Perpetual Prompt
ACTIVITY
With Perpetual Prompt, the leader offers a verbal phrase. Participants write a series of sentences, each beginning with the prompt phrase and completed with something different.
Effective prompts can be related to personal history, identity, or — inspired by a particular artistic goal — particpants’ relationship to a particular person, place or idea. Examples of effective prompts for this activity are “On the day that I was born…” “I miss the sound of …” “Some days I wish…” “My heart beat faster when…”
A classic example and highly recommended prompt for this exercise is the phrase “I come from…”: If you are sum of all your experiences, you can “come from” a vast variety of places, people and things. Therefore, sentences can be completed with stories and images that are either immediate or deeply rooted:
-
I come from a heavy hotel breakfast of French toast and sausage.
-
I come from Minnesota.
-
I come from the march on Washington.
-
I come from frozen lakes defrosting in April showers.
-
I come from my grandmother, a little girl who hid under the floorboards.
Set a fixed time (three to five minutes is plenty). Offer examples like those above. Tell participants keep writing the prompt phrase followed by whatever comes to mind, keeping pen to paper for the entire time. If they draw a momentary blank they can write “I don’t know what to write” until the next idea comes to them.
When the allotted time is up, ask participants to put down their pens. When everyone is finished have each participant read one or two examples, reminding participants that they are in charge of what they choose to share. In larger groups, have participants in pairs read a few examples to one another; then ask the group for any strong images that may have stood out in the exchanges.
Choose images or ideas from the completed writing, and draw movement ideas from the group. This can be done a variety of ways: Spontaneous Gesture, Movement Metaphors, Equivalents. Then apply Build-a-Phrase to structure a short dance.
APPLICATIONS
Perpetual Prompt can be an early step in a choreographic project engaging community members. With the “I come from” prompt it can be used at the start of a meeting to quickly acquaint members of a group to one another. Story material for a variety of outcomes can be developed from the phrases that the exercise elicits.
Perpetual Prompt is a fundamental tool that can combined with others and taken in limitless directions. Here’s a sampling:
-
Using Build-A-Phrase, develop an eight-count dance inspired by images drawn from responses composed by various participants. Then perform the phrase while a single participant speaks her full series of sentences. Watch for unexpected meanings that emerge from the new juxtapositions between words and movements.
-
As a group, start an eight- to twelve-count dance using a composite of three or four images presented in the group’s responses. Then have each participant continue the process solo, completing the phrase using images from their own series. The dances can be shown as solos or presented to the group as duets or trios.
-
Sitting in a circle, a group develops a dance from a composite of the images, as above. Then each participant moves to the floor to expand the vocabulary in space.
FOOTNOTES
The “I come from ...” version of Perpetual Prompt was developed by poet Jo Barnes and dance artist Celeste Miller, based on a poem by Barnes.
