Words Against Light

I've had an email from Frances Babbage (the colleague of mine whose area is drama and who is working with Hannah Fox in the 'acts' strand of the project). She wanted to let me know about some work that the drama students are doing and that might be relevant to our thinking:

The first years (English & Drama) have been working with Terry O'Connor of Forced Entertainment as part of her Knowledge Transfer contract with us, and this Friday are presenting a performance called 'Words Against Light' in the Theatre Workshop, from 1-3. It's actually a durational performance, in that although the performers do the full two hours, spectators can drop in at any time and stay for as much or little time as they want (thankfully!).

I wanted to let you know about it because the performance is precisely a curation of voices - it is a kind of cataloguing of thoughts, feelings, experiences etc. It is improvised, but will use principles and structures that Terry has helped them to think about. There are actually two parts to this project, one of which is a live performance; the other is a film (still being edited) whose visuals consist of material filmed by the students from their mobile phones, set against a soundtrack made up (again) of each of their recorded voices, which have been edited and grouped by Terry. For the film part of the project, she got each of them into a sound booth on their own and basically encouraged them to talk for as long as they wanted (following a structure she had given them, which I won't reveal!).

I think both live performance and film are interesting (or will be, in the case of the film). I only really thought when I woke this morning how close a correspondence this work might have with the sound/composition strand of the exile project, and your own interests. So, let me know if you have any free time between 1 and 3 this Friday, and if you fancy it, do drop in!

I'll definitely go along on Friday, and, if it does seem to have connections with things that we're thinking about, I'll try to have a word with Terry O'Connor. There's information about Forced Entertainment, the company that Terry works with, here.