by Lynx » Sun Oct 23, 2016 11:37 pm
Hi ya'll,
Oh, IS, i see what you mean. Okay, credit Joan and then me for passing on the tip.
It's very, very, interesting what you are saying about copying or speaking our writing. Artists are noted for going to museums and copying out the masters in their sketch books. COPYING the masters. They've been onto something for a long time. The common advice is to READ a lot if you want to be a writer, few say COPY a lot to become a better writer. A new secret in plain sight.
Are you seated because this next bit may skip us to the next plane.
In my insecurities around reviewing plays without a professional relationship to the theater I read a lot of books about the biz. The one I'm studying now is How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors by Damon Kiely. As part of his research, he talked to dozens of directors and shares their practices. I just this week read about Kim Rubenstein. She had to direct a Shaw play as an assignment and her first impulse was to dress everyone as Shaw as they all spoke alike to her mind. But while reading the script with a piano concerto playing, she says it was like in the movie A Beautiful Mind when all the numbers come to him. "All of a sudden, the punctuation just leapt off the page because Shaw, his punctuation is insane. One sentence they'll be three ellipses, two exclamation points, dashes. And I was like, What the hell is going on here? Then I stood up and started reading aloud and walking the punctuation. I started to make up these different movements for the punctuation. And all of a sudden the score, I really could hear it. ...
"A colon is like a leap in thought. Colon sometimes can be about making a list. But I'm talking to you: Oh and then I have this other idea. It's like a based on the same thought except it's: Oh, I just had this other thought. Or: Oh shit I forgot this thing. It's like a leap in thought. A semicolon is a twist in thought. I'm talking to you about something and then; oh maybe it's this. So there's a way in which it actually shifts, but it's still the same sentence. It's like a gear shift."
Kiely says Rubinstein has her actors "walk the punctuation. They walk in a straight line while speaking; when they hit a period they can stop moving, then move again on the next sentence. But if they hit a comma, they make a turn. When they hit an exclamation point, they jump up; a colon is a leap forward in thought; a semicolon a twist. They experience the language viscerally."
I haven't played with this yet, |turn| but I will.
Lynx