Welcome to Glimpses into Words in Winter, a weekly showcase of writings from some of the talented presenters and authors joining us for this year’s festival.
This week, we feature writings from Sandra Fiona Long, an award-winning theatre maker, writer, and artist working across performance, installation, and sound-based works.
Sandra will be delivering Text and Voice, a workshop exploring how to generate and arrange text for voice, and then bring those arrangements to life. This workshop is open to participants of any skill level.
The workshop takes place on Saturday, 29 August, from 1:30pm to 4:30pm at Radius Art. Tickets are limited, so be sure to book your spot now!
Explore the full festival program at www.wordsinwinter.com
From Sandra:
Here are the opening lines from The Engineer in the Snow: a fantastical erotic fugue for planet Earth.
This new work is currently in development and will premiere at Theatre Works in St Kilda from December 8-17. The text is erotic and riffs off trashy romance literature to become a quest to reconcile the desire for connection with nature in the face of capitalism and patriarchy. Alongside the text which will be performed solo by actor Emily Tomlins, the work is also written for voice, sound and visual elements. My writing workshop ‘Text and Voice’ in the Words in Winter Festival will explore how to consider the potential of voice when writing text for spoken word, using techniques I have learnt and developed creating experimental theatre works over many years.
How about you?
I am a civil engineer.
building bridges?
Not quite. I engineer drainage systems.
Drainage systems?
Fish and frogs need shallow pools to breed in. Areas still and warm for part of the year. Yet we treat our waterways like drains. Every time it rains water is funnelled high speed through concrete gutters into the rivers. It’s a deluge, flushing fish eggs, fry, tadpoles and away.
I’ve never thought of that…
My drainage systems will divert storm water away from rivers into large tanks. There’ll be one on each block, for residents to use on their gardens.
Then once the river levels are stabilized, the riverbanks will be replanted encouraging birds, animals, insects, reptiles, fish and amphibians back.
What an amazing profession!
I love it, I love engineering a lot.
Above us metal cable squeaks through sheaves, pulling our chair into the terminal. We raise then lower the tips of our skis, standing up in unison to glide downhill onto the wide slope.
Skiers weave and splice past us.
I haven’t noticed this path before.
Me neither.
Shall we try it?
We get to a small clearing. Fir trees circle us. I feel as if I am amongst giants.
With a fine branch whittled to a blade the Engineer carves blocks from the wind packed snowdrift, stacking them into a dome. I sit inside and carve a network of flowing rivers into the icy ceiling with my green wood chisels.
The constellation of rivers sparkles above us. I am starting to feel really excited. I can’t believe I am here, building an ice castle with this incredible frog saving Engineer!
I too want to save the rivers. From now on, it’s my mission!
