WRITING DANCING: AN EXPERIMENT NIKKI HEYWOOD
34
|
WOMEN’S WORK CRITICAL PATH
In late 2018, Tess de Quincey and Peter Fraser invited participants from Sydney’s Writing Dancing group into a 3-day (Body Weather informed) group improvisation lab, Impro Exchange. This was an experiment for all of us, with the three writers in the room responding directly to the same stimulus and input as the moving bodies. I have been practising improvised performance for decades, and often use writing either to record or to expand that experience. Mostly this writing remains private. However, in the context of Impro Exchange the challenge (as I saw it) was to extend attention beyond the body and somatic perception into an instantaneous linguistic frame, and to allow composition and performativity to emerge. The task called for the impulse to move to be transmuted into writing, somehow allowing the hand on the page and the mind and word forming sense to move together. Blindfolding was generated with eyes closed in such a way. I am very interested in this potential for embodied writing and am currently working on a kind of libretto for a spoken word opera about nothing and everything.
|
WOMEN’S WORK CRITICAL PATH
35