One of the most difficult things about writing a love story is figuring out how to make it live for an audience, through characters they will meet and know for less than three hours.
How do you make a connection that can so often be filled with intangibles – believable?
So much about love defies definition.
This was confirmed for me when I started what would become The Fora Project.
TFP started as a wish I had to solidify the sound of the language of Forafu, the island where the story is set. When people think of islands, they tend to have very different ideas of what the people there sound like. This was never more true than in early readings. My actors would all gamely try out their best Caribbean accents – with varying levels of success. It wasn’t the accents that bothered me – it was that they all sounded like they were from different places! For a play based on family and country – that just wouldn’t do. I resigned myself to figuring out the dialect down the line in workshop.
In 2010 however, I met an artist who was doing a project on the universality of sound. Collecting aural examples from all over the world – a market in China, night animals in the Mojave desert – it is amazing what happens when we just sit still and listen. It was at this point I thought – there’s no reason why the island of Forafu can’t have it’s own language. I named it Fora - later finding out the word already existed (there really is nothing new under the sun:-), meaning, ironically enough, “a meeting place”.
It was with this intent that I created Fora as a “romance language”. Not in the usual and accepted sense of the term, but finding myself met again with the indescribability of love, deciding that these sequences of letters and phrases, of poetry and sound, could only be spoken and understood when one is truly in love. Fora cannot be learned. It is thus known on the island by its ghosts - the Ashii - and “remembered” by those who fall in love.
"What does vulnerability sound like?"
The best way to create the language, I thought, was to ask people to describe what they felt.
Randomly, I would call friends of mine and hold impromptu interviews, asking them to describe emotions – feelings so commonplace that they are often taken for granted.
Or, I would ask the interviewee to describe naturally occurring phenomena – fire, water, air – in emotional terms. What I found was that the answers to the questions I was posing always came in the pauses, the hesitations, the silences, the struggle to find a way to describe a feeling.
Is it any wonder that of all our choices - speaking is the least effective form of communication?
And so the language of Fora is universal.
It is a language of purest sound, found in the unspoken.
Randomly, I would call friends of mine and hold impromptu interviews, asking them to describe emotions – feelings so commonplace that they are often taken for granted.
Or, I would ask the interviewee to describe naturally occurring phenomena – fire, water, air – in emotional terms. What I found was that the answers to the questions I was posing always came in the pauses, the hesitations, the silences, the struggle to find a way to describe a feeling.
Is it any wonder that of all our choices - speaking is the least effective form of communication?
And so the language of Fora is universal.
It is a language of purest sound, found in the unspoken.
