Yesterday attended the second-year writers' lectures. I've missed having lectures, being part of a learning group. It's an important experience, I think. Think I'll go next week too. Can't go Friday, sadly, gotta miss Larry for a CEP tutorial (my CEP proposal was met with a worrying 'Tutorial on Friday?' response.
Was watching a random video in the library yesterday:
In this film we're using an actor to represent me. Directing her performance gives me another way of exploring what is real. This is something artists have long been interested in. But as recent events such as the collapse of the energy giant trading company Enron and the Dot-Com bubble show [that] businesses are just as able as artists to create fictions.
Which got me thinking: the CEP seems to be concerned with truth. One would never lie or blag their way through a CEP, not deliberately, because one would only be lying or blagging to oneself. In addition, my writing practice often adheres to truth, perhaps unnecessarily. I have found it quite liberating to take poetic licence with my words, to gloss over things which might be inconvenient to explain, which—though it requires a lot of self-honesty—is a very useful thing to be able to do. Why not go further, and 'make up' my CEP?
Surely, to be continued...
In our first year, 'Other' Sebastian and I made a list of all the most ridiculous, far-fetched and nigh-on impossible CEPs students could do including:
ReplyDeleteAtlantis
Mecca (pilgramige to and entry as a white foreigner)
El Dorado
Bermuda TRiangle
Ibiza
Shangri-La
The Forbidden City
The South Pole
The Moon
etc. etc.
However, what became apparent the more we thought about these places, bandied about in whimsical banter, just how possible, and how far Students will go to explore the borders of the possibility with their tutors. We even found that Ibiza had been someone's CEP a few years previous- but that it was the most epic FAIL if a CEP to date.
This question, investigation, enquiry into the 'real' and the 'truth' are prime for my CEP also, and will become the very meaty bones of contentious ravagings at Falmouth over how we/the Dratington Departed speak and explain to the unwitting 1st years about Old World Dartington - how 'truthful' will our descriptions be? How 'real' are the 'simulations' of the studios in the Performance Centre? Will any one give a damn once the 2nd and 3rd years leave?
Let's open the discussion- just you and me Amy. And good luck with Larry. I feel 'the made up CEP' is perfectly within the accepted realms of Performance Writing. Being here in America, I am constantly wary of the use of 'real' and 'fake' in a country built out of the deserts and desolation. Sometimes, on the corner of the bloc, I can feel the soft breeze of sand blown about from the west...
Indeed. I had a tutorial today with Jerome where he told me of some made up CEPs, including one where someone tried to sit in a box and get themselves mailed somewhere. But Jerome said she couldn't do it. But she said she'd do it anyway. So the result was a set of grainy film footage (no light in tha box), and some photos, and sound, and accounts, but no one really knew whether she'd actually done it.
ReplyDeleteSo I came to think about the way we have learned about the CEP, and the way we teach others: in storytelling. Notions of the CEP are always passed down, through students and staff, in the form of memorable CEPs, little fables or fantastical stories. Like the one Julie told us about in the health and safety meeting, about that guy having everything stolen from him.
Which is interesting, because that is of course very similar to the way Marco Polo's stories worked. And why they, and the CEP, has this fantastic aura around it. And I'm sure it goes some way towards what's turned the CEP from an ordinary module in social context, to this crazy massive intense coming-of-age project.
Also, speaking of Polo, in Re your other comment:
Haha, in fact, I mentioned that very text to you when you were coming up with the germs of that piece! I think you said you were reading it already however...