Capstone Weekly Reflection 2- 17/09/2018

This past week was a bit frustrating. I was successful in completing a fair amount of research, but I am still having a hard time organizing my research. The video rant form, while an interesting way for me to work through my ideas, is probably not the best way to analyze or assess a source, without having prepared a report to read and record. I will most likely keep the form of the rant but will distinguish between videos related to my working through an idea or capturing my initial reactions versus videos dedicated to synthesizing the salient points for a particular reading in relation to my project.

Creatively speaking, I discovered that my writing tends to take on a more realist format when creating scenes for my Playwrighting course. I’ve begun reading plays outside of the realist tradition, specifically the work of Caryl Churchill, in order to challenge this impulse and am having a better time understanding how plays can be written for dance or movement scores. Previously my thinking was that stage directions are my primary means of creating movement or dance and I therefore had to be as descriptive as possible. While I will most likely continue using stage directions in this way, I am also viewing them as invitations for creative improvisation, particularly in terms of physical theatre trainings such as Grotowski’s plastique rivers or the lazzi of Commedia Dell’Arte. Churchill’s plays were extremely useful in understanding how to effectively use sparse dialogue and stage directions. Scott McCloud discusses the concept of ‘gutter’ in his book ‘Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art,’ as the space between panels within which readers engage in imaginative leaps in order to connect the panels of a story into a continuous arc. Thinking of stage directions in relation to the concept of ‘the gutter’, as used in Churchill’s ‘A Mouthful of Birds’ in relation to the sections involving dance for example, is useful to me in thinking further of how to translate a comic book story to playwrighting and eventually live bodies on stage.

I am also considering how to go about adapting the comic of ‘Amazing Fantasy.’ My thinking of the project for a while has been in terms of reimagining the story through the lens of another character but very much keeping the exact plot lines, characters and structure. An announcement about an upcoming series launch for Miles Morales, a half black half latino version of Spider- Man, has helped me to distinguish the kind of adaption I would like this project to take. Rather than simply copying the story of ‘Amazing Fantasy,’ I am thinking more in terms of how the shape of the story can be transposed to the world of Anansi and the trickster, without having to necessarily reuse the exact same characters and plot points. The film ‘White Scripts Black Masks,’ was the main spark that ignited this question of adaptation for me, in reckoning with the historical context of the principal black characters in mainstream comics. Traditionally, these characters have existed on a spectrum of elevated, reserved dignity or ‘thuggish,’ violent and aggressive behaviour. In thinking of the kind of masculinity I would like to present through the trickster, situating this character in a history of comic book characters and storytelling was insightful in order to begin considering how I could go about disrupting or destabilizing these portrayals.

I have also engaged in some preliminary world building for this project this week, in order to begin playing with some choices that might be interesting. This question of world building was helpful in order to begin highlighting the kind of theatricality I am hoping to present onstage and how that is reflective of a form of writing based on comic book storytelling. Silence and space are of interest to me, in terms of writing, particularly as I am interested in how movement and dance can be used to drive a story. I have also started storyboarding some scenes because I have realised that my impulses tend to be visual and I am primarily working from the lens of comic book storytelling.