The Visual Script: Theory and Techniques

Extract

Over the past twenty years there have been a number of scattered but promising experiments with visual scripts. (By “visual script” I mean a non-representational graphic pattern which an actor is handed and asked to find some way of performing.) In his 1958-9 Graphis project (T30), Dick Higgins provided actors with “scripts” that consisted of words spread out irregularly over a page with lines drawn between them. Performing the script was defined as physicalizing the process of moving from one word to another over the routes of semantic association suggested by the connecting lines. (For example, getting from “lock” to “locksmith” entailed a detour through “macaroni”….) More recently, in 1971, the Anna Halprin Company tried using a “graphic score” devised by John Muto as the basis for a piece called Animal Ritual (T59).