When Poetry meets Dance

I started Possible Worlds rehearsal this week by shutting myself in a room with the dance troupe. This is risky business, as I would have to be one of the clumsiest people around – a few weeks ago I fell down the stairs, a few weeks before that I gave myself a black eye with the kitchen cupboard (yes that actually happens!). So I get a bit nervous around the dancers though I live in hope that some part of them will rub off on me.

The idea is that at some points in time during the performance of this poem, my movement will mirror the dancers’ movement. Given my penchant for falling down, this is a real challenge for me. So we shut ourselves away, I practiced the art of letting go, and we ran through with the words and choreography together as we figured out the places where I would reflect their movement and how to get me doing it in a way that looks natural to the poem. It’s going to take a bit of rehearsal for me to get this one down without holding back, but once I get it this is going to be such an awesome piece to perform. I am so excited about working with these dancers – they really work in with the other mediums so everything is fully melded into one unified experience. I love watching them turning our words and emotion into body language using the physical relationships between bodies. Not only is it beautiful, but it’s so emotive, it teaches you something about what the words mean to others.   

The week before, Zanni and I hid away in our respective corners writing about ‘the burial of management’, that time in life when we feel the need to throw our inhibitions out the window for a while. After half an hour of writing, we came back together to find we had written two halves that fitted perfectly together and our revolution poem was born.

This week, Christian and I turned it into a script and started to work out the way the poem will move on stage. That’s right – Zanni and I wrote it, but Christian and I will perform it. All of the dancers, poets and musicians crowded into one of the larger rooms. Christian and I performed the poem over and over with feedback from everyone as we worked on getting our tone right and John worked on getting the music right. This is a tricky piece because it is neither dark nor light, but a complex mix between the two, which the subjects ultimately embrace as a necessary part of their existence. What they are throwing off, is the futility of trying to keep themselves hidden in niceties. So it is resentful, it is longing, it is raw but at the same time it is hopeful, it is positive, it is freed.  Fabulous to finish the day on the high note of getting such a complex poem worked out. The next step is to add the choreography to the piece. But that’s for next week!

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Miriam Barr has been performing with The Literatti since its inception. She was creative director from 2007 – 2010 and has performed her poetry from Whangarei to Dunedin, including taking out the top honour in the 2007 Poetry Idol slam and performing at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Bali. Her poetry has been published in such places as Landfall, JAAM, Poetry NZ, Black Mail Press and Enamel. She is also part of the coordinating team for Poetry Live, a weekly open-mic poetry event in Central Auckland and one of the creative writing tutors at Toi Ora. By day she works for Like Minds, Like Mine at Mind and Body Consultants, to reduce the stigma and discrimination associated with mental health problems.

more information at www.theliteratti.com