Text in Performance

Thinking Notes are short reflections on elements of craft that are meant to trigger further thought on the subject, or to direct you to reassess your work through focusing on specific elements. They work best if you make your own notes as you read and reflect on your work critically as you do so. This note discusses the elements of craft in writing and performance, using the story of the recording of the jazz album "Kind of Blue" as a starting point.

Performance gifts us a presence through which we can modulate the receiving of our work, but what happens when we are gone, and the text must work on its own? This is where intentionality can help to give form and power.

"Talent is insignificant… Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance." - James Baldwin, novelist, essayist, Guggenheim Fellow