So today met up with Chris, and went out to test the Iambic pentameter swingball. I was a bit worried, I had played it a bit at home in the garden but was unsure it would be of interest really to anyone but myself. Also I just felt strangely embarrassed about playing this outdoors,and involving Chris for some reason maybe i wanted to keep it to myself. Maybe I had just been doing too much in the public realm and getting people involved. Chris had made this great contraption to stop the ball falling down the post. I decided to return to the post by Manors car park, as it has the fully grimness of the town, and is often a spot for models being photographed. Also it is away from the public gaze, and felt it was the best place to start.
So we wrapped the poll and tried playing, but unfortunately the cable got wrapped up in the in contraptions I will call it, and it didn’t really work, though it looked great. So we just went for the ball with a loop and a hook around the lampost. This worked good enough.
Chris immediately seemed to get fully into it, and was thwacking the ball a great deal, I then played in, it proved hard to get it going to begin, but after a while, we were able to master it. And for all intents and purposes we were playing swingball, but with no end goal. It felt transgressive more than the maypole to be playing this game, in this place, using the object. It seemed also that the object was more involved than in Maypole project.
I felt that this work, did fit in with a playing the city sensibility. That is could be a city wide instal. People passing did notice us, but also seemed amused and happy to see us, we got lots of smiles as people passed. I also noticed people around us, also watching in. The noise of the bats, and the rigour of hitting the ball, was a challenge and engaged me and Chris more than the maypole we had done.
Then I bought out the text for the Shakespeare text. But by then had also been thinking on a number of things around swingball, in that it is a very open game. We begin to talk about maybe a swingball with a number of balls, that group plays and hits. Maybe sequentially, in order to wrap the pole.
So I put the text up and attached it to the pole. I then demonstrated to Chris how to play the Shakespeare version.
I get Chris to play it, and originally he has problems, but then become proficient and more competitive. After a couple of goes I ask him if he wants to stop, but he gets mover into the mastery of it, and does display fierro when he manages to complete a whole line. He then wants to go on, to see how far he can get. Afterwards we tak and he says he did feel the need to keep playing to get better, as eh learnt the words to say, that it was satisfying to thwack the ball in time and he was also learning how to pronounce the text.
I decided then to play in against him, and it did get pretty competitive, and there was a thrill when you hit the ball well and it was in time with the text. The ladder to success when you tried it go as far as you could. I had said that it would be good to just leave the games for people to come upon, and I think something like swingball from street furniture could happen, and maybe it could be a number of posts around the city. But for further rules and developments they would have to be explained. But I did feel that swingball is a very open game structure, and that you could make a number of different version of it.
I did feel that this moved on from the Word Play in terms of getting people to say the text aloud. Of giving them some kind of meaningful play experience, in the sense of connecting action to game effect, in that the saying of the text, the beat, is around their ability to hit the ball on time. Chris afterwards commented that swingball is a kind of meaningless activity, at times, people not really driven to win, but happen in a Dekoven manner to play a rally. But here the text and the Iam gives it more purpose.
Afterwards back at the studio, we discussed maybe a ball bearing contraption, into which the rope would be put, to keep it up. I may get this made, but like the rough and ready way it is at mo.
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