Creative Textual Practices as Critical Re-writings

Caroline Lucas, in her graphic score ‘[Untitled]’ (2013), created for Lauren Redhead, employs a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ that addresses the women’s literary tradition in the 19th Century as ‘short and partial’, stating ‘it is useless to go to the great men writers for help’. (2001, p64). Performing this piece for voice and electronics (‘burn the shelves’, 2016) became the starting point for a method of quasi-improvised textual exploration by our duet. This lecture-recital will take the form of a performance lecture (cf Cage, 1961), combining the performance of work for our duet of spoken word, e-violin and electronics, with a critical evaluation of how such performance, and ‘creative textual practice’ (Kristeva, 1984; Barrett, 2011) might rethink the traditions in which such texts can be considered. We draw on improvised practices and prepared texts that have been created using Oulipo-inspired techniques to derive new meanings from existing texts through critical rewritings, or translations, of work that address historical, political, aesthetic, and gender-based themes, and their relation to art and listening. For example—and in addition to Lucas’s composition—about women’s work in radio (‘feminist pirate broadcasts’, 2021) and digital aesthetics (‘machines’, 2021). There is a deliberate plethora of traditions that this work is in discourse with: at the same time as performing the music, we aim to reflexively examine the methodology of practice research, considering creative practice both as its means of investigation and mode of presentation and communication. The violin improvisation ‘plays into’ the spaces offered by the spoken word, presenting its own spaces, or responding to the spoken text. This strategy is deliberately non-mimetic and serves as a parallel to the spoken word, oftentimes deliberately tenuous and exploring the extremes of difference within the texts.