Narrative Practice outputs
DAY 1.
SCORE FOR NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY
ONE PAGE OF WRITING INSPIRED BY THE "TEMPLATE" OF NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY
She puts on the brown shoes with faded noses.
She will never throw them out, they were her father’s first good gift.
She slams the stained glass door behind her.
I walk with big steps, in a rush to get this over with. At the postal collection point, I hand in the package with a big return label glued onto it. The woman behind the desk scans the barcode and says I have to pay more than the label accounts for. I say I just printed what they sent me. She says it doesn’t matter, it weighs more than the label accounts for.
When Dan said he was jealous of my calmness cause he couldn’t remember the last time he felt at peace, I wanted to break his bones. But I didn’t. He might not understand me, but I understand him all too well.
I ask her how much more, she says two euros. I say that’s fine, can I pay by card please? She says it doesn’t work that way. That I have to create a new label. I walk out of the store, leaving behind the package and the label and the 50 euros worth of refund money and the woman behind the desk.
Before I was living in this house, the one with the stained glass door and the deep windowsills and the morning sun and the modern kitchen, I was renting the attic room of a young family on the outskirts of the city. I had to share the bathroom with the children, twelve and fourteen they were, but had a little kitchenette on my own floor. It wasn’t much more than a microwave and kettle, but that is all I thought one could need at that point.
Then I got a job, a real job that pays real money and offers real benefits. At that job, I couldn’t possibly tell people that I was living in someone else’s attic. I lied about having a nice apartment till I actually found one, and before I knew it, I started believing that I, too, deserved such a place, that I needed such a place. It’s a feeling that only very rarely makes place for an incomprehensible lack. Moments where I try to hear if the bathroom is already being used before the realisation sets in. Even though it wasn’t my family, it was still a family.
I wash my coffee cup for too long. I am trying to hear the conversation going on at the lunch table, they are not in my team, but some names of shared bosses get dropped. A quick rinse would have sufficed, I wonder when they will notice that the tap still hasn’t stopped running. The water turns hotter and when my hand is almost burning, I finally turn it off.
If only there would have been more of us, more like me. Friends, siblings, cousins. If we would have been with more, it might have felt like enough.
You wake up in a mirrored world and every time you try to use your right arm, your left arm raises.
Back at my desk, Dan comes over. I ask him how his morning meeting was, the one above my pay grade. While he explains in intricate detail who said what and made which faces, I think about what I will cook tonight.
DAY 2.
NARRATIVE AS CHANGE - USE AN UNPROMISING OBJECT
Trying stuff with squares and circles:
File:Squares and circles 1.mp4
File:Squares and circles 2.mp4
File:Squares and circles 3.mp4
TALE BASED ON THE PROPP’S TEMPLATE
1. Initial situation: introduce a small group and their setting. Name the members of the group and their characteristics; identify the future hero.
2. One member of the group (an authority) absents themselves from home: for example, parents leave for work, to the forest, to war, they die.
3. Before they leave, an interdiction is addressed to the hero (Don’t do this: don’t pick the apples, don’t pick up the golden feather, don’t open the chest, don’t speak to the neighbour…)
4. The interdiction is violated.
5. The villain is introduced.
On a stretched out beach in the scorching sun, three young kids are working on an enormous sandcastle. It has towers and walls and chambers and moats. One of the kids is Lola, only five years old. Her age never stops her, she is always eager to prove her courage. She didn’t know the other two, siblings of eight and ten vacationing here with their parents, till she came up to them a couple of minutes ago with big steps, asking if she could help them build their castle.
Lola gets up from shaping one of the sand city’s bridges and declares to the others she will get some water for the moat. They tell her to be careful and to not go too far into the sea. All of a sudden they feel the responsibility of being older, with the young girl’s parents nowhere in sight. Lola tells them not to worry, she goes into the sea all the time, she says.
She takes two of the little castle-shaped buckets and walks her way down the beach, in between the sunbathing families, the umbrellas, the greedy seagulls.
She gets knee-deep in the water and scoops it up with her buckets. They are quite heavy now for her little arms, and she almost loses one to the tide. Right as she manages to pull it back up, a kid shows up behind her out of nowhere, older than her. Eleven, twelve maybe.
They kid says ‘Hey’. Lola responds ‘Hello’.
The kid asks to borrow Lola’s buckets, she refuses. The kid insists, she refuses again.
‘But you have two, I just need one of them.’
‘But they’re not mine.’
‘Come on, don’t be so annoying!’
The kid starts to pull on the bucket in her left hand, it’s a blue one. Lola tries to pull back but even she would admit that her age is not working in her favour. The bucket slips from her fingers and Lola falls backwards into the sea. In the split second it takes her to find her balance and get her head above water again, the kid has run away with the blue bucket.
DAY 4.
Rodolfo tells a tale
DAY 6.
Ursula Le Guin exercise
Same story, different viewpoint:
1. In a dark and smokey room, Noah is sitting in a faded white armchair, leaning deep into its cushions with both her legs crossed. The others are on couches, each a different colour and fabric. The furniture is uncoordinated, picked up from corners of the streets. Each time Noah visits, they have brought in something else, making the house into an eclectic decor. On a scratched up coffee table in the middle of it, cards are laid out. Noah keeps getting distracted from the rules of the game, a game that Muriel, the owner of the deck of cards, made up. Instead of following what the others put down and who is winning, she looks at the mythical characters on the cards in her hand. Each number card has a fairytale-like animal, in groups as big as the value of the card. The jack is a centaur, the queen a nymph in the woods, the king is not a person at all, but a tree that looks a bit like a tree of life. Lost into the pictures, she hears her name being called repeatedly. The others are pushing her to put down a card. Right as she is apologising and deciding between putting down the four purple squirrels or the eight golden snakes, still not sure which is more valuable in this game, a fast fluttering sound enters the room. On the table, right on top of the stack of cards, lands a little bird. The bird is grey with an orange-reddish chest and stares intensely into Noah’s eyes while tweeting as if its life depends on it.
2. There is a strong wind in an eastward direction and the Robin is flapping its wings bravely against it. It is squinting its eyes and feels the rush along its ears. The edges of the high buildings and trees that it is flying in between are getting fuzzier, the sun has set and the light is slowly disappearing. It has had a long day of flying already. Normally, the Robin goes from garden to garden or terrace to terrace, but today it has flown over trees and rivers, metal and concrete. It isn’t sure what is driving it, but it knows it has to keep going. The Robin will know once it sees. And it does. In between high towers is a slightly lower and wider building. It is made of grey bricks and rows of windows. The Robin isn’t sure yet which window, but it is getting close and needs to choose quickly, before splatting into the wall. There it is, an open window with a heavy smell coming out of it, similar to what the Robin smells at its usual terraces on summer days. It is loud, too. The rush of the wind makes place for low and high tunes crossing each other, seemingly without any logic. The Robin slips through the opening and lands firmly with both feet on the first platform it can find. There she is, now it knows, this is who it needed to find. The Robin stares into her big, wide eyes and shouts out how happy it is to have found her.
Title and shotlist:
MESSENGER
1. Vaguely down over Noah’s shoulder (not feeling her presence too much), a steady shot of the arms and legs of her friends, a last ray of light hitting the table filled with beer bottles, cards, a smoking ashtray. Hands are putting down cards, pushing out cigarettes, picking up bottles.
2. Zooming through a city landscape, like an unsteady drone. Looking down at the small people, squeezing through gaps between high buildings.
3. Closer on the table and the cards, a robin enters the frame and lands, it tweets, it looks, it looks longer.
4. Close up on Noah’s face, she blinks, she leans in.