the website of robin vaughan-williams
With Verbiage and Demolition in 2004 and 2005, I developed a collage-performance method for working with poetry and music. The performances involved poems by up to 25 poets being interwoven with one another and with music by the Ella Luk Project to produce a live collage of sound and voices. They took place in site-specific venues (Sheffield Winter Garden and Sheffield Cathedral), with poets and musicians performing from different points around the space, to engage both thematically and spatially with the venues.
I developed the collage-performance partly as a response to the challenges of poetry in performance, which can often be very static, with little movement. In the collage-performance the poets' voices come at the audience from different directions, introducing a new spatial dimension to the performance.
Another challenge of poetry in performance is the integrity of the performance or, put more simply, how to keep the audience's attention. Long poems have some kind of narrative or development built into their structure, but a series of unconnected short poems can easily lose the audience's interest. A typical way of dealing with this is to read cycles of poems, or to select poems that resonate with one another and which will lead the audience somewhere. However, problems can still arise if the poems have been written with private reading in mind, where the reader has the chance (and motivation) to carefully read and re-read the text. In performance you only have one chance (although I have occasionally seen people repeat a poem), and if most people's attention is anything like mine, they will not follow a poem word for word, but dip in and out of it, the poem mingling with the associations it conjures up and anything that grabs them in their immediate environment.
The most common way of trying to maintain the integrity of a performance is to contextualise through the use of talk (introductory comments, anecdotes, banter, chit-chat, etc.). This could be called adding extra-poetic context, as opposed to relying on intra-poetic context, which is built up within the poem itself. One of the features of poems written specifically for performance is that they will usually have an intra-poetic context that works better in a performance context. One of the peculiarities of poetry is, after all, that it is both a temporal and a non-temporal artform.
The use of talk for contextualisation usually works so as to root the poems in the figure of the individual poet (or their persona), their life experience or perspective. This is evident in most multi-person poetry events, where the primary breaks in the event are the changes in reader; and while one might make links between poems by the same poet, one is less likely to do this between poems by different poets (although organisers, even at open mics, will often try to arrange readers so as to draw out such links).
The collage-performance is an attempt at an extended poetry performance that does not depend for its coherence on talk between poems or on the unifying context of the individual poet's persona. Poems, while remaining individual, appear as part of a larger whole, where the developing theme, mood, perspective, and voice encourage the audience to find connections between the various poems. Instead of relying on an extra-poetic context, the production thus weaves its own inter-poetic context. Music functions as an additional part of this intertextual web, opens up more space for people to take in what they are hearing, and helps to bind the whole performance together.
The idea of a poetry collage-performance came about partly through my experience of organising open mics (at Spoken Word Antics). While an open mic can be a chaotic affair, I've always loved the contrasts you get between different readers in terms of their style, voice, and concerns, the authenticity people bring to their material, and the wonderful surprises you sometimes get, not knowing what's going to happen next. These are the qualities that, for me, can bring an open mic to life and make it one of the best ways of encountering contemporary poetry; in the space of a few hours you experience material with energy, authenticity, humour, and a sense of engagement - qualities which seem to be spread very thinly among most contemporary poetry magazines.
At Antics I always tried to arrange the open mic so as to bring out the continuities and contrasts between the different people taking part, and to bring a sense of structure and development to the night. Sometimes it worked extremely well, sometimes it probably didn't make any difference at all. The collage-performance, in its simplest form, could be seen as a kind of orchestrated, pre-arranged open mic. People had written poems in response to a theme ('gardens' in Verbiage, 'change in the city' in Demolition), and I arranged their work so as to bring out the continuities and contrasts between them, with changes in mood, theme, voice, and so on. At their best, Verbiage and Demolition were like the utterances of a composite voice, a cross-section of society, with all its contradictions and commonalities.
Verbiage and Demolition were experiments in the development of a form, an exploration in the combination of voices and sound. We had voices arranged sequentially, one after another (as is conventional), overlapping, and simultaneous, coming at the audience all at once from different directions. Sometimes poems or voices were interwoven with each other internally, at the level of lines and verses. We discovered how music can slow a poem down, creating a lot more space around and within it, and how where several poems share a common mood, a sense of distress, for example, music can be used to draw out that shared mood and draw the pieces closer together. There are voices that are powerful, confident, authoritarian, and others that are insecure, troubled or frail; some sound young, others old; and varying dialects, with all that they signify. In future I would like to explore the use of these different qualities of voice more, as well as some other dimensions, such as the deterioration of the voice from the coherent to the unintelligible.
Following on from Verbiage and Demolition, I became interested in using improvisation to develop collaborative poetry texts, and in bringing greater narrative force to collective performances. I was able to explore these areas in the pieces I created for Life 2.0, which was held at Access Space, an open-access recycled technology lab in Sheffield, in October 2008. I produced Everything Changes (a recorded, multi-channel poetry improvisation), Skype Me! (involving remote readings via Skype), Lost Voices (a collaborative poetry performance), and arranged a viral text poem by the audience for Life 2.0, with other contributions by Richard Bolam, Brian Lewis, Linda Lee Welch and The Only Michael, and Jake Harries. More about this event can be found on the Life 2.0 webpage.