WEEK 3 - Stop! Think! (or How to Listen to Your Internal Monologue)

 

Intro | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

 






Each participant contemplates how to represent a significant event in their life and/or a corresponding idea (e.g., conflict, fear, escape) as a single image. In pairs, each participant tell another all the information necessary to create (sculpt) that image, leaving out any info regarding the before and after of the event.



  1. The participant who has listened to the depiction (sculptor) arranges the room, objects, and people in the room into a single tableau to portray this event or idea. If describing an event, others (actors) may be given minimal information about context (i.e., its 1999 in the Bronx). If representing an idea, like incarceration, minimal information may be given concerning the character, such as “man, 30 years old,” while leaving room for the actors to interpret the details.
  2. Without moving, the actors then voice the running interior monologue of what their characters are doing, thinking and feeling.
  3. The original teller then mentally records the actors’ interpretations of events as a way to analyze their own personal narrative.
  4. They may then choose to re-sculpt the scene—adjusting positions and relationships of people, setting, and objects to see how it affects the monologues.

How does it feel to have someone else portray an important event from your life? Where were the gaps or inaccuracies? By sculpting the scene yourself were you able to capture more authenticity or accuracy? How would your relating the before and after of the event affect the shaping of your narrative?




Alternative



  1. The participant who has listened to the depiction (sculptor) arranges the room, objects, and people in the room into a single tableau to portray this event or idea. If describing an event, others (actors) may be given minimal information about context (i.e., its 1999 in the Bronx). If representing an idea, like incarceration, minimal information may be given concerning the character, such as “man, 30 years old,” while leaving room for the actors to interpret the details.
  2. The original storyteller should then weave in and out of space, at times facing a frozen group member.
  3. The storyteller performs an action that mirrors or deflects the gesture’s meaning.

What choices did you make when encountering a gesture? Did you choose to mimic, confront, or maybe console the person? How and why?




So we connect the dots. We start by understanding the inherent meaning in subtle gestures... how a simple walk, or tilt of the head, or stare is loaded with meaning. Then we build. We study how media, in this case The Wire, attempts to portray a young man’s turn to criminality. We learn how to read narratives... to find the nuance, the embedded meaning.




Then we build. We translate our own stories into a scene to see how it is played out before us. So that we may have the opportunity to see where the narrative fails... how the performance is not telling the story accurately enough. We gain the tools to describe the narrative differently, using language that was not given to us or placed upon our bodies—to tell the story the way it needs to be told, so that our truth is conveyed. So that it is our story to tell.