Text and Movement 3: Perform in class March 11
For this Text & Movement exercise you will choose a text to work with, and you will determine which words from the text to use as your source for developing the movement material. This technique can be used as a director or choreographer to determine the text for your actor or dancer. This might be a script, devised work, or a myriad of other sources. For this sake of this exercise, you can choose a text from a variety of sources
Some examples:
A poem, a newspaper article, a script, a passage from a novel or non-fiction, maybe a text book, song lyrics, directions from an instruction manual or a recipe. For the sake of this exercise, don’t fret too much about the text selection. Use this opportunity to develop a skill that you can apply to a future project that you are working on.
Here are some links for poetry resources.
Poetry: https://poets.org;
https://www.poetryfoundation.org;
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/08/poem-of-the-week-jazz-by-theodore-maynard/538011/
Equally, ANY text will work! Something you’ve written, text from an instruction manual, or a recipe. A favorite quote…
Perhaps you have a text from another class that you are working on? Don’t limit yourself to literature. Passages on organic chemistry, from an essay in Gender and Women’s Studies, a calculus set… all are fun places to find text. You might also work with a text of your own authoring.
Whatever text you use, remember to always cite your work.
Step One:
Select your text. You will have a full text, like the full poem as we did in Assignment 1, or a full article as we did in Assignment 2. Only a small subset of the text will become “script”- the spoken word part. In Assignment 1, it was a stanza from the poem. In Assignment 2, it was a paragraph from the full article.
Step Two:
Select 8-10 words from the text. These 8-10 words could come from the entirety of your text choice, or just the paragraph or stanza. In Assignment 2, you were given suggestions of how to find the 8-10 words.
Create a movement response for each of these words. Fully create your movement response like we have done before. Love your movement. Be specific and clear . Apply your best movement thinking/performing to your responses. You will string all the movements together to make a string, but pay attention to each “bead” on the string.
Memorize and be very clear about this string and how the movements connect to one another for seamless delivery before moving on. If you are working with a partner, show them your string and see theirs as well. If you need more than ten minutes, do it! But not less. If you feel like you are done, keep working for the fully allotted time anyway. If you find yourself wanting to take more time to create this string, do so.
Step Three:
Read the text thoroughly. Choose one paragraph to focus on. This paragraph will end up being your script. (You can choose one paragraph, or write an amalgam paragraph if you prefer.) Use your critical reading skills to look deeply into the text. Paste it in your journal and make notes, drawings, annotations. The amount of time you spend depends on the length of the text, the complexity of the ideas in the text. A poem might take longer to parse than a newspaper article (or not.)
After you have completed your annotation, share with your partner. You can photograph or scan your journal page and exchange with your partner. See if you want to add any additional ideas to your annotation. This annotation will be saved as part of the documentation of your process on this assignment. Take the final five minutes for this exchange.
Step Four:
Take your movement string from Step Two, and the spoken word selection from Step Three. Assemble them together. The text becomes the sound track for the movement. Rehearse rehearse rehearse.
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Text & Movement 3 – Carissa
Text: excerpts from the poem “Pinned to the Dish” by Shane Koyczan
*content warning: mentions of death/dying*
These are some of my favorite lines from one of my favorite poems, and since I pushed this project into spring break, I decided to work with one of my favorite places too: the swing set in my backyard. I didn’t expect it to be so wet and squishy, but it’s interesting to see how being outside changes the soundscape I’m working in. It was also fun to work with the swings as a set because I could put things between myself and the camera or decide whether to stop a swing or to let it keep moving.
Text & Movement 3 – McAfee
Text: Excerpts from “Explaining My Depression to My Mother”, a poem by Sabrina Benaim
Content Warning: Discussions of mental illness, references to suicidal ideation
One of the hardest things about assembling this choreography was deciding how to amalgamize the original text into a functioning script the best I could. I highly recommend reading the piece in its entirety; I found it difficult to both maintain the original flow of the poem while also ensuring certain moments would still be present in the script with the movement I generated.