Brian Catling, cris cheeek, Aaron Williamson
South Bank Centre, Literature, Voice Box, 8 July 1997

This was an excellent evening. In a venue predisposed to the traditional
'poetry reading' format of 'text-based literacy,' work was presented which
extends the range and sense of poetry without loosing sight of its
grounding in language art. 'Performance' was the key word invoked, and yet
this was not a matter of 'packaging' ['marketing'? ed.] -- not, for
example, a way of making poetry palettable by applying banal guitar-work
and domestic humour (as in Hegley's 1990s Flanders & Swanism) or through
the pop expressionism of poetry slams. This was work that requires
performance as a extension of the reading of poetry, or because of the
nature of the poetry which is being read.

cris cheek gave performances which are the clearest indication of this
inflection of poetry as reading/shaped breath/(tongued) embodiment. His
work engages the page, but it also scores for the voice and occasionally
requires musical/taped overlays. He works seamlessly in and out of these
media, which are not 'mixed' in his performance but brought together.

Surprisingly -- since his perfomances are usually visually inflected and
recall his practice as sculptor -- Catling gave a more or less 'straight'
reading, from his classic, 'Stumbing Block' and also from a new sequence.
This was assured work, anchoring the evening to the (more generally
understood) practice of writing.

Aaron Williamson's performances are legendary, visceral. On the page, his
work is cerebral, considered; in performance, the body takes over and
transforms postmodernism into solo expressionist theatre. It is all but
underbearable, the pitch of intensity unrelenting, although the occasional
clear poetic sentence is there to prove that a choice has been made.
Because it is unique, it is difficult to assess his work. I would preferred
to have more access to its linguistic content.

The venue was sold out and I imagine more tickets could have been sold. The
audience was mixed in age, mostly white, perhaps younger and less
middleclass than for the usual poetry reading -- all to the good.

The Voice Box is a strange venue, it feels (and is) marginal to the main
activity of the Royal Festival Hall and it is not very accessible, yet it
is light, airy and open. The air conditioning is terrrible for its noise,
which severely impairs the potential enjoyment of quiet poetic passages.
Why the engineering of a large building has to intrude into this space in
this way, I do not know.

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[Now, to whom is this (slightly abridged) review addressed, I wonder?]

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