Deep Study Session
Poetics/Poetry on Myth, Caste, Race, Supremacy, and Emancipatory Practices; Deep Study Session with Prageeta Sharma and Pramila Venkateswaran
This workshop is designed for poets with an interest in writing for the stage and playwrights looking to experiment with new techniques for writing. If you have a poem that is calling to take on a new form and be staged, voiced, and dwelled in, this class will guide you through the process of developing a one-act play based on your idea. Students will bring the poem they would like to work with to the first class, where we will proceed to break them open as a group through writing exercises and workshopping around character, mood, setting, arc (or lack there of), action, choreography, time-scale, dialog, and art direction—all elements that will be used to manifest our poems for stage. Our final project will be a (roughly) 10 minute one-act play. Weekly readings will be distributed to stimulate risk taking and imagination. We will also read each other’s works in-progress in class and provide each other with feedback. Over the course of five sessions we will see our poems in new ways, as if they were peopled and designed for living in the breadth of a single, staged act. Our poems will be the “inciting incidents” for new, collaborative spaces.
