[ Dictionary ]
Come and watch a text being born.
Live Writing gives literature a room of its own. A writer sits at a keyboard, the text is projected as it is born, and a room full of people reads while it happens.
Painting has the studio visit. Music has the rehearsal. Dance has the open class. Literature keeps everything hidden and shows only the finished thing.
Live Writing turns that around. The writing happens now, in public, and the audience sees the whole of it: the hesitation, the word that arrives late, the sentence that turns out better than anyone expected. What usually gets cut is the show.
Improvisation here is a discipline. There are rules, constraints, timings and games, most of them developed over fifteen years and tested on more than six hundred nights. The constraint is what makes the writing possible: give someone a blank page and total freedom and they will stare at it.
How a session works
A room that can go dark. A wall or a screen. One or more writers at keyboards, and the text projected large enough to read from the back. Usually a live musician, often a host, sometimes actors, dancers or a camera.
The audience gives something to start from: a word, an object, a question, a photograph. The writing begins and the room reads. In most formats the keyboard then travels, and someone sits down to write in public for the first time.
The technology
We work with VJ software — Resolume, Millumin, VDMX, MadMapper — so the text can be projected onto any surface: a wall, a curtain, a barrel, a body, the facade of a building. The projection is part of the dramaturgy. The text moves, breathes, waits, falls across a dancer.
It works in any language
We have run sessions in Spanish, Catalan, English and Norwegian, and the format survives translation because what carries it is the situation. A language is a meeting place: put two of them in a room and the writing gets richer.
Photo: Mar Perla
Come and destroy the silence. There is plenty of it.
What defines it
Improvised
The text is invented in the moment and projected as it appears. A catalogue of rules and games makes it possible to start from a blank screen, on cue, every time.
Participative
The audience is invited in. The keyboard travels. People who came to read leave having written, most of them for the first time in public.
Collective
One text, many hands. What matters is what happens between the people writing: the voice becomes shared and so does the story.
Artistic
Writing in dialogue with the other arts. Live music, theatre, dance, drawing, film and projection are part of the piece itself.
Three lines of work
Research
We investigate what happens when writing meets the other arts and the machine. New techniques, new games, new ways of writing together, developed and documented. Four years of dramaturgical laboratory at Sala Beckett.
Production
We design and produce live literary shows with musicians, performers and full projection design. Each format is a finished production with its own dramaturgy and technical rider.
Teaching
We run workshops for every kind of audience, with a special emphasis on young people and students, in universities, schools and festivals.