robin vaughan-williams
I started developing poetry improvisation after a transformational experience back in 2008 when Steve Jackson of Point Blank theatre company in Sheffield ran a one-day workshop for my poetry group (more on this here). Since then I've produced a series of recordings with a Nottingham-based trio (Mark Goodwin, Richard Goodson, and myself), devised an improvised poetry performance for Apples and Snakes' Word's a Stage programme, collaborated with QuickShifts dance collective and musicians Derek Saw and Charlie Collins, and run workshops in London, Nottingham, and Glasgow.
The workshops I run are a collaborative experience. A good way to describe them is to say it's like poets bouncing their voices off one another. We use games and exercises to build confidence in our sponteneity and creativity and to explore how our voices can connect with one another. These involve things like breathing and relaxation, vocal warm-ups, stream of consciousness, movement, awareness of body and surroundings, and pairwork and groupwork.
Past participants have said:
One of the collaborative pieces felt like being in a poem as it was being made. V powerful!
It reinforced the idea of the ordinary being extraordinary.
It's changed my relationship to speech and the things people say.
It was really exciting to see a different approach to poetic collaboration.
I'm running some poetry improv workshops at a venue near Clapham Common tube station in South London starting in September 2025. If you'd like to join in or find out more, send me a DM on @robinrvw (Instagram) or email robinrvw AT gmail DOT com (put 'POETRY IMPROV' in the subject line). I'll only be booking the venue a couple of weeks in advance, so instead of posting a series of dates for the autumn, I'll email round the dates as I book them. The cost will be £5 a session.
You don't need to be a poet to take part! You might be creative in another field like dance or music, you might be curious about exploring a form of spontaneous, oral, and collaborative composition, or you may just want to see where you voice will take you. You're welcome to try it out, and if you come back there will also be opportunities to create recordings and performances.
Some past recordings (SoundCloud), mostly from the Nottingham trio.
Some of my past workshops and projects (not all of them improvisational) are listed on my Workshops page.