Research Area F
There are two generic forces at the chore of this project.
On one hand I strive for a understanding of where we are in the world. To understand how we are commonly shaped by the events we are faced with. “We” here understood as agents, human beings, and the world understood as the society in which we live and act. And on the other hand, a need for freedom. A will to tear oneself free from the constraints this present society offers.
So why and what is it that I want to tear myself free from? In what way can I develop textual strategies for this liberating action in my dramatic texts?
Since my media is text for the performative field, for “theatre” – the relationship between theatre and “the world” is also at the centre of this project. And since text is my tool – the relationship between “the text” and the “world” must be dealt with.
I research playwriting. My method consists of exploring tools for composition, different forms of collective writing, sketching and text-experiments both on paper and in the theatre space. When the medium of the artwork and the reflections is the same (writing), a double bind appears. The artwork is not mirrored by the writing, instead one form of writing, mirrors another form of writing. So what one has to ask is; what can one type of text do for the other. Writing then becomes my tool for understanding AND for exploring. An essay can do and show something that a deliberation cannot, and visa versa. A note can add depth to an understanding, a deliberation can look more closely at a dilemma, and in the meta-reflection a meta-level can be added as a road-map to the mix.
To expose the relationship between reflecting and cerating plays and texts for the stage, I have created this web. It is a site, a container. A place to gather the text and for them to "be". To live side by side, so to say.
THE WEB
For me, language is a tool that not only expose my “thinking”, it does something to the way I think. By choosing a form, a rhythm, a point of view and a metaphor, different ways of thinking can be brought about. Language also express and communicate this thinking. In this respect, form and content is deeply connected. The form a writing takes, gives itself to the meaning it expresses.
Writing an essay in its meandering and polyvocal way, through digressions, facts and quotes, gives it a potential for polyvocal reflection both for the reader and for the writer, but at the same time the author never lets go of your hand. She walks patiently beside you all the way.
In an essay you can “travel” the topic, and visit many aspects of it. Also what surrounds it. As such it is a genre full of leakages (See:Our Daily Discomfort and Change, Protest, Theatre).
A deliberation looks at a subject, an idea or a problem once more. It can be short like this one, but when I write my deliberation on a special project, the texts comes close to being case-studies, and tend to grow. As a case-study is first and foremost a descriptive tool, laying out and narrating an events, it often takes you a very specific place (See: Collective Writing – a communal endeavor and Exercises and Adresses). Due to that, these texts needs space, since elaboration and narration is at the core of their purpose.
In the plays, monologues and metalogues/meta-dialogues the “thinking” continues or “begins”. This work is not reflections as such, but it is acts of writing where I put my thinking to praxis or where the actual thinking starts. The idea is that reading the works connected to the reflective texts, will inform the reflections and the reflective writings will inform the “works”(See the Heaviness of Palaces and Planes – a dramatic metalogue)To be able to understand and mediate my own project, I strive to represent or to organize my research as a landscape. There is this ideal running all through this project. A type of mimesis that is not teleological, but more event-based and that strives to make the way the work is organized mirror the project itself.
Since all these works presented are interconnected, and feed off each other, the different areas must be seen as interlinked. As a part of one body that function both together and separate. They do not exist or function as chapters in a book, the one leading logically to the other in an organized line taking one from A to B. Rather they consist of a body of work developed parallel over time. The texts are generically interlinked. As such my research as my reflection and artistic praxis is rizhomatic in nature, so when I separate my work in different research areas, it is rather to be able to orient myself, and it is important to note that between this "organizing", behind every system there is a “hinterland” of motives, themes and intentions. Of the works that are no longer there, the work that was left behind, and the works that are still emerging as I write: the motives, themes etc. that is yet to come.
Another important aspect is that I want the end result of my research to be a hybrid in itself. A whole consisting of parts. It is a feedbackloop – and the hub of it all is the performative text representing a compositionary form, a movement from one to a hundred and back again. From the text to the world and back. From the theatre to the world and back. From the singular to multitudes and back. From the play to the text about the play and back. From the writer to reader in an open-ended process where the works (plays, monologues, voice-montages etc) surfaces along the way.
In this web the texts are seemingly organized from the top down. From a meta/matrix over-view leading into the text producing "machine". I recommended reading this web like that from the top down, but one can also read it sideways. Following the links, jumping from one text to the other. Loose oneself in the documentation in the dropbox, and the surface again. And after all, if one gets lost, one can always return to the index. Here one can also find a list of literature and a timeline.
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