09 November 2021
Tiny Plays
This Tuesday’s session began with the prompt to ‘describe your week as collage materials’ (answers ranged from hot glue to fast food receipts, with a surprising lack of glitter).
Antosh shared some short plays of his (see two below), written years ago inspired by Craig Taylor’s One Million Tiny Plays about Britain. Their construction as short bursts of content reminded the group of Vine / TikTok.
We were asked to script our own tiny play by personifying two objects and thinking about their relationship with each other, which we found thought-provoking and difficult, when it came to deciding which object might be funny to put onstage.
Anna picked an object in the room – a water bottle – and wrote a dialectic between a bottle and a lid – “they’re not getting on very well”.
Reintroduced to last week’s fear maps, we were asked to apply the same tiny-play structure as we had with the objects but to a kind of fear (heat, heights, dark), with no pressure for it to be funny, instead to naturally build any emotion out of the abstract we chose, coming up with three different skits if we could.
Libby focused on craneflies (they come when you least expect them) and Louise on claustrophobia, homing in on a new perspective for each of her separate skits. Coming up with new ideas was the biggest challenge for the group – some found a smart way forward by adapting the same joke differently a few times (to the point where it became meta).
Finally, the group revised their skits using the ‘intention-ing’ technique typically applied to acting, asking, ‘What does each line do?’. Having identified their purposes, we could then subvert the intentions of lines to find new material.
Rewriting made it easier for Jade to contain her thoughts, since the first draft was already written, and she could approach editing with a logical mindset. Libby found the opportunity to change the way her characters met, and it worked better the second time around. Editing was overall a challenge to our typical processes.
Crow’s Nest was featured this week on the Barton Peveril blog – read that here. A new session begins next Tuesday at MAST.
Archive
Storytelling and Escalation or Rising Action
Junior Writers Club Acrostic Poem
Notes on Intention for MAST Collective - Year 3 - Facilitation Focus
Earthquakes & Dominoes - MAST Collective Blog #4
SUPER MARIO AND POP CULTURE POEMS
Receptionists & Inky Voids - MAST Collective Blog #3
Saying No and saying YES on National Poetry Day!
There's a Dragon in the Wardrobe...
House Warming Party (The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known) - MAST Collective Blog #2
Intern Blog 5 - The Publishing Process
POEMS TO SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS
On The Streets With Theresa Lola
Intern Blog 4 - The Internship Journey
NEW DIRECTIONS, STARTING SMALL - THE ORWELL YOUTH PRIZE
LIGHTHOUSES, HOPE AND METAPHORS
on workshop and transformations: frogs, lions, and the duck that becomes a larder...
Poetry Ambassadors - Interview with April Egan
Intern Blog 1 - Finding a Voice
World Poetry Day: Fluffypunk and the Invisible Women
On Being a Writer: A Conversation by Beth Phillips & Sam Morton
Poetry Ambassadors - Interview with Kaycee Hill
UNHEARD VOICES: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY, AND STORIES OF CONFLICT
