Process Writing

 

Over the past few years I have developed a form of participant observation of devising and rehearsal processes that I now call PROCESS WRITING.

 

It involves me sitting at the edge of a space and writing about what I see. I might be watching a workshop, a devising process, a rehearsal or even a class. I flit between modes of writing - observing, critiquing, documenting, analysing, theorising, writing from, at or to what (I perceive) happens before me, or indeed what happens inside me. And at the end of each session, my writing is made available (via hard copy, email, or blog) to those who wish to read it.  

 

I consider what I write to be a creative act in itself, and I submit it to those I write about as a creative collaborative contribution intended to aid, reflect, explain, enhance, stimulate or document the collaborative process itself.

 

What follows is an extract from my writing at the beginning of M&DE 2007, as my discomfort at being the only person in the room not involved in the extended improvisation I was observing led me to exploring and justifying my presence there. It functions well as a description of what I now call ‘the process writer’.

 

 

What am I here for?

·         to provide a record of what happens, lest we forget, as the speeding by of now blurs and tricks our memories

·         to see what cannot be seen by those who are necessarily blinded by their own busy-ness and closeness to themselves

·         to grapple with the difficulties of collaboration, but from a distance. From the vantage point of otherness, with the benefit of exclusion and stillness, to understand and try to sense the complexities, possibilities and opportunities of collaboration, and to dare to name them

·         to explore and welcome the notion of self in documentation and observation

·         to read what I see – to be an immediate ‘first spectator’ seeing both the process and the product long before it sees itself, with the possibility of dramaturgical response as a collaborative element

·         to explore how process can survive, as words, after the event

·         to work at the themes of the day, exploring their embodiment in the real and raw action within the space

·         and to make all of the above available to anyone who wants to see it – to aid reflection, to offer another (potentially ‘wrong’) perspective on what is happening and what has happened, to encourage reflective dialogue (spoken, written or simply ‘thought’) that can be shared and built as the process goes on

 

Thus the project of M&DE raises issues surrounding:

v      non-directed devising

v      the collaborative relationship between dance, music, theatre and visual artists

v      the role of and possibilities for the process writer as an equal collaborator in devised processes