Spatial Awareness

Forced Entertainment have also played around with the idea of a love letter in performance writing calling it ‘a love letter written in binary’. Our group decided to use this idea but with a different approach of using improvisation through spoken language to create the letter, whilst one member stepped out and documented it. If we were to do this exercise again I think it would be interesting to use a microphone and pass it around every person to say their piece of the letter. Forced Entertainment use microphones in many of their performances and rehearsals. It would be interesting to see what the microphone would bring or take away from the game. For example it could transition the exercise into a performance or it could slow it down and lose all the energy improvisation requires.

While planning the exercises to do with the group during this session we thought about all the Forced Entertainment work we had seen up to that point and how text was used, in order to think about how we might generate something to the same effect. In Emmanuelle Enchanted, the cast describes, in a series of disjointed scenes, their individual experience of a particular night ‘when the lights went out’. With this in mind we decided to give the group a stimulus and have them write as much as they could (in the form of a diary entry) under a time limit, and then compare the results. We considered asking them to describe something mundane such as ‘what do you do when you wake up in the morning?’ but thought this might produce results that were too similar and so changed the question to ‘what do you think about before you go to sleep at night?’

Incorporating ideas from our earlier ‘Fiction/Real/Everyday’ session we told the group they did not have to be honest in their diary entry, so that if these texts were ever used in a performance then the audience would have to question their validity. Further to this, we decided to have people write for a minute, then pass their piece of paper to the person on their left, write some more, and pass the paper on again. This meant we finished with ‘diary entries’ written/generated by three different people.

The results were encouraging. Some of the diary entries were comical and others were sad. Many evoked characters and began stories. Even though this was not the intention the texts would make a good starting for developing a narrative in a show, even if that narrative is loose and disjointed in the same way as Emmanuelle Enchanted.

Pictures of some of the diary entries have been included for your reference below.

After the group had completed the diary entry we moved on to slightly different exercise, after reading Tim Etchells’ book Certain Fragments we found another exercise listing as many words as you could suggesting the word “masturbation”; according to Etchells there were five hundred alternatives. We got the group to write down what they came up with and then read out the results. After this we wanted the group to do something a little more physical and playful. We set up an improvisation by putting a bin in the middle of the room and creating a performance space, and let anyone do what they wanted with it. What could they do with the bin? Tell us a story about it? Tell us a story from the bin’s point of view? We let this continue until the end of the session and the bin became several different characters during this time. At one point the bin was Santa Claus, then someone’s boyfriend and then went back to being a bin.

Several interesting quotes came from this, particularly one by Katie Price aimed from the bins point of view “I have just go so much baggage”. We took inspiration for this exercise from the session we had in week four when we did “Play and Improvisation”. We decided use one of the games from that session here, but instead of props we only used the bin and items we had with us (including things we found inside the bin). We got the idea to this from a term Tim Etchells mentions in Certain Fragments; “Invisible Text”, meaning that text doesn’t have to be physical (written) but watching back on our session we could use the spoken text that people came up with (e.g. Katie’s quote from earlier). We reused this exercise again in week ten to see if it would work but unfortunately it didn’t, and we were much more engaged with other props.