Spatial Awareness

Working With Text

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The process we undertook to prepare us for the session we lead involved intense research and preparation to best aid us in mimicking and applying Forced Entertainments practice and play through the use of Practice as Research methodology as best we could.                                                                                                           

 

 Our session’s task revolved around ways of Working with text. This followed up from Generating text, of which the group leading the prior session had done a great job with.
They provided us with superb pieces of text generated by the entire class the previous week.

From there we decided to take the same steps Forced Entertainment usually follow in their process of making work which at this particular point in time was to, as the session was appropriately entitled, work with the text already generated rather than start from scratch.

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Our reasoning behind this was since we as a class are all gaining knowledge and methodologies of practice led research (using Forced Entertainment as our case Study), we can implement them in this student lead session, eventually onwards onto an entire piece of performance. We would rather, utilise the text generated by our classmates in the previous session. By picking out all of the texts we were already familiar with meant we would be able to spend more time focusing on play. Therefore making it easier narrow down even more on key moments which might possibly work for the whole project in the near future.

 

One of the previously generated pieces of text that we used was a list of ‘love stories’ that we had comprised with the other groups text generation work shop. These were lists of pieces of writing that we had spliced together the week before and had simply put them into a readable order. We decided to cut these into strips and present them to different members of the group who then had to read them. We also used the previously explored plaque card idea and implemented this into our work shop. This meant that the way in which the text was read had changed depending on which key word was placed in front of them. We used a great deal of repetition on this part as we kept some of the same pieces of text for a while but simply changed the person reading them and the way in which they read them. For example the characteristic written in front of the reader (on the plaque card) was the characteristic that they employed and this changed the way in which the text was read. We found that there was a great deal of difference between the ways the word “darling” is read depending on someone’s mood. If someone has the characteristic of someone who is sarcastic then this term may seem derogatory, but when said with warmth and passion this term becomes sexual, even lustrous.

During the class that we lead we decided to play a little with some of the narrative that we had gained from the text that had been generated before. This text was based around what we would do should a zombie apocalypse occur. This text was created with the same principle as ‘the love letters’.  Each person wrote small part of their survival story onto a piece of paper, this bit of paper was then passed on to continue the story for generating text. Our group then took it and decided to play with it spontaneously and physically. We choose three captains to lead three very different zombie apocalypse teams. It was decided that every captain were to select a diary and read them out. For every other person in the room, they had to decide which character was most reliable to live with, and would help them to survive a post-apocalyptic universe. This made a contribution to every performer and the relationships they had with the diary’s, “the distance between the performer and her text is visible” (Etchells, 1999, pp 105) depending on what part of the text everyone had written, their own ideas was what might have possibly attracted them to a particular leader, therefore Etchells point does not apply here, for the texts were written and expressed from what came from within everyone, what we wrote ourselves has a connection to us. Whilst one team would stand up and portray their scenarios, the rest of the group acted as zombies. We then alternated in true Forced Entertainment style and repeated these steps. The outcome was that we had many different attitudes towards helping a group survive a zombie apocalypse. It is arguable, however as to how far this repetition would remain to be useful with this particular exercise when it comes to research.

 

We found it very tricky to elaborate on what exactly Forced Entertainment do particularly with their text. Despite that we felt it was a good idea to use the text already generated from the previous session, it may have been a good idea to choose one that Forced Entertainments’ own resources. Mainly for going back to our point earlier that referred to the relationship between performer and text maybe we were already too familiar with it, as it was all and expression of ourselves collaborated. However from what we have found, it is interesting how much characters interacted with one another, from just a combination of the plaque cards and text.