The Lines at the Desk

Playwriting Exercise:

Do you want to try writing your own affective stage directions? This is an exercise I use in playwriting classes to create some affective dance breaks (a subset of choreographic stage directions covered in Chapter 3).

Find a music video with a dance or movement portion that you enjoy. (I like to use Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” video because it is one continuous shot and a single dancer.)

Watch the video and try to write down things about the music and dance that describe the mood of the dance and the music without making any specific statements about particular dance moves or the name of the song.

Are you writing about the dancer’s mood? Or the way the dancer affects your mood?

Now that you have these affective snapshots of the dance, think of another context for this particular set of movements to take place. Who are the characters? What is the setting? How can you describe the feel of what you've just seen in the video without naming the song or prescribing dance moves.

Trust your reader. Prompt them with affective information about the mood and tone of this movement sequence and build a scene around it. Are you transmitting the dancer’s affect from the video? Or are you more focused on your affective response to the dancing? Or is the dancer in your scene responding to both kinds of affective information with an entirely different kind of response?

At the end of the class, share your scenes with each other and notice what parts of the video seemed to strike your particular group of people most. If you are writing by yourself, share your work with a friend and then show them the video that inspired you after they’ve read your scene.