Self portrait / in cross-sections / with bird: a monologue

Abstract

ABSTRACT Self Portrait / In Cross-Sections / With Bird is a performance text that evolved from my experimentation with biologically driven dramaturgies. In this experiment, cancer biology was utilised as a dramaturgical model. Applied to Hamlet, the writing employed iterative techniques (for example the Microsoft Word dictation function) that favoured the accumulation of error while suppressing authorial imposition of form, structure and meaning on the emergent text. The aim of the experiment was to generate a text that, like cancer, was inclining away from order and towards ‘the inner edge of chaos’ (Sigston, Elizabeth A.W. & Bryan R.G. Williams. 2017. ‘An Emergence Framework of Carcinogenesis’. Frontiers in Oncology: Cancer Genetics 7: 198, https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2017.00198).