Using dance studio space in commercial house and working with Chris Folwell.
Rules: The text is placed on one person,(reader) by the other (placer). It is placed one at a time, sequentially, that the person with it on reads in the mirror. Then the next text line is placed, and the person reads the previous lines leading up to that and then that one. So all the time they return and read through the lines that lead to the currently placed line, and this accumulates.
I wanted to just see how it worked on another body, so tried with Chris. So each of us has a separate role, Placer and Reader and we change over at the end of each game when the Reader has deciphered all their lines of text. I am using Prosperoe’s monologue from the Tempest. This dance space has performance groups so could do a bit of research with them. I did find myself as the placer trying to find bits of the body to challenge the reader and that was fun. The space was great with the mirror. Though maybe it is lacking a sense of urgency, the time between turns, is a bit unhurried, and the challenge wasn’t that strong. It seemed a bit flat to play. So next will try two together against each other and see how that goes. So each places a line and then reads it each. Starting to think that hesitation may result in penalties, or could be what leads to a winner, though this would be hard to judge and calculate. Will look now for best font for mirror writing try a few out, at moment just using my default of Aerial Bold, maybe also different colours and sizes as the text isn’t as prominent as I thought. I am at the moment working on twelve lines of text. Is there some way to make placer more active! Got into spinning Chris each time as well to help confuse things, as he was finding it too easy to do. Some games like bindman’s buff do the spin first, and that would fit with Callios idea of Vertigo as a game construct. So need to shake up the game structure, as each taking a turn to go through all the lines, and keeping returning to the beginning each time, doesn’t feel that satisfying of challenging to play. there is no real way to loose. Is this important though, Dekoven and the Well Played game, perhaps just dong it well together? . Will maybe do it that it is the same text and the person does a line each. I think the mirror could work outdoors, are mirrors in some way always an object of affordance in some manner. In Steven’s the Ludic city, there is a bit about Anish kapoor mirror ball in New York, and how people play and dance in front of it, to observe their reflection. Researching mirror writing, it is connected with secrets, and codes, Leonardo da Vinci is known to have written some notes with a mirror writing, probably to avoid an encryption while retaining a reasonable write speed. Leonardo was left-handed and it is slightly easier to write from right to left for a left-handed person. Thinking on placing words, it has to be in straight lines I think, was thinking about circles etc, but something about the line leads to the reading. Also the idea of the choreography, at mo am placing the words to make it hard, but now am thinking that maybe the words can be placed to make things more choreography, to create a rhythm, like on knuckles etc, so am wondering as the placer is it more interesting to maybe create a dance with the other person than to make it overly difficult. Patches, can I make them into patches, but will still just attach them. Though started to think about dressmakers and pinning, though patches have a nice aesthetic. Looking back at the videos, the build up of the sentence allocation is a bit slow.
research 