25
Sometimes I believe that theatre without scripted text is the future and that language really does get in the way of telling the truth. Paschal Daantos Berry at Speak Local, Critical Path, 2015. Photo: Heidrun Löhr
V. It’s been strange developing a work and being convinced it would be text driven. Then having to rethink most of the ideas after going to Laguna and playing with Anino (Shadowplay Collective) at reducing the ideas behind the words, specially the abstraction. It’s at once frightening and invigorating working in this way. But then again I’ve never been that precious about losing gorgeous material. As with (my previous play) The Folding Wife I feel the text will again be more like a schematic. It can easily be erased and worked into a much more physical idea of performance. I can even see it as dance really. The city as fiction, brutal memory or as ephemera is a pretty rich source material. I went into this wanting to write but I think this text will disappear altogether. Once again conceding to the much more powerful and reductive force of the image. Or the simplicity of a movement vocabulary. And yet again, there’s all this unspoken text piling up in