by Hilary Peach
I have been writing for performance for twenty years, and have begun to understand that writing for performance, or performing one’s own writing, is not a single activity, but the fusion of several very different events. When I teach writing for performance, I divide the teaching time into five sub-activities that make up the whole: research, scribing (or recording), editing, preparing the text, and performance. This works well with secondary students because it asks them to use different parts of their brains and they don’t get bored. It also teaches that form is reached through technique. The unedited outpouring of content has a place in the research phase, but the honing and crafting of the raw material is equally important.
Part One: Research
Parts Two to Five: Scribing, Editing, Preparing, and Performing