10/09/2020

One reason why I've never tried to write a novel is that I don't have an instinct on how to structure it. How quickly do you make events happen? how long do you linger on character? how can you adjust the pace of the action, moving between slow and fast?

Reading Milan Kundera's novels last month I became aware of the way the construction is choreographed. Characters come into the scene, pausing to show themselves, pass and turn, move before and behind each other, veer into the foreground, retreat, stand in patterns, sweep together. You see someone close-to, they move to the back. Someone from the distance looms up into focus.

I'm using the endless possibility of dance to improvise new arrangements in setting up my pieces, keeping the idea of a stage in my imagination. There is no reason or order really, just happy accidents. A tall piece I put at the font suddenly springs into life when I add a small portrait at its shoulder. It make me eager to add new elements such as mobile landscapes, speech bubbles, large faces, so that there is a pack of components that can be shuffled and reshuffled like the cardboard Pollock theatres of my childhood.

Maybe the next step is to introduce ways of arranging the choreography in different methods - blindfold, in the dark, by order of size?