LitfestWe had the challenging pleasure of Penny Collinson coming in to lead the day today. Penny is a dancer/movement artist, particularly interested in how our bodies respond to space, emotions and narrative.
We all dived into the space, playing about with how we occupied the large auditorium, alone and in relation to each other. This was just to warm up. Then Penny brought in the text.
She pulled three words from Cath’s poem and asked us to development movements to them.
Swallows: Longing: Severed. 
I won’t ask you to guess which is which. But Cath did develop a sequence that sped up and slowed down under Penny’s direction, stretching out the emotional content of each poise.
We also thought it would be a good use of Penny’s eye to show her what we’d discovered the previous week. She loved the plastic: it’s movement, light and sound. Classic how we’d come to it as an afterthought – Cath had only brought it as a protective sheet for other stuff and now it was looking like the central prop. Oh happy spontaneity.
Of course there maybe still be changes. After all, there is the issue of confidence (in throwing and wrapping a plastic sheet about a stage) that needs to be reconciled. Intention, and belief in the why is a good start. We’ve decided to explore the use of plastic more in our next session. Kids, ask your parents before you try this at home.
There is also the relationship between stillness, space and silence within movement that I am interested we pull out more. This is, after all not a movement piece. We are ‘exploring live literature’ and what we think it is. Which to my mind means we put the text at the forefront of whatever choreography we decide upon. It seems essential to me that, as Penny said, the clarity of the clarity of movement supports the clarity of the text.
As we began to discuss at the end of the day, ‘live literature’ is a relatively new term with many people attempting to define it. There is the view that anything read or performed with text is live lit – but then that kind of pulls the carpet out from under the feet of theatre and experimental drama. My thinking is that if there’s a name/label/tag there ought to be a definition.
Not that I want to be the one nailing it. And not that this project intends to nail anything, but to draw some lines at least.
Is it a matter of balance – exploring the proportional presentation of text with action/props/movement?
What about delivery? What if the text is recorded? What if the text is spken by others as well as the writer?
I like the idea that live literature is enlivening literature that wasn’t necessarily originally conceived as an oral piece. Although that’s not particualrly catchy. But. It’s more than a monologue. It isn’t a script. It isn’t a recital, or reading. It isn’t Cath rolling around in a piece of plastic. No. Wait.
