Tripping on words to make movement – second
session.
In the second session, we started by making some poetry
ourselves, thinking about placement of the words in space and the rhythms
implied by that. We also considered the process of
extracting/highlighting/choosing information, in making blackout poems.
I handed out word cards, newspapers, black markers, and
scissors.
We found especially interesting Maisie’s approach, moving into
the 3 dimensional, and Fran’s idea that a piece of text, divided into sections,
could be understood in different ways according to the arrangement of the
sections on the page.
We then took our cues from the reading+listening experiment we
had done in the first session, and chose to try the following:
One of us would read a piece of text – we chose to use another
one of Caroline Bergvall’s, and the reader ended up being myself – and the
others would be assigned a semi-often occurring word each (in this example, the
words were ‘point’, ‘close’ and ‘face’) and a corresponding gesture. Whenever
that word was heard, the gesture would be acted out. By doing this, we were
trying to make visible the act of listening, and of processing information.
To perform this task was more difficult than expected, but we
decided to go a step further:
The gestures would stay the same, but instead of a word, the
performers would listen out for sounds – we chose
‘th’
‘r’ (we noticed that would be relatively easy to pick up on
because I pronounce it a bit differently than the others, in American English)
and ‘p’.
We also used a different text: A page from Finnegans Wake by
James Joyce, a novel well known for its close- to-complete incomprehensibility.
James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake as well as in Ulysses, plays
around magnificently and irreverently with sounds, words, meanings,
associations, insider jokes, and notions of counts as intelligible and
what doesn’t.
The fact that this was such an exhausting thing for listeners to
act out was the crucial bit for me – I am really interested in that heightened
state of paying attention and how the immersion and the struggle is made
visible by embodying the process via gestures. I also consider this a live act
of translation.
