THE SCRIPT WRITING SCORE
SWS is a new form of writing built off of ten years of experimentation and performance.
Convention by Danny Rocco, 2017
Right now, creators have two options to make their written work:
a blank page and a pre-formatted script that looks like a screenplay.
Both of these are in the tradition of the novel or poem, and limit the kind of work an artist working on these canvases can create.
Ten years ago, Rocco wrote a large play (Orchestra, 2012) for eighteen actors/characters in the same scene. Striving to create a sound that was more organic, electric and acrobatic - but not cacophonous - he reoriented the page in landscape, rather than in portrait, and created horizontal lines across the page for each character - called “staff lines” - writing the characters’ text in these lanes, on top of each other, rather than in the traditional one-after-the-other format.
This simple shift in the page, and layering characters on top of each other in landscape, has had a profound ripple effect, producing a decade-long renaissance of new work and philosophy around it.
Rocco is currently presenting lectures and demonstrations of SWS globally to both codify the work and to promote the usage of a new software, Swseng (/'swing'/) that allows all creators to write in SWS. Rocco’s ambition is to offer a competitive and contemporary way of hearing and relating to dialogue and discourse, eventually changing how we design experience.
Danny Rocco presents SWS at Judson Memorial Church NYC, Dec 2023