Reflective Practitioner: moon text

The moon text is an exploration of femininity and suicide. In making this text, I have drawn from a variety of conceptual ideas and sources: media representations, fine art, film, literature, dramatic literature, autobiography and poetry. I have drawn together a plethora of representations and used them as the starting point and springboard with which to write the text. What fascinates me as an artist, is that so many of our representations of women are flawed and tragic, Western History also paints a similar picture. I am interested in the fact that so many of our cultural icons that are female have been portrayed as victims, many of them taking their own lives; Marilyn Monroe, Dusty Springfield and Sylvia Plath…to name just a couple. That is really the head space that this piece comes from and it obviously fits into the discourse of the work through the themes of woman and trauma. For me the moon and the sea have really interesting relationships with the idea of femininity.

One of the key devices that I have employed in this text is that none of the voices within the text actually converse with each other or enter into dialogue. Each voice directly addresses the audience. It is all about blurring the presence of the audience and problematising the notion of acting/presence. The text is presentational in style and is full of holes and gaps, it forces the audience to take up the slack, they have to work to construct the narratives that run throughout the piece and find their own context and meaning within the text.

Each new voice changes the pace and tone of the text, picking it up and taking it off on a new or shifted narrative; a changed perspective. The text is split into three sections and in this way mimics the construction of a traditional or well made play. It becomes mico, several mini narratives crammed into one short text. There is not plot, rather the text has narrative threads or strands, no tension is built and the narratives are not accumulative to a singular idea or story. We are given new information but it does not serve to illuminate, explicate or clarify the previous section; instead each new narrative thread exists along side the previous, their relationship left for the audience to devise.

The overall text is not written in a naturalistic style, it is not a dramatic text per se. Each section uses a different device for the narrative and tells its story in a different way. This pushes the audience to have to do work, they have to work hard to make their own sense, to carve their own set of meanings from the multiple possibilities. This means that they are in a constant state of flux during the text, having to re-evaluate their relationship and position to the text.

Repetition is a theme of the text, and as a writer, is something which really fascinates me. The pattern that this repetition creates serves to replace the plot, giving structure and pace to the writing.