A production with ‘purrfect’ grammar

With cats swinging from cleverly woven prose and properly placed punctuation, “Cirque du Chat” is not for those allergic to clever language or “purrfect” sentences.

The show is this year’s annual Gram-O-Rama production, with skits written and performed by students in Marianne Gingher’s stylistics class.

Gingher, a UNC English professor, said she has been teaching the nontraditional class since 2001.

“Daphne Athas founded the idea that grammar could be performable,” Gingher said, adding that she arrived at the University decades after Athas began the show.

Gingher was a graduate student in creative writing when she first saw the show. She began co-teaching the course the following year.

“I was blown away,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was seeing or hearing … The sound and nonsense (of language) kind of revives you.”

This year’s show is wild and provocative, and all of the students are rock-solid writers, Gingher said.

“The title of the show exhibits its wordplay aspect,” she said. “It can be a circus of chat or circus of cats, if translated from French.”

Senior William Heathcote, one of Gingher’s students, said he saw the show last fall and decided he had to take the course.

“This course is very fast-paced,” he said. “We had to perform a piece every day in front of the whole class.”

Gingher said the class of 17 students has written about 400 pieces this semester — and only about 35 of them have made it into the final show.

“We thought we could have a portion of politically themed content,” Heathcote said. “But as we got burned out on the election we realized the audience would be burnt out as well.”

In brainstorming for new content, Heathcote said, the group developed a common feline theme.

“We didn’t know where (the cat theme) came from,” Heathcote said. “It’s in anything from a cat pun to an entire monologue about being a cat person.”

Alex Karsten, a junior in Gingher’s course, said the show primarily focuses on making grammar fun, and showcasing creative, funny pieces.

“The course helped me break away from only using logic in my writing,” Karsten said. “It helped me think about the way something sounds and not just what it means.”

Karsten said all of the students in Gingher’s class are funny — in different ways — and that humor and wordplay are worked into the well-written prose.

“We had to write a monologue using lots of alliteration,” he said. “We’ve also had to write conversations with lots of malapropisms.”

Gingher said the show is meant to remind people how much fun writing is.

“These shows are off-the-page and on-the-stage,” she said. “It has a three-dimensional dynamic that writing on the page doesn’t have.”

Contact the desk editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.