Developed Writing

For the last third of the workshops the participants were asked to spend a longer period of time on a final exercise that would produce a more extensive, or more edited, piece of writing.

The instructions for this task varied slightly between the two groups, but fundamentally involved the following two suggestions.

First, to write from the perspective of an individual connected to the performance, writing in the first person as either a dancer in character; or a dancer as a dancer; or as a member of the audience.

Second, to write a narrative, in the third person past-tense inspired by the dance.

Interpretation of these was left open to the participants, as was the degree to which they wrote something literally connected to the dance, something more evocatively connected to the experience, or something departing from the performance but maintaining it as a central inspiration. Across the group each of these possibilities was demonstrated, with some pieces of writing clearly emerging from the exercises that had gone before while others started from entirely different places.

The next few posts reproduced, and briefly comment upon, some of these pieces of writing.