Archive for the ‘poetry improv’ Category

zq News April 2016: Words Aloud Sutton + Dance & Poetry Collaborations

Friday, April 15th, 2016

Words Aloud, Sat 16 April, 2–4pm

Sutton Central Library
I’ll be at Words Aloud in Sutton this Saturday with guest Lewis Buxton. I’m doing a slot, and the open mic is always excellent. Compered by Rachel Sambrooks. See their Facebook page for further details:https://www.facebook.com/events/455341517998768/

Publications and Collaborations

Quick Shifts dance collective

Quick Shifts Dance Improvisation Collective

One area of poetry improvisation I’m keen on exploring is movement—in terms of building up a relationship between speech and movement to give performances a more physical dimension, but also how posture and movement affect the way we speak while improvising. Getting performers pacing up and down the room can add nervous energy to their verbal improvisation, and simple things like whether they are looking at one another or up at the ceiling can dramatically change the dynamics.
So I was pleased to be invited to take part in a workshop with Quick Shifts, a dance improvisation collective based in Leicester, in February. We explored ways of incorporating speech into their performances, and one of these ideas formed the basis of their show on 3 March. I also benefitted a lot from seeing how people use improvisation in another artform where it is more established; for example, how they use the number of performers (solo, duet, triplet, etc.) as a central structuring principe.

Nottingham Poetry Improvisation Group

Earlier in April I met with Mark Goodwin for a session in Nottingham, where we recorded some duets and alternating solos (usually I work in bigger groups, so this was a good chance to explore techniques for working as a pair). We’ve both got the recordings, so there may be some alternative versions surfacing once we’ve got round to editing them. There are plans for more in Nottingham over the next few months, with probably a scratch event coming out of it at some point.

Obsessed with Pipework and Open Minds Quarterly

I was excited to hear last week I’ve got three poems in one of my favourite magazines at the moment, Obsessed with Pipework. ‘Story’ and ‘Lay-by’ are from my Poems from the Road sequence, and ‘Trickster Wind’ is about noises in the back yard. ‘Pills’ (which riffs off William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’, but substitutes ‘pills’ for ‘plums’) appeared in Open Minds Quarterly 17:3.

Sutton Cultural Award

Next week I’m picking up an award, alongside Rachel Sambrooks, for our work on Sutton Stories, a project that ran from July to October last year as part of Imagine Festival of the Arts. It culminated in ‘a truly intergenerational event that gave the elderly a sense of connection to the community and emotionally moved many of the public’, in the words of the Festival Report. Thanks are also due to Joanna Steele, who put a huge amount of effort into the project and successfully managed to pull together all its different strands. There’s a blog post about the work I did with care home residents for the project here: http://www.zeroquality.net/zqblog/?p=747.

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Digital Poetry Jam at WAC Arts

Thursday, October 8th, 2015

WAC Arts Interactive Poetry Jam 2015In September 2015 I ran a digital poetry jam project with young people in the WAC Interactive group at WAC Arts in North London. This was a trial project, exploring how we could use Keezy, a sampling app on the iPad, as a fun and engaging way into poetry. The idea was simple: we’d write lines (or just think them up in cases), sample them, and have a go at playing back in different ways. Participants would be able to create the content, use their voices, try out different arrangements, and produce a performance, but without the pressure of having to write a fully formed poem or read out in front of the whole class.

We had a fantastic range of responses, ranging from the poignant to the comic, and it was amazing to see how every person had a different approach to playing back the samples. One person would play back more conventionally, line by line, another would make use of the chorus, a third would go minimalist, stuttering back and forth between just two samples, and a fourth would use looping and layering to create a full-on DJ mash-up.

Here’s a mix I put together afterwards using Launchpad, a live sequencing app.

Many thanks to WAC Arts for giving me the chance to trial the project, and indeed sparking the idea in the first place through the Creative Innovation for Inclusion (CiFi) Think Tank  I attended there back in January 2015.

If you’re interested in me running a digital poetry jam for your school or organisation, get in touch via my contact page.

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zqNews Apr 2015: Texas 2 London Skype poetry + Word’s a Stage poetry impro

Tuesday, April 7th, 2015

In this issue of zqNews, find out about two forthcoming events using Skype and poetry improvisation to make connections, and check out a couple of videos recently uploaded to YouTube.

Texas 2 London

Texas 2 London, my next Skype event, is happening this Friday, 10 April, in Colliers Wood, London. We’ll be linking up with a parallel event at the Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) in Texas with three featured poets either side of the Atlantic sharing their work. There’ll also be a chance for three open mic participants to perform in front of the Austin audience via the video link.

One our side we’ve got Matt Black, Agnes Meadows, and Kayo Chingonyi, and in Austin we’ll be hearing from three AIPF poets: Element615, Teresa Y Roberson, and Mr Dave.

I’ll be presenting alongside electro-pop poetry duo Project Adorno, and the Texas event will be hosted by Thom the World Poet. Thom is a gloriously spontaneous, unpredictable, and inspired poet and also committed to the principles of democracy in the arts. Check out his appearance at a previous Skype event on YouTube.

The evening kicks off at 7pm with the open mic (first come, first served), then we’re online with Austin from 8 to 9.30pm. For more details about the programme visit http://www.zeroquality.net/texas2london.html.

Friday 10 April 2015, 7–10pm
Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills, SW19 2RD (near Colliers Wood underground)
£3 on the door. Enquiries to 020 3730 8039.

Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.

Word’s a Stage Improvisation Project

Word’s a Stage

The last couple of months I’ve been working with four poets—Becci Fearnley, Sean Wai Keung, Andrea Queens, and Zahrah Sheikh—on putting together a performance using poetry improvisation techniques. We’ve got one more workshop to go, then the final event, where there’ll also be a collaborative performance from Apples and Snakes’ GasWorks group, will take place on Tuesday 14 April at Free Word (Farringdon) from 7.30pm (Free).

It’s the first chance I’ve had to work with a group over a sustained period on a poetry improvisation project, and the first time I’ve used improvisation to put together a performance rather than recordings, so it’s been an exciting and new experience for us all. The group has been amazing, fearless, and eager to rise the challenge, and I’ve learnt a lot from them myself during the workshops.

Our final piece is provisionally entitled ‘You are not the voices inside my head’ [later changed to ‘Grey Parrot Singing’] and circles loosely around the idea of ‘search’ and what happens to our voices in the age of social media. YouTube has been a significant source of material, from trolling to cat videos, self-hypnosis and political rants. The performance includes several improvised scenes, including free improv, pair work, a human-generated Apostrophe poem, and a warm-up that surprised us all by uncovering the poetry of numbers.

The project is coordinated by Apples and Snakes, and you can see the event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/836322796452518/

NWS in London

Andrew Kells at NWS in London

It’s been a busy few months what with Texas 2 London and Word’s a Stage coming up, and the Nottingham Writer’s Studio’s London showcase, which I hosted on 21 March 2015.

When I was Development Director at NWS we’d been talking about a London showcase to help bridge the gap between the London-centric publishing world and the strong writing communities in Nottingham and other regions, so all credit to my successor Pippa Hennessy for taking the first step in making this happen.

The readers were all contributors to one of NWS’s new ventures, a literary journal that has so far covered ‘crime’, ‘secrets’, and ‘a sense of place’. You can get hold of the journal in electronic form for free on Issuu: http://issuu.com/nottinghamwritersstudio.

It was great to hear the stories and poems I’d read in the journal straight from the writer’s mouth and to feel the enthusiasm in the room from both audience and readers. One of my favourite stories was Lynda Clarke’s rather gruesome tale ‘Stealing from the Dead’, and Andrew Kells and Liz Hart in particular electrified with their energetic performances.

Videos

Reuben da Cunha Rocha Skyping Nottingham, Oct 2014

I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube recently. Here are a couple you might enjoy.

  1. Brazilian poet Reuben da Cunha Rocha mesmerising the audience at Skype Me! Nottingham and the World, 18 October 2014: https://youtu.be/4iTPu4KvPtM
  2. ‘Frogger’, a poem that started out with dual origins in a 1980s computer game and an attempt at a perpetual cycling accident, but which ended up in the twisted fairground of the imaginationl, read here at Word of Mouth in Nottingham, November 2012: https://youtu.be/HiyH980Fv6Y

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zqNews Jan 2015: Texas 2 London, Death on the Road, and Word’s a Stage

Friday, February 6th, 2015

In this issue of zqNews, find out about my forthcoming video link between Texas and London, new audio tracks from Poems from the Road, and poetry improvisation projects in the pipeline for London and St Andrews.

Poems from the Road

Poems from the RoadI’ve uploaded two new tracks to my Poems from the Road SoundCloud playlist. There’s a fascinating interview I conducted with London Grip editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs about poet-cum-cricketing commentator John Arlott’s pamphlet-length poem ‘Death on the Road’, and ‘Travelling the Roads in My Red Mini’, a poem by Ann Vaughan-Williams exploring the voices that accumulated in her car during her time as a psychiatric social worker

The Poems from the Road podcast is now available on the Apples and Snakes SoundCloud page, so if you missed it in December, you can now listen to it at your leisure. And the additional materials that I wasn’t able to include in the podcast are up on my SoundCloud page until the end of February. Check out the Poems from the Road webpage.

I’m also planning to submit a 10-minute Poems from the Road feature to Radio Wildfire, so if you’ve any favourite poems from the show or additional material, let me know and I’ll consider them for the feature.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the show!

Texas 2 London

Skype Me! Sheffield and the WorldOn 10th April the Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) is coming to London with Texas 2 London at the Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills. AIPF is renowned as a melting pot of world poetry, and our three guests will be trading poems with poets in Austin via a live video link. On our side we’ve got Matt Black, Agnes Meadows, and Kayo Chingonyi, and on the Texas side there’ll be Element615 plus two more to be confirmed.

Take part!
There’ll also be a chance for you to perform your work at the AIPF. At 7pm we’ll have an open mic (offline), and three participants from the open mic will then be offered a short slot during the video-linked part of the evening.

I’m co-hosting with electro-pop poetry duo Project Adorno, and the hosts on the other side of the Atlantic will be the irrepressible and always surprising Thom the World Poet and James Jacobs. I’m collaborating with OpenHaus Arts on producing Texas 2 London, and it’s supported by an Arts Development Fund grant from Merton Council.

Friday 10 April 2015, 7–10pm
Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills, SW19 2RD (near Colliers Wood underground)
£3 on the door. Enquiries to 020 3730 8039.
More info: http://zeroquality.net/texas2london.html

Poetry Improvisation

Poetry ImprovisationMy December workshop at the Scottish Writers’ Centre in Glasgow got a great write-up, and I have several poetry improvisation projects coming up in the next couple of months.

I’m particularly excited about an Apples and Snakes project called Word’s a Stage that’s starting this Saturday. I’ll be leading a series of four workshops with four emerging writers to develop a performance for early April (exact date TBA). We’ll be using improvisation techniques to generate material and the final performance will be at least part improvised on the night.

This is a valuable opportunity to explore what we can do with poetry improvisation when working with a group over a sustained period of time. I’ve got some ideas about feeding off the audience (so the audience become part of the poetry), chorus work, and layered set pieces with background and foreground voices, but in the end it’s down to the individuals in the group to see how they interact and what we come up with.

Leaving the Comfort Zone
I’m also offering a poetry improvisation workshop at Scotland’s Stanza poetry festival in St Andrew’s on Saturday 7 March. This will be a day-long workshop during which we’ll devise material for a short performance at the end of it. I believe there are a couple of places left, so still time to book.

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Poetry Improvisation Workshop – Nottingham 26 July

Monday, July 14th, 2014

I’ll be running a poetry improvisation workshop at Nottingham Writers’ Studio from 10am to around 5pm on Saturday 26 July 2014.

The session uses group improvisation to explore ways of working together to create spontaneously. The session will include games, structured scenarios where we work with different poetic voices, and freeform improvisation that can take off in any direction. Some of the things I’ve done in improv sessions in the past include creating a human-generated Apostrophe poem, speaking in endangered languages, and producing a piece based on Snapchat.

If you’re used to writing poetry on your own with a keyboard or pen, this is going to be something completely different – it’s oral, collaborative, and spontaneous.

Poetry improvisation can be a great way to channel your inner voice, explore the possibilities of working with others, and build confidence in your spontaneity. It can also be used to generate pieces for performance or recording, and as a method for producing ideas for further development.

The cost is £75 or £50 (NWS members), which includes tea/coffee and biscuits, and there’ll be a one-hour lunch break (lunch not included).

Further details and booking info are available on the Nottingham Writers’ Studio website:
http://nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk/event/group-poetry-improvisation-workshop-robin-vaughan-williams/

More about my workshops: http://www.zeroquality.net/zqme/workshops.html

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Poetry Improvisation Workshop, 28 February 2014

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Back in 2008 I was blown away by a poetry improvisation session I’d been to, along with other poets in the group I belonged to at the time. One of the members of the group worked for Point Blank theatre company, and had arranged for us to spend a day with theatre director Steve Jackson. He’d asked us to each memorise a poem, but apart from that we didn’t know what to expect. We hoped it would shake things up a bit, give us some different perspectives on our writing, and help us improve our performance techniques.

BOOK POETRY IMPROV WORKSHOP

BOOK WORKSHOP (free)

We spent the morning doing physical theatre exercises, but it was the afternoon, when we focused on the voice, that really produced amazing results. There we were, about five of us, lying spread out in Sheffield’s Open Performance Centre, shut off in our own little worlds, slowly reciting the poems we’d learnt and building on them, working out new directions for them. And then something wonderful happened. We started to respond to one another’s voices, picking up on words other people had said, incorporating them into our own narratives, and listening to our own threads become intertwined with those the others were spinning. We had started out as five disparate voices, but by the end of the exercise those voices had come together to form something utterly new, unique, and of the moment.

That is not an experience you often get as a poet. And the feeling was very different too—I tend to find myself using spiritual terms when I describe it. There was a sense of a deep but effortless connection, of a consciousness awakening, and I would say a kind of euphoria.

So that got me hooked. I wanted to do it again, to record it, see what we could come up with. I ran a poetry improvisation session with some of our group again, using a multitrack recorder so I could capture each voice on a separate channel. That resulted in some pieces like ‘Everything Changes‘, and we started to explore different ways of spontaneously building a poem together. I used some improvisation in the workshops for ‘Lost Voices‘, a collective poetry performance I was producing at the time. And then in my final radio show for SheffieldLive, Adele Geraghty and Sarah Thomasin joined me for a couple of structured poetry improvisations I’d devised, which produced ‘Are You My Friend?‘.

I’m now drawing on these experiences for a poetry improvisation session with Apples and Snakes on 28 February. We’ll be using a mixture of structured and freeform approaches to explore how poets can create spontaneously and collaboratively. If you’ve ever been to a creative writing workshop, you’ll know that people can come up with some amazing things in a five-minute exercise. To me that’s evidence that we can all improvise, but we often censor what we produce; we’re afraid to fail, wanting to check and edit before letting others see what we’ve written. Group improvisation is all about the process, finding the confidence in your inner voice, and opening yourself up to the voices of those around you.  It can be a powerful way of giving your creativity a kick and discovering new ideas. Some of what we produce might just be an interesting experiment, and some of it might be something we can work up into a recording or a performance.

If you’re up for something new and exciting, give it a go! You can find booking details on the Apples and Snakes website:

http://www.applesandsnakes.org/page/37/Power+Plant+Improvisation+for+Poets/1098

Workshop Title: Improvisation for Poets
When: Friday 28 February, 10am–3pm (with a break for lunch)
Where: Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Rd, London, EC1R 3GA
Tickets: FREE
Info: 020 8465 6154

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poetry-art collaborations and improvisation

Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

Several exciting things have started happening recently. I’ve got a couple of poems, ‘Frogger’ and ‘Eating Ghosts’, included in the Jawspring Poetry and Art Exhibition, which will be showing at The Village Hall Gallery in Wimbledon (SW19 4QD) 19–23 March. My poems have been sent to two artists, Siobhan Tarr and Phil Deed, so I look forward to seeing their responses, interpretations, or reactions. There are twenty-five artists taking part, and seventeen poets from Merton Poets, who work will all be shown during the exhbition. There’ll be a launch, with drinks and readings, at 7pm on World Poetry Day, Friday 21 March 2014.

Trevor Tomkins, by Alban Low

Trevor Tomkins, by Alban Low

Jawspring is organised by Alban Low, who has a line in producing some lively jazz sketches and album art. Check them out on his blog: artofjazz.blogspot.co.uk. We’re talking a about some live poetry-jazz sketching, and producing a film-poem, and I’m sure something is going to come of this. Here’s a short film he produced a couple of years ago, a walk through London streets…and here’s one of my favourite film-poems, ‘Door’ by Lawrence Bailey, based on a poem by Merton Poets’ own Patrick McManus.

On Friday 28 February I’ll be running a group poetry improvisation workshop as part of the Apples & Snakes Powerplant series. It’s FREE and runs from 10am till 3pm (with a break for lunch) at the Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road, London. Full details here. If you’d like to book a place, get in touch with Apples & Snakes on 020 8465 6154. We’ll be using a mixture of structured and freeform approaches to explore how poets can create spontaneously and collaboratively. If you’d like to hear an example of improvised work, check out this piece I produced for my radio show back in 2008, with Sarah Thomasin and Adele Geraghty. It’s called ‘Are You My Friend?’.

This can be a great way to shake out some fresh ideas, create work for recording and performance, and get some writing done that doesn’t involve sitting on your own staring at a screen for several hours. You should try it!

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