Powerful drama

I guess its why academia is so great. One cannot realise how powerful or how beautiful an art form is until you start to study it. Read a poem once and it may strike you as beautiful, but once you start to read and study literature in general, then a whole new world opens up. You get to compare and contrast; you get to see more in that poem when you read it in relation to a whole literature. I have found this with writing and film, of course, as I have studied them for many years, but I have only just discovered the wonders of drama.

Before now, I have seen drama as writing made visual – that is to say, a secondary outlet. But in and of itself, drama can be beautiful. I realised this only after I started hanging around with graham; going to rehearsals, seeing how a play is put together. I got to see how scenes are put together. It isn’t a case of merely reading lines: it is far less clinical, more human, and quite quite fascinating. Whereas writing is a solitary rather simple process – you just sit at a desk and tap away upon your keyboard – creating a piece of theatre takes more time and physical, emotional and, to an extent, intellectual effort. Theatre also kind of bridges the gap between my two loves of writing and film, or else fits comfortably into a tripartite, so knowledge of the dramatic process as well as the literary and filmic ones will almost certainly come in handy with my m.a.

Watching the rehearsal this afternoon, I had an idea. The actors were trying out ways of becoming old people. they were working with a dancer, who was teaching them how to walk like old people. I was suddenly hit by a fascinating thought – is it possible to act disabled? Is it possible for a normal person to simulate something like athetoid cerebral palsy? Earlier today, me and graham had been throwing about ideas to do with working together: if I transformed Moby dick into a script, he would direct it. Now, melleville’s classic has a great narrative, but the narrative is largely secondary to the human story of Ahab and his decent into vengeful madness. It is this which interests me, especially when applied to disability and it’s representations.

My mind is now abuzz with ideas; the two link rather well. Is it possible to explore the nature of disability through drama. I try to bring people into my world through my writing, articulating the paradox of being different, yet the same on my blog. But would it be possible to do this more physically through drama? Can people be brought into my world, not just through writing but through playing? And what would we all learn?

Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating.