After a few weeks of major milestones in the Contacting the World calendar, weeks 9 & 10 have been a return to thinking about the missions, the collaboration and, just peeking over the horizon, the show!
Sticking with the themes that have most excited us whilst interacting with our twin The Arts in Action Wordsmiths, our writing workshops in week 9 & 10 have had a political flavour, all the while dipping in and out of ideas concerning the origins and functions of carnival.
In week 9, rather predictably for Manchester, it’s pouring down. As rain falls on the roof, dusk falls in the city and the rehearsal room falls silent. Pens are pushed across paper, assigning the five senses to objects in the room, inventing adventures for carnival characters and looking at the world from an alien perspective. We gather all of the bits of writing, mulling them over in our head and storing them for later in the box sent to us by our twin. We play with the idea of unexpected political leaders. George becomes a mafia boss, Rico imagines he’s a homeless revolutionary and Francesca turns Ruby into Tracy, a Robin-Hood-esque Tesco employee who doesn’t scan the barcode of every product she puts through her till.
In week 10, fired by conversations that began with Danielle during her visit, we debate class, the media, funding cuts and Jeremy Clarkson. We talk about the State of Emergency curfews in Trinidad & Tobago, censorship and free speech on the internet. We wonder about subjectivity, offense and the concepts of right and wrong. We certainly don’t agree on everything, but we do all get excited. Could we have found the foundations of our show?
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