UNEXPECTED LESSONS 5: The Resonating Body – Writing and Orality

Language is sound. Melodies dancing within a choreography; a tongue moving against the palate and pressing against the teeth. People spit and chew, bite and devour, sing and shout. Writing is a practice of knowledge transfer, memory and self-positioning.

Through the interplay of body, orality and writing, hybrid forms emerge in which experience, history and the present are inscribed and passed on. The works presented in the fifth chapter of “UNEXPECTED LESSONS – Knowledges of Body and Sound” reflect on these and other aspects through a writing workshop, performances and a discussion.

‘Language Acts’ – Writing Workshop

• How do they edit language acts for the stage?
• How do you craft texts for dance and performance?

‘Language Acts’ is a three-hour writing workshop led by Melanie Jame Wolf and Celina Baljeet Basra for dance and performance practitioners, as well as for writers who wish to explore language as a deliberately employed material for performance.

The workshop is aimed at artists who wish to develop concrete tools for editing and reworking language that is brought to life on stage. Participants are invited to bring an existing text, which will be edited and further developed during the workshop.

The workshop aims to equip stage artists with the skills to write.

‘The Resonating Body’ – Three Performances

Melanie Jame Wolf explores the vulnerability of the live moment and the body as an unruly political enigma. Through her formal experiment “UNRULY MATERIAL (After Genet, after Mr. Punch)”, she offers an insight into her current creative process.

emet ezell explores the themes of devotion, dispossession, ruin and return. The mouth and lips, as well as the knowledge conveyed through eating, chewing and spitting, are recurring motifs in ezell’s work.

As part of “UNEXPECTED LESSONS 5”, emet ezell presents the performative reading “MY MOUTH IS A RESURRECTION CHANNEL”.

The choreographer and artist Alvin Tran works with pop songs, music videos and film. “STRAWBERRY, ARIZONA”, his first play, deals with the act of watching and parasocial imagination. It explores the unsettling possibility that personality itself can become a survival strategy: something we inherit, portray, desire and ultimately pass on to someone else.