Day 7: Language

Think About

Subject.

Object.

The way that “We”, “Us”, “They” is used in the news to name entire countries as people with feelings rather than governments.

How does the language of material, body, the unspoken play out in your work.

 

Play

Prompt One

  1. Create a performance lecture. Not a performative lecture, but a performance lecture.

Prompt Two

  1. Have a two-minute conversation about literally anything with literally anybody.

  2. Once alone again, set a time for fifteen minutes.

  3. Create a movement or sound score based on the conversation.

  4. Repeat with another conversation or one that you recall from memory.

  5. Document. Adapted from Rob Kitsos

Prompt Three

  1. Write a short text that speaks to two different audiences, without naming them.

  2. Perform this.

Prompt Two

  1. Select a homophone that you find interesting. i.e. gaze, gays / ball, bawl / dual, duel

  2. Use this word as a prompt for a piece.

 

Dig Deeper

Presidential Alert (America, Lip-sync for your life), Kevin Quiles Bonilla

I explore the action of lip-syncing as a strategy of embodiment and unearthing through multiple temporalities, using as context the song ‘America’ from the 1961 musical West Side Story, and multiple voices from the past and present, such as the current president of the United States speaking on the aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico in 2017, Young Lords member Pedro Pietri reciting his poem Puerto Rican Obituary in 1969, and Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask speaking on stolen lands in 1990.

Slap Talk , Action Hero

Speaking to each other and to the audience via a live feed from a camera to a monitor, the performers rant, insult and threaten each other in a scripted version of a pre-fight press conference crossed with a 24 hour rolling news channel.

The Violence of Language: Slap Talk, Text and Durational Dramaturgy, Catherine Love

An audio excerpt from bell hook’s The Oppositional Gaze

Expressive Language, Amiri Baraka

Baraka’s essay “Expressive Language” first appeared in Kulchur in the winter of 1963, and was published in his collection Home: Social Essays (1966)…Asserting that “words’ meanings, but also the rhythm and syntax that frame and propel their concatenation, seek their culture as the final reference for what they are describing of the world,” Baraka argues that the artist must use the language and semantics unique to his culture to create his art, and that the work should also be understood within the context of that culture.