On Perfermance Writing (Tim Etchells, 1996)

On Performance Writing

(20th Century)

• P.178 This piece addresses itself to the task of making text for performance, especially within a collaborative process.
• The piece talks about physical action and set construction as forms of writing, it talks about writing words to be seen and read on-stage rather than spoken, it talks about lists, about improvisation, about reading, about whispering and about collage as a form - in each case implying a critical dialogue with more traditional notions of theatre or performance writing.
  
• A text to be spoken while fucking secretly the partner of a good friend.
• A text of lines from half-remembered songs.
• A text composed of fragments.
• A text to come through people's doors - perhaps a letter.
• P.180 The same text written every day for a year, in different places, in different locations.
• P. 182 A series of texts in a language that doesn't work.
• P.185 And in any case in some recent shows the text was generated in good part by performer improvisation - in reaction to written stimulus or without it. In this way a two-paragraph fragment becomes a ten-minute monologue - a growing, generative process of improvisation, negotiation, discussion, more writing and eventual fixing. A kind of speaking that becomes writing.
• P,187 A text which sticks in the mouth, begging you not to say it.
• A text that no-one will ever hear.

Etchells, Tim (1996). 'On Perfermance Writing' in Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, Etchells, Tim, New York: Routledge, 98 - 108.

Etchells, Tim (1996). 'On Perfermance Writing' in The Twentieth Century Performance Reader 2nd Edition, Huxley, Michael, and Noel Witts. New York: Routledge, 2002, 178-190.