The Dirt

With the mission to make words sweat, this MPHIL encompasses the writing of a metaphoric text for an hour-long solo performance in which physicality and movement are crucial elements, and an academic essay on the practice and challenges involved in the communication of text in embodied live performance. In this context, how does the material of words relate to the body in movement? How can the differences between the two be identified in order for performers and performance makers to use them to their expressive and communicative potential? These questions were explored through active research consisting of practical time spent in the studio (working alone or with colleagues), facilitating workshops in professional, vocational and participative contexts, the development of the solo The Dirt, creative writing and academic research and writing. The project has exposed areas of apparent contradiction in the artistic approaches expressed in words on the one hand and movement on the other. Rather than thinking of ‘dance’ or ‘movement’ therefore I prefer to research and then present states of physicality which run parallel to the text. This produces both resonances and dissonances and has the effect of making the text more expressive when it is experienced alongside the physicality of performing bodies. The Dirt, a one-woman-show, uses these explorations of form to ask ‘[In the context of the climate emergency] is it still OK to have children?’ Physicality is what carries the cumulative narrative structure and underpins its communication through language. The Dirt, encompassing the perspectives of multiple characters and voices, bounces between the literal and the surreal, observations from my everyday life in Berlin (drawing particularly on the experience of working as a babysitter and as a neighbour to the feminist-anarchist squat Liebig34), and abstract dreamlike material