the friday peer review session went really well. nearly 100% (15 people) attendance and new faces who have been writing for the blog but whom we have not yet met. it was all a bit chaotic, since we decided to not set an agenda per se for the session, and instead hoped that eating 'Bring Me the Head of…' by artist Serkan Özkaya and mtg roselee goldberg etc would fill up the time and enable more free-flow discussion. what transpired was that people did want to talk, about the wriitng, whilst eating the head. Jennifer Lease, also joined the mtg and was keen to emphasise that our writing was going to play a really key part in the Performa 07 catalogue, which was good news.
Jennifer said that the first person accounts and immediate publishing of the blog would make for a really good book and she was enjoying reading all our texts. it was good to see jennifer and meet her, also good for the writers to know that there ius a good chance of being published through their activity for Writing Live: Writers Hub. hopefully it will spurr on people to post more blogs.
we did initiate a conversation about writing about diffficult work, with defne's instructions to the writers that the bog must not be a love fesat- in mind. we also discussed posts that we really liked from the blog. the majority were silent at this point, and i think the hindering factor is the fact that we dont know each other so well and dont feel confident critiquing others texts. i passed on the fact that i really liked korin's blog post about marie cool: short, precise and very strong, leading intellectually. the peice summed up a very complicated dance work and raised some pressing issues about writing about contemporary visual art/ dance works. the only criticism i levelled at the group was that too much description could hamper their ability to comment, critique or contextualise the work seen, and that this was an important part of the writing. i suggested lifting themselves out of the decriptive narrative early on in the review in order to give them time to critique and contextualise. basically, running description describe throughout a peice of writing – as i have done many times- instead of separating it in a paragraph – can lead to confused, unstructured and overly long texts as it is then hard to 'lift' youself out of this descriptive mode.
in order that everyone can better comment on some practical examples of performance writing at tuesdays session 1-3 at SVA critical we have decided to bring materials with us that other people have written, either in the new york times or on blogs. that way we can have a look at different styles, voice and critique it without worrying about other members of the group's feelings. we will also making the session quite structured, taking advantage of the SVA room to have a really intense session.
must go and do some more writing now. will feedback after tuesday. will also upload photos of friday workshop..
RLxx
