Monday afternoon with our elder’s performance group. We are creating LOVE an immersive theatre experience to be disguised as a 21st Century Tea Dance in October of this year.
We find ourselves dissecting the anatomy of a relationship. Twelve of us huddled around a table encircling a vast expanse of white unmarked paper. It’s another ‘starting out’ moment in the company of our shared imaginations. We are working with a fictional provocation that somehow has taken the centre stage of our attention: a story of two people who have spent the last forty-five years living together and suddenly walk out of each others lives. Why would they have done that?
We’ve talked of narrative form and performance structure but the truth of it we don’t know where we are going, we don’t know where we’ll end up. We just have a vague idea of the sense of direction. We are making it up as we go along. Inventing.
The contemporary Spanish novelist Javier Marías talks about the verb to invent, or inventar in Spanish, coming from the Latin invenire, which means to discover, to find out. That is, he says, what he likes to do in writing: finding out what he is writing about as he writes it. Deciding on the spot.
And that’s what we have been doing. Finding out together: listening, interrogating, deciding and moving collectively on towards a bit more of the unknown.
If you are as curious as we are in finding out what we’ll end up with book at ticket
Creativity, Arts and Older People 