[standing eyes closed] [the space feels cool and empty]
[raise arms out: no walls]
It feels…cold. And big, like forever.
[bend body, explore]
…and white. White. Mmmmmmmph
[arms stretch up, search for limits]
…a cool whiteness. Like
[twist around, arms search]
a sphere, a ball, a white sphere. Or…a cloud. Maybe it’s a cloud. When we were children and my father went away in a plane we thought he was going to land on a cloud, we thought
[arms reach up, face reaches up to light]
all the places he said he was going were clouds, and the plane would land on a cloud and he would get out. We thought
[warmer below. Warm floor]
we were on a cloud too. I had a picture in my mind of a blue sky, with all these clouds floating in it, and a little town on each cloud.
[stretch out on floor (cloud)] [fingers stretch, wiggle, sing]
Loooolooloolooloo.
[they are flowers, cloud-flowers]
Leeeeeeeloolooloolooloo.
[draw arms in under, and knees]
But they weren’t all on clouds, because when I was on the swings at home and I went really high,
[roll over, arms out]
I could see a yellow house across the fields that was America. And when we went to stay with our grandparents, we drove past an old barn that was Dublin,
[draw in, a warm ball]
where my aunt lived and which was too far away to visit. They must have been on the same cloud as us.
[standing up, looking up]
When we took my brother to watch the plane flying away into the clouds, he said ‘My Daddy will come back,’ then he started crying. We were laughing, because we knew he would.
[the space feels very enclosed, like inside a cushion][or a cloud]
END
The above excerpt from my experience in the workshop demonstrates my spontaneous discovery of a kind of “movement stream-of consciousness writing” which has enhanced my writing practice by literally adding the dimensions of time, space and movement into it. From now on, I plan to workshop new texts by filming myself moving while I improvise them. I have already done this several times. The act of sitting at a desk is so limiting and physically constricting, and in my view to constrict the body is to constrict the mind…this feels like discovering the simplest, best way into more profoundly free creativity.
*Bodystories/Perforum were two linked performativity conferences run in UCC by the departments of Drama and Theatre Studies and Women's Studies from June 18-21 2016 (click on highlighted text for websites).
**Kate Hilder (http://katehilder.com) is a teacher and practitioner of movement, sound and word improvisation. Her practice is informed by Action Theater™, “a form of physical theatre improvisation pioneered by Ruth Zaporah (USA),” and also by the Feldenkreis method. Most of all, the practice seems to be about play and freedom.
[raise arms out: no walls]
It feels…cold. And big, like forever.
[bend body, explore]
…and white. White. Mmmmmmmph
[arms stretch up, search for limits]
…a cool whiteness. Like
[twist around, arms search]
a sphere, a ball, a white sphere. Or…a cloud. Maybe it’s a cloud. When we were children and my father went away in a plane we thought he was going to land on a cloud, we thought
[arms reach up, face reaches up to light]
all the places he said he was going were clouds, and the plane would land on a cloud and he would get out. We thought
[warmer below. Warm floor]
we were on a cloud too. I had a picture in my mind of a blue sky, with all these clouds floating in it, and a little town on each cloud.
[stretch out on floor (cloud)] [fingers stretch, wiggle, sing]
Loooolooloolooloo.
[they are flowers, cloud-flowers]
Leeeeeeeloolooloolooloo.
[draw arms in under, and knees]
But they weren’t all on clouds, because when I was on the swings at home and I went really high,
[roll over, arms out]
I could see a yellow house across the fields that was America. And when we went to stay with our grandparents, we drove past an old barn that was Dublin,
[draw in, a warm ball]
where my aunt lived and which was too far away to visit. They must have been on the same cloud as us.
[standing up, looking up]
When we took my brother to watch the plane flying away into the clouds, he said ‘My Daddy will come back,’ then he started crying. We were laughing, because we knew he would.
[the space feels very enclosed, like inside a cushion][or a cloud]
END
The above excerpt from my experience in the workshop demonstrates my spontaneous discovery of a kind of “movement stream-of consciousness writing” which has enhanced my writing practice by literally adding the dimensions of time, space and movement into it. From now on, I plan to workshop new texts by filming myself moving while I improvise them. I have already done this several times. The act of sitting at a desk is so limiting and physically constricting, and in my view to constrict the body is to constrict the mind…this feels like discovering the simplest, best way into more profoundly free creativity.
*Bodystories/Perforum were two linked performativity conferences run in UCC by the departments of Drama and Theatre Studies and Women's Studies from June 18-21 2016 (click on highlighted text for websites).
**Kate Hilder (http://katehilder.com) is a teacher and practitioner of movement, sound and word improvisation. Her practice is informed by Action Theater™, “a form of physical theatre improvisation pioneered by Ruth Zaporah (USA),” and also by the Feldenkreis method. Most of all, the practice seems to be about play and freedom.
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