Absurdist Expansions: When a Scriptwriting Workshop becomes Performance Art

The film is out of focus, the characters are just blurred shapes moving around a blurred world.  But their voices are clear: one is looking to the past - he thinks he will find answers in a drawing he made as a child; the other is looking to the future - his first gallery opening.  Neither character is in the present which is probably why they are not hearing each other.

That is the simple conceit of Elmgreen & Dragset’s short film ‘The Audience’ - a film I was asked to expand upon with a live audience in an exploration of perception and storytelling.
When I received the email asking me if I wanted to take part in the first Prada Mode to be staged in London I didn’t really understand what I was being asked to do: become part of a site specific art installation with a cinema, mannequins as part of the audience and me running a scriptwriting workshop.  Okay…

My first pitch was an afternoon long storytelling workshop – I come from academia where we spend hours workshopping students’ ideas in small or large groups.  Storytelling shouldn’t be rushed.  Prada liked the idea – but could I condense it to 90mins and run the same workshop three times a day for three days?  Okay…

Concerned people wouldn’t be carrying pen and paper I created an app they could use to input their ideas.  And why not get them to prompt an AI image generator to create scenes?  These would be literal visual expansions of the world.  Not enough time to brand the app and concerns over AI generated content meant giving out sheets of paper, pens and clipboards to every workshop participant for them to scribble their ideas longhand.  Fine.

I made it work.  

The audience for The Audience came in droves – the queue stretched around the old town hall in King’s Cross, along one side of the building and out onto the main road opposite the British Library.

The participants in the morning workshop were the most sincere: engaging, thoughtfully.  The afternoon workshop was scriptwriting workshop as performance art: a crowd would gather around us and watch.  And the early evening workshop was the most absurd – because Elmgreen & Dragset’s film, which was played in loop all day long, stopped at 4pm and the workshop didn’t begin until 4.30pm so most of the people who came hadn’t seen the film – but that didn’t stop them.

We discussed storytelling, genre and scriptwriting.  Participants added characters – a mother, a lover, a whole family, a pet; shifted location – onto a bus, at the gallery, in the bedroom later; and changed genre – into a sci-fi story with a robot, a dystopian narrative as an audience in the distant future watch the film and wonder was that what humans were like, a comedy and a thriller.  They scribbled their ideas into the margins of the sheet they were given and some even found extra paper – inspired to write they didn’t want to stop.

The most inspiring part of the workshop: when participants came to the front, stood at a mic and shared their stories.  The audience laughed, cheered and clapped.  Feeling emboldened others would rush up to share their story.

And then a final thought: if the world is truly Absurd, in Camus’s sense, and we are looking for meaning in a meaningless world, then this isn’t an individual pursuit: we are all living in a meaningless world searching for meaning.

All of us.

Together.

People came up to me at the end and told me they had been inspired to write, others wanted advice on storytelling in music and narratives for clothes lines and some just wanted to say thank you.

From saying yes to an experience I had no expectation of to three days of becoming part of an arts installation and meeting hundreds of enthusiastic, joyful storytellers.

Camus imagined Sisyphus happy at the end of his exploration of Absurdism.  If he’d been standing outside the old town hall in King’s Cross on the Sunday after the final workshop Camus would have seen me leave with a spring in my step.
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Meaning isn’t a single point in time.  It’s all the points in time.