606 The Score of a Narrative (ENGLISH)

There is narrative that does not forward the plot so much as deepen it — deepen our sense of what’s going on, emotionally. I want to call it the score of the narrative. Like movie music, it ebbs and flows, as needed, creating atmosphere, enhancing the mood, quickening or slowing the pulse. It can add a note of anticipation to the story’s forward momentum. We will look at how setting can be employed as an objectivization of the emotion in the scene. We’ll acknowledge T.S. Eliot’s tiresome definition of the objective correlative, but we’ll explore its potential through writing exercises. The take-away here is not to look at the character and try to describe them and what they’re going through, nor to rely on internal monologue but to look at the world through the character’s eyes seeing it as they are seeing it in this heightened emotional state. Joseph Chakin in his book THE PRESENCE OF THE ACTOR describes how an actor learns to find “the dramatic collision which is at the center of every scene.” We will each develop such a scene, focusing in, through a series of detailed takes, not on the characters but on everything else: where the scene takes place, how we might use that setting to underscore the content of this meeting, how might the available props and material presence of this place deepen the resonance of the moment? How can we build on that? What might interrupt such a scene and allow one of the characters a distracted but thoughtful moment alone? What do they notice aurally, visually, in the other’s absence?

Instructor

Tim Wynne-Jones