Workshopping

We had our second open-ish workshop today. We've been playing around with a great bunch of people and today we had a wicked time making poetry madness with Anna K and Lee Wallace.

To begin with The Literatti core met up - just me, Christian and Sabrina for the moment - and listened to the GROWL CD. Yes that is right. The entire show was recorded through the sound desk and it is brilliant. If I do say so myself. And I do. Brilliant. We need to re-record two words that were not said into the microphones on the night, and then it's basically ready for release. It's so good for us to be able to listen to what we produced as well, find out once and for all what worked and what did not. And it all worked - though I'm vetoing the one where they convinced me to sing, it would be inhumane to inflict it on the world in such an enduring fashion :o)

Anyway, so when Anna and Lee rocked up we did this wicked warm-up activity that Shane I think taught me, where you physically and verbally throw your voices to one another, catch it, transform it and pass it on. It's really funny, and helps everyone step out of comfort zone and into a performance space. Then we did a round of improvised line-by-line poetry until we petered out, just going round the circle each adding to a poem. I figure if we do this every time we'll eventually be able to incorporate things like that into our shows, which would be choice. It takes a special skill to improvise poetry well. Shane can do it excellently. I struggle with second-guessing myself.

Then we got into performing our poems to each other and giving each other a bit of feedback. A major one was eye gaze, lots of us felt uncomfortable making eye contact with an audience, and lots of us found ourselves betrayed by a gaze that wandered to the floor or the ceiling. So I made everyone turn to face each other and hold each other's gaze for 15 seconds without 'breaking character'. None of us wanted to do it, so we thought that probably meant we needed to. So we did that until we were able to do without laughing our arses off.

Only took 3 tries too!

Then we wrote a number of different emotions or 'voices' on bits of paper and each drew two out at random. Then we'd perform our poem using those two voices. Some totally bizarre and hilarious things emerge, but then so do some surprising little gems. And a confidence emerges when you allow yourself to be potentially silly in this way, to let go, to be spontaneous, to trust your instincts.

So essentially I spent the afternoon remembering how great GROWL was, being inspired, trying out new poetry, playing games and laughing until there were tears in my eyes.

I have learned that Sabrina does an excellent crazy face,

that Christian can channel an old man as if he had already been one,

that Anna exudes a vibrancy when she lets herself go with it

and that Lee can do a voice that sounds kinda like Johnny Cash with a kiwi accent.

We've got our set sussed out for our Rythm and Verse appearance at Lopdell House in Titirangi on August 20th. I'm quite excited about it really. It's our first gig without Murray and we'll be doing a lot of new pieces by the looks of it. And we're working on getting Fiona Holding along to play a bit of cello with us. So cross fingers. That would be choice.

Next month anyone at all can join us for our workshop (provided you email to register). We've linked up with Poetry Live and Montana Poetry Day and will be running a Resurrection Workshop for anyone who wants to prepare a performance for Poetry Live's Resurrection Night. These are official Montana Poetry Day preludes.

Resurrection Night (July 21st) involves bringing to life a poem by a dead poet during a 5-minute open mic performance. There is a prize for best performance and best costume. Christian, Sabrina and I will be joined by Shane Hollands, Daniel Larsen and Raewyn Alexander in resurrecting a selection of poems for the guest poetry slot.

The workshop (July 18th) will involve developing your chosen poem into a performance piece. Besides Resurrection Night, performing another person's poem can often be a really useful way to develop performance technique without the added pressure of having to bare your own poetry at the same time. We hope that the workshop would also just be good for anyone who wants to get more comfortable performing poetry or even just reading it out loud. Email theliteratti@gmail.com to register. Costs $5 unwaged/ $10 waged.