Students lost for words in new theatre season

Students lost for words in new theatre season

Creative writing students are challenging conventional writing methods through the use of spoken word, poetry, sound and screen work and installations.

Creative writing student Natalie Acerman at a live reading performance.

Third year students who are studying the Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing), are developing a production that will be performed at the iconic Melbourne theatre La Mama in Carlton.  

The production is titled "Lost for Words" and will be an exploration of storytelling over two nights through live performance.

In the show students will map their stories, themselves and their readers onto new bodies, spaces and mediums.

The class group that is creating it is one of three creative writing studio labs within the School of Media and Communication called the Horizons studio.

Horizons is a course that invites third-year students to develop and present their work in real-world contexts, through collaborative industry partnerships and work-integrated learning.

The lab, called "Live art: writing as curation, exhibition, performance,  is run by Smiljana Glisovic who encourages writers to situate themselves in a broader artistic culture where they challenge their role and practice as 'writer'.

“The students have bravely taken on this challenge and apart from words they are working with images, objects and their bodies," Glisovic said.

Final year student Calypso Spendlove said that the studio allowed students to explore the physicalisation of the written word and the interaction between body and line, language and space.

“I'm really excited to see how each different person will be responding to these ideas and what we'll end up with on stage," Spendlove said.

The other two labs in the Horizons studio will also be creating and presenting their written work within an industry context: one of them, taught by Ronnie Scott, is making a salon event for the Emerging Writers' Festival in June; and the other, taught by Rose Michael, is making individual manuscript pitches for a panel of critics and agents.

“Lost for Words” is on at La Mama Theatre on May 23 and 24.

Story: Wendy Little

07 April 2016

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07 April 2016

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