important in order to instil the political hierarchy in the play, but were also used as a play on manners.

During rehearsals, we constantly considered the physical codes of gender, sometimes focusing on one specific viewpoint such as:

• Physical strength
• Eye contact
• Spatial relationships
• Rules of contact and touch under specific situations

I found it very useful to examine these codes through the rules of Italian Renaissance and Elizabethan dance. This gave a set of rules that we could clearly reverse.

For example, in this period men always lead ladies but in our world ladies lead men. Women initiate rather than wait to be told. They command more space than men. They overpower men.

In our gender-reversed world men are the paraded sex. They are led, they are gazed upon. Their looks are a power and their dancing is an art to be perfected.

As a creative team with Composer Ruth Chan and Director Justin Audibert we worked to constantly evolve the physical language of our world and the creation of this parallel universe. We use dance as a measure to view our new world order.