Hiya --
I've just had the nicest Friday in the history of Fridays. Determined to have a productive day, I woke up early. Well, early for me. So 8am. I know. I'm a wuss. After the coffee was a'brewin', I embarked on a little professional networking thru social networking, which yielded an almost instant reply from an artist who's work I greatly admire. And that lead to an email exchange, which then led to a tea meetup in two weeks. Yahoo! Not bad for TGI at 8:30am!
After that, I started work on some text for a performance piece I've been thinking about. During the first block of my course, we had a guest lecture from Emily Orley, a place-specific UK theatre/art practitioner. She introduced to me an interesting technique called "place writing,' a good jumping off point for creative writing. I've never considered myself a creative writer. I can talk for hours, I can express myself through movement/gesture, and I'm comfortable using someone else's words to tell a story, but I choke when it comes time to point the pencil to paper in an imaginative sort of way. In this approach however, you use to me what feels like a catalyst: a place, defined not necessarily as a geographic location, but rather as a particular, describable point/object. So this 'place' could be a passage in a book, describable for not only the words but also their placement on the page, the smell of the book, the type etc. A place could be an object, like my cluttered desk drawer, a seat on the Central Tube line, or the clawfoot bathtub at my parents' house. The point is that this 'place' has a history and a makeup all its own, and that combination can be elucidated through writing.
Now, to those of you who are writers, this probably sounds pedantic and dull. But for me, it's a welcome restriction that actually helps me get writing, instead of staring at a page being nervous about writing. I wrote about my ring. I've worn the same ring for almost seven years now, on the middle finger of my right hand. I take it off very infrequently, usually only when I performing etc. So I used it as my place. I started out describing its physical characteristics (engraving, signs of age) and its placement, and then my wiritng started to morph into the object's history. I started writing about how, occasionally, I wake up and my ring is missing. I must take it off in my sleep, with no recollection of doing it. It'll go missing for a few days, before it turns up in my pillow, or under the bed.
I started thinking bout that in relation to the engraving on my ring, which is from Song of Solomon and deals with the notion of being "beloved." Why do I take my ring off? To give that away? To become someone's beloved? Or simply because, for whatever reason, it gets in my way in my sleep? Whatever. Not really relevant points, but they do make for interesting writing explorations, especially for someone like me, who is the biggest block to my own creative writing.
In any case, I've been fascinated with this exercise, and have been trying to use it to develop some short texts for performance pieces. I spent yesterday developing a little snippet from this material I gathered about my ring, and it is taking an interesting shape. I'll post some of it here in a few days, perhaps.
So that was yesterday morning. A productive creative morning. And my day wasn't even half over! Then I trekked onto campus to meet-up with a fellow student and create another performance. I'm trying to be dedicated in the off times, and really use them to explore my own performance vocabulary. I've been stewing around a storytelling type performance, influenced by the thinking I've been doing about my grandmother and memory etc., after seeing Krapp's Last Tape. I'm working on an idea that I'm going to continue expanding, using objects to trigger memory. In this case, I'm using objects that call up stories I have about my grandmother, like a set of keys, a bell, a ball of yarn, birdseed etc. In keeping with the explorations of fragmented memory however, I'm trying to weave these memories of mine with snippets from her later life, when her memory was impaired. For example, the ball of yarn reminds me of how skilled my grandmother was a craftswoman. She could knit or crochet in the neatest, fastest way, while keeping her eyes fully on the tv or her grandchildren. It was like second-nature to her. In later life however, not only had she lost this ability, but she slowly became even unable to wind a ball of yarn. Every once in awhile however, while we sat and talked,her hands would be rhythmically moving, empty, but moving almost as if they were remembering some of the actions involved in the craft. I'm interested in explore that, and that's what I'm trying to do with movement and text.
I also have this idea of selecting a lot of objects, but only having space for some of them. Out of a collection of 30 objects that I bring, audience members would chose say eight of them and set them in their places in the performance space, out of my sight. That way, until i see them, I don't know what stories to tell.
In the same piece, I'm working with Julie Taymor's idea of an ideograph, a simple pictorial gesture used to encapsulate an entire character/theme. In this case, I'm trying to use my gesture to represent the two grandmothers that I remember: regular memory, fragmented memory. It helps me make the shift between the two stories I'm trying to tell.
It probably sounds very strange, and not very interesting, and perhaps it isn't to anyone but me. But I'm really captivated by it. The little five minute performance of this sort that I worked on yesterday has given me a lot to think about, and I'm going to work on developing it this week, with an eye to show it again in two weeks, in a more developed format. So there's that.
After all of this, I took a much-needed evening off to enjoy Bonfire Night in London, the celebration of the failed Guy Fawkes' plot to blow Parliament sky high. And how is it marked? With bonfires and fireworks displays of course! Strange, right? But hey, I'll take any excuse for a fireworks show, especially one in November! The display we went to see was set to music, and it's hard to enjoy oneself when fireworks are exploding to the tunes of Guns n Roses and Madonna. All in all, a nice little night, followed up with drinks and a rush back to the Tube before service ended for the night. Nice.
So that's that. This weekend holds a bit more theatre, a lot of reading, and a little relaxing to gear up for my IRELAND ADVENTURE this coming week!
Love,
TGI
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