Category Archives: Performances

Crossing Voices at Ca’Foscari University, Venice

Crossing Voices 7-5-2014 Banner FINITO

In May 2014 co-organised and participated in Crossing Voices at Ca’Foscari, University of Venice, a three-day workshop and collaborative performance by 3 UK and 3 Italian poets.

For my piece, we played around with ink and stamps on clear acetate to produce negatives, which I then cut up and collaged to make cyanotypes. We then collaboratively performed these, using them as graphic scores for sound poetry. The source text we started with was a Venetian folk-song called ‘Il ritmo dei battipali’.

Work in progress: playing with pen, ink, brushes and stamps on acetate.

Photo by Steven Fowler

Photo by Steven Fowler

A few examples of the finished cyanotypes:
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And a video giving a flavour of all the workshops and performances, made by Ariadne Radi Cor:

Crossing Voices – 5th / 7th May 2014 from Ariadne Radi Cor on Vimeo.

Grass Routes

A guided walk in Peckham, 5th-6th October 2013. Four poets (Camilla Nelson, Mendoza, Edmund Hardy and me) led short walks which explored the natural, social and architectural history of a few streets.

Photo by Amy Cutler

Photo by Amy Cutler

My walk centred on the Pioneer Health Centre, aka The Peckham Experiment, an interwar experiment in community health, self-organisation and what might today be called citizen science. The glass and concrete building is still there, but it’s been turned into private flats.

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Enemies/Camarade Collaborations

SJ Fowler has been an incredibly prolific organiser of poetry events and collaborations over the last few years under the ‘Enemies’ and ‘Camarade’ banners. I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with four great poets for his events, at the Rich Mix with Ghazal Mosadeq in 2011, at the Rich Mix again in February 2013 with Christodoulos Makris, at the Arnolfini in Bristol in April with David Berridge, and most recently back at the Rich Mix with Edmund Hardy at the back end of 2013.

Liverpool Biennial

Bulwer-hands

In 1644 John Bulwer published Chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand, one of the first analyses of the rhetorical power of hand gestures.

Using the ‘Alphabet of naturall expressions’ that Bulwer included in his Chirologia, I sourced a series of gestures by feeding Bulwer’s Latin names through a Youtube search. I then tried to explain in words how to perform these new gestures to Sally Davies and recorded the results. The instructional passages are intercut with reflections on these attempts recorded in a domestic setting.

This work was performed at Mercy’s Electronic Voice Phenomena weekend at the Liverpool Biennial 2012. Excerpt below:

For the rest, see my post on the Vox Lab website.

Charter of the Forest: Two Way Radio Guided Tour

walkie talkie 3 Photo: James E Smith.

This performance and guided walk was devised in collaboration with Townley & Bradby, for the Lincoln Art Programme 2011.

We communicated remotely with groups of participants via walkie talkies, giving out instructions and information, some of it unreliable, and asking people to complete tasks and speak back to the radio. Through this disembodied communication, taking place deep in the thickets, we explored the imaginative spaces of woods and forests.

Voiceworks

Voiceworks is a project by Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre and the Composition Department at Guildhall School of Music & Drama which explores the collaborative possibilities of making new works for voice.

I’m currently part of the Voiceworks Team, administrating the website and developing new online resources for the project.

For two years I took part in the Voiceworks project as a writer, working with composers and singers from the Guildhall.

2010/11 Suzanne’s Secret II: Bechstein-Kultur-Film Version, collaboration with Ben Graves, Donna Lennard and Daniel Rudge.

2009/10 Weathering, collaboration with Patrick Brennan and Robert Elibay-Hartog.