With Rebecca Mackenzie
A deep dive into different techniques in fiction, exploring what they could mean for a performer; rhythm, image, gesture and symbol, landscape, the use of time, multiple voices, narrative journeys.
A novel is a place of encounter. We enter the body of the text and experience a consciousness moving through time and space. We tune into a writer’s quality of attention and ways of paying attention to direct experience.
As we encounter the body of the text, so too does the text inhabit our bodies.
How do these words rub up against our imagination?
How do they inform our doing and being in the world?
How does the text make us want to move? What does it call forth?
Through three workshops, and three novels, we will be invited to enter these places of encounter and experience literature and movement together. We will read a text then meet in the studio to explore our responses. We will form a group, each bringing our own unique way of reading into the space. We will examine elements of a novel’s craft, such as time, place, rhythm, gesture. We will continue this exploration through movement, allowing our observations and ideas to inhabit a physical space. This will create a zone where our experience as readers and movers will meet, where imagination and body will speak to each other. What residue of our reading might appear in our moving – what images, stillness, use of space? As a group we will develop our own vocabulary and lens for examining texts, finding fresh ways to engage with our reading in order to inform our growth as people, readers and performers.
The workshops are led by Rebecca Mackenzie, a novelist and performer whose debut novel In a Land of Paper Gods, published in 2016, was a Red Magazine Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
As a performer she regularly collaborates with dance artist Seke Chimutengwende; she is an approved teacher of Action Theater™ and teaches improvisation in both the UK and Europe. She is also a visiting tutor on the Royal Holloway Creative Writing MA and a visiting Lecturer in Improvisation at LCDS.
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Indicative book list
These are the kinds of novel the group may explore:
Marguerite Duras The Lover
Virginia Woolf The Waves
Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
Eley Williams Attrib. and Other Stories
Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis
Alice Oswald Dart
Andrew McMillan Physical
Anne Carson NOX
Jenny Offill Dept. of Speculation
James Joyce Dubliners
Jane Gardam The Queen of the Tambourine
Muriel Spark The Driver’s Seat
Kazuo Ishiguro The Buried Giant