hard not to toss a hat into this ring . i have written three texts that for various reasons i committed to memory .
one shorter a piece called The Jitters toyed with the conceit of being a poltergeist monologue, drawing on an initial impulse from Guy Playfair's book on the Enfield poltergeist Ths House Is Haunted . it seemed a fun premise for spoken word and over time i had a simple little light fitting made which responded to volume of sound input . so that i could set it to go on and off when i spoke . if i was quiet i would not trigger the light et cetera . so, holding a page in one hand and this lamp (which ended up being attached to the end of a tree limp and could be positioned in very different ways in relation to my body and my mouth) in the other felt complicated to say the least . especially since there would not always be sufficient light to read from the page by . so i learned the text and the piece unfolded in a curious territory between mucked up monologue (Ruth Draper scripted by BS Jonson), live art and poem
a longer piece skin upon sKin ran to about 30 minutes of densely written wordplay . it was really hard to memorize such a thing and i have to emphasise that it was not theater but very much a poem . there was some use of the classic things that Eric Havelock describes as constituents for epic poetry performance in Preface to Plato . it had uses of refrain and of dub-style lists and close variations (not quite repetitions) through anaphora and so on . memorising it helped me to edit it actually . it's on the 1996 CD that some here may remember, along with stranger
a third piece was developed with dancers (Miranda TUfnell and Dennis Greenwood) who had commissioned me to write a piece of music to move to . i wrote texts instead . a typical performance would last for 45 minutes . they would improvise and extemporise around movement materials developed to the soundtrack of my talking and i would improvise and extemporize around textual materials developed while watching them dance . . . over the course of many performance the piece did settle into a start point and maybe an end point but what happened in between varied considerably . i had a huge amount of material memorised and would play it pretty much like an instrument
cris
On Oct 21, 2011, at 12:06 PM, David Bircumshaw wrote:
> Doug
>
> I'm not sure if I need to clarify this, but I'd stress that I was using the
> term 'page poetry' (in quotes) as presented by the 'spoken word'
> advertisers: I find it a very doubtful usage.
>
> best
>
> Dave
>
>
> --
> David Joseph Bircumshaw
> "The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is
> that none of it has tried to contact us."
> - Calvin & Hobbes
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