Lakeland hosted playwright Tecia Delores Wilson for a workshop earlier this week, and I treated myself to attending as a midterm reward. Her approach of devised theater was intriguing. I signed up for the workshop for several reasons that involve my work: composition also deals with dramatic ideas; I may someday collaborate with a poet or librettist and need to understand some of that process; I have, over the last several years, written a play about some of my experiences. Devised theater could play into many of these needs for me, although not as directly as I had expected, as it turns out.
For a writer, it is tempting to start from words, but devised theater, as we experienced the process on Tuesday, begins with movement, and goes from movement to story. It was almost as much about dance as it was about language, which is many ways made it more relevant to my creative work.
In an email later with Jamie DeMonte, I expressed an idea I hadn’t really mused on before: while we tend to “silo” the arts into writing, theater, music, visual arts, dance… the reality is that they often lie more on a continuum, and that one can impact the other. I’ve blogged here before about people like woodcarver Spirit Williams and writer Kiersi Burkhart and how their ideas about working in other forms have impacted my own working process, but it’s also fascinating to see how those “disparate” arts themselves can be work that is neither-nor, or both, or all.
Tags: art, devised theater, Jamie DeMonte, Kiersi Burkhart, Spirit Williams, Tecia Delores Wilson, working process