UNEXPECTED LESSONS 5: The Resonating Body — Writing and Orality

“Everything I Make Starts with Language, with a Word, a Title, a Repeated Phrase” — Melanie Jame Wolf

Speech is sound. Melodies that dance in choreography; a tongue that moves on the palate and presses against the teeth. We spit and chew, bite and devour, sing and scream. Writing is a practice of imparting knowledge, remembering, and self-positioning. The interplay of body, orality and writing creates hybrid forms in which experience, history and the present are inscribed and passed on. The works presented in the fifth chapter of “UNEXPECTED LESSONS — Knowledges of Body and Sound” reflect these and other aspects in a writing workshop, in performances and in a conversation.

“Language Acts” writing workshop

How do we proofread voice acts for the stage? How do we design lyrics for dance and performance? “Language Acts” is a three-hour writing workshop by Melanie Jame Wolf and Celina Baljeet Basra for dance and performance practitioners as well as for authors who want to consider language as a deliberately used material for performance.

The workshop is aimed at artists who want to develop concrete tools for editing and rewriting language that is brought to life on stage. Participants are invited to bring an existing text, which will be edited and further developed in the workshop. The workshop aims to teach stage artists the ability to act in writing.

“The Resonating Body” — Three Performances

Melanie Jame Wolf explores the vulnerability of the live moment and the body as an unruly political puzzle. With the formal experiment “UNRULY MATERIAL (After Genet, after Mr. Punch)”, she provides insight into her current process.

emet ezell deals with the topics of dedication, dispossession, ruin and return. The mouth and lips as well as the knowledge that is imparted through eating, chewing and spitting are recurring motifs in Ezell's work. As part of “UNEXPECTED LESSONS 5,” emet ezell presents the performative reading “MY MOUTH IS A RESURRECTION CHANNEL.”

Choreographer and artist Alvin Tran works with pop songs, music videos and films. “STRAWBERRY, ARIZONA,” his first play, is about being an audience and parasocial imagination. It explores the frightening possibility that the personality itself can become a survival strategy: something that we inherit, represent, desire and finally pass on to someone else.