VERSeFest (Part 1: Wednesday night)

Did the people who had never been to a Voices of Venus show have any idea what they were in for? Did the people who had never been to a blUe mOnday show have any idea what they were in for?

If not, that's exactly what I had been hoping for VERSeFest: that I would look around and see someone in the audience being exposed to something entirely new. Although, I have to say that even I can't remember ever having been to a poetry show before where not one, but two of the performers removed clothing . . . but that's another story.

Wednesday night was sort of a girls night at VERSeFest - Voices of Venus, of course, is the city's only women-only open mike & series, and the University of Ottawa's blUe mOnday series, who hosted the second of the evening's events, featured Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair. Voices of Venus hosted an open mike (all erotica and all signed up in advance) and then a sexy set by Beth Anne Fischer, a new and very welcome addition to Ottawa's spoken word scene. She started out the set with a piece accompanied by a lovely flamenco guitar that made the whole poem seem somehow sun-dappled and sultry, encouraged the audience to get loud, did poems that were funny and funky and hot (check one of them out here), gave out chocolate, and wrapped up the set with a polished, fun, really well-choreographed... burlesque routine. Yup, she did a striptease, tassels and all, to Michael Buble's rendition of "Fever." There's a gorgeous picture, snapped by Charles Earl, here.

I've got to say the open mike was pretty stellar as well - the whole set damn near stolen by Luna Allison's theatrical, vulnerable, hypnotic piece, more dramatic monologue than straight up poetry performance. (See? Boundaries and borders getting shoved around all over the place!) But the other performances were also strong: Allison Armstrong's "All Woman" and Emily Kwissa's love poem to anger being standouts for me.

Going from the Voices of Venus show to the blUe mOnday was a brain-expander for me. The crossover that was going on between the different series was made obvious when the host, after their open mike, said something (possibly a bit too self-disparaging) like, "That was a really good open mike. I've seen a lot of those performers as features at other shows. Usually our open mikes are, well, they're kinda different. You know. And usually our open mikes aren't so . . . slam."

"Spoken word!" someone yelled from the audience, "there's no competition here!" (She meant that "slam" is a kind of poetry show which involves a competition, although it's frequently conflated with the style of poetry that most often makes it onto the stage at a slam. That terminology, and all the discussion that goes with it, and all of that stuff about poetry categorization, is getting clawed to the surface at VERSeFest, which is something else I'm happy about.)

"Well, you know what I mean," he said, kind of defensively. "Just - our open mike isn't exactly like that." Meaning, I assume, that their open mike has more people reading their work off pages, and probably more new poets. (I don't know, haven't been, should go.)

But what turned out to be the brain expander for me was listening to Christine McNair and Sandra Ridley, while being aware of the 'spoken word' people in the audience. Christine and Sandra are probably/would probably identify as (not that I want to run around slapping categories on people) 'page' poets. But as I listened to their readings, I started hearing how some of the wordplay is the same. Repetition to create a rhythm and to punctuate. Breaking or twisting a word in the middle to bring extra meaning out of it or to make it sing. 'Team pieces," even, since the two poets joined forces a couple of times to read certain sections of their poems in counterpoint. They both break syntax and juxtapose unlikely ideas and words, allow images and ideas to be suggested at rather than given, and put the listener in the place of building her own linkages and relationships to the poems, but (especially with the open mike bridging between their work and Beth Anne's spoken word) I couldn't help but feel a strong sense of continuity.

Both Christine and Sandra set a whole different rhythm to the night. Quieter, yes: from poems designed to get a round of applause at the end we had moved to a sense of sequence, a sense that it was okay not to clap (although people did, sometimes, for some poems.) It felt we were listening on a longer timeframe (and in fact, Sandra only read two long poems, both of which gave us - and her -  time to stretch out and relax into their flow: a meditative way to wrap up the night.

Confession

Is it wrong to be jealous of Sean Moreland?

I made it across town last night for the Dusty Owl reading at the Carleton Tavern (the new locale, at the moment, since Swizzles had been proving a little unreliable in the being-there-and-opening-the-doors department.) Call Me Katie were there for one of their regular Dusty Owl gigs, with a lot of new material and a collection of fans to fill up the upstairs room. And then Sean got up to read.

Yeah. Jealous. Is that so wrong? He's got the perfect poetry reading voice, and (when he needs to) he stretches and squishes it around like a slightly elastic, pliable substance under the pressure of the words he's pronouncing. I like the sound of Sean's stuff, I like the rolling repetitions of sounds and the dreamlike way the images are suspended. I like that he writes what I would have to call 'horror poetry' - creepily insidious and disturbing even while it's elegant. (The poem 'Alma Mater' was a mesmerizing exploration of the horrific aspects of the feminine. I want to hear it more.) He's also free to do a fairly straightforward narrative prose line (still with that ear for sound, though) or to break words and images down and stretch them around as he reads - both figuratively and literally.

Sean does this stuff so well I'm tempted to throw my hands up and just leave this writing thing to the experts. Except that he also makes me listen to my own words as they come out just that little bit more carefully. And he does make it seem like so much (brainy) fun.

Also, on the verge of VERSeFest, listening to Sean reminds me how much I'm looking forward to the cross-fertilization of the 'performance' and 'page' poets that VERSeFest will (hopefully) engender. Can we get rid of those distinctions please? They're so weighted. Depending on what side of the 'line' you're on, they're value judgements and that's just plain wrong. Sean Moreland is a performer. You can tell he thinks about how the poem is going to sound, not just as he's reading it but as he was writing it. He knows where he's going to drag a consonant out, twist a vowel to get a separate shade of meaning. He's thought about this stuff. Forget this 'page'/'stage' distinction-based-on-content stuff, there are poets that focus on how their poetry is going to sound and then there are poets that don't. But you know? Most of the poets that I enjoy do. Gonna be fun to hear them all in one place for once.

VERSeFest kicks off Tuesday!

Hard to miss the buzz about VERSeFest lately. Check out their website: I'm definitely booking off some time next week to get out and see what I can! This weekend is packed with pre-Fest events, and then the official kickoff happens at Arts Court on the 8th with Ian Keteku, David McGimpsey, Brad Morden and Craig Poile. . .  and it all just goes from there.

I also have to join the rest of town to say congratulations to Pearl Pirie for the Robert Kroetsch Award win!

Ottawa, Ottawa, it's a poetry sort of town. Even if the people at Metro were a little unplugged (and it was funny to watch the indignation fly. Hey, Metro is a massive cheesenews conglomerate. Not that surprising they don't know what's going on in poetry (and that they called VERSeFest the city's "first ever poetry festival.") Really, if you're not involved with the poets, you don't know what's going on in local poetry. . . It IS kind of a niche market.

Translating Talk

Now this is something that has interested me before: the Literary Translators' Association of Canada is hosting a talk on March 3rd on "Translating the Spoken Word" in The Book of Negroes.

It fascinates me because so much rests on what characters say in a story, and what they say is so dictated by the language, the time, and the culture that they live in. It's vitally important (as came up in an Ottawa Storytellers meeting I was at last night) that the words of the characters - and their diction, and their idiom - serve the story and convey more than just what they're saying. And in translation that becomes a whole separate challenge.

I remember, while rereading Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, years back, suddenly becoming aware of his (frankly brilliant) translator, William Weaver. It was because I was reading along in a passage where the characters were engaged in a funny, witty, snappy bunch of dialogue, and I noticed ... a bit of slang, or a reference to something in pop culture, that had seemed completely natural to me. Until I remembered that the whole passage had originally been in Italian. The novel is set in Italy. The characters are undeniably - essentially - Italian. And I caught myself thinking, "what the hell did Weaver have to go through, if this is not an idiom in Italian, to find an idiom that would make sense in English and still fit the characters?"

Since then, I've been, in a sidelong kind of way, really interested in the question of translation. I remember talking to Marie Bilodeau on Literary Landscapes a year or so ago: she is a native French speaker who didn't really speak English until adulthood, and who now writes fantasy and science fiction novels - in English. And she told me that she wouldn't translate her own work into French, and isn't sure if she's got a 'voice' in French.

It's fascinating. I don't, and can't, translate. But I think I'd like to catch this talk.

Literary Landscape tonight!

So, tonight I'm breaking from the usual trend of talking to someone about an upcoming book launch or reading or what have you: I read Pearl Pirie's post on poetry and performance on her blog, and thought, yup, that's something I think I want to talk to Pearl about on the show! Check out the post, and then tune in tonight at 6:30 (CKCUfm, 93.1)!

(And, after the show, I'll try and post the audio here in case you miss it.)

Oscar Wilde? Bollywood? WTF?

This weekend a friend and I got to go see Plosive Productions' The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gladstone. I have had a bit of a soft spot for the play since I was a teenager (when, by way of illustrating something in the middle of an after-dinner conversation, my dad once got me to read through the Lady Bracknell interrogation scene with him. Something to do with his wondering how I would decide to deliver the line "A ... handbag?!?")

It's a terribly clever script, of course, packed with so many one-liners and quotes and aphorisms and tight little reversals and verbal fireworks that you're almost certain to get a laugh out of at least a tenth of them, no matter what you do. After that tenth, the rest of the laughs have to do with how good your actors are. And this production had some solid actors - leading the pack were Stewart Matthews as Jack and Garrett Quirk (what a terrific name, especially for this show) as Algy.

But - but - oh, I can't go any further into the show, really, without addressing the looming, unavoidable thing that's breathing down my neck. I have to get this out of the way. For some reason, God knows why, the director (David Whitely) decided to set the play in British India. And in the 1920's, which is sort of peripheral. Okay. . . fine, upperclass twits are upperclass twits wherever - and whenever - you go in the Empire. Global search and replace London to Calcutta, Shropshire to the Punjab, Victoria Station to Howrah Station, etc. There's an extensive glossary in the program to explain all of the replacements, and I have to be impressed at the research that went into it: looking up a Calcutta cultural equivalent of "the Empire Theatre" or "Willis'."

But I mentioned to my friend, going into the theatre, that I was really curious to figure out why they had decided to do that. As it turned out, the setting didn't change anything, really. The characters are all the same, the story rattles along as archly and cleverly as ever. Except that it was set in India, and the servants popping in and out were Indian. Oh, and then every so often they parachuted in an inexplicable sitar player (Sheldon Heard). Only in the second half: at one point he comes out and plays for a minute or so, when the tea trays come out and Gwendolen and Cecily are being frosty. Then he abruptly stops playing and scurries off stage, presumably because he senses a fight brewing between the two women, although it's not that clear. Then at another point, the lights go dim on the side of the stage where the action is taking place and for no discernible reason he comes out, settles down, and plays while Henna Kaur Sodhi, playing the servant Merriman, performs an Indian classical dance. Don't get me wrong, she was beautiful to watch and an excellent dancer. But what was she doing in the middle of the scene? When the dance was finished, they walked off, the lights went up, and Algy and Jack were still sitting in the garden eating muffins.

Disconcerting though the slight stabs at "Indian-ness" were, the crowning silliness came at the end, when after everything's come to its frothy conclusion, the servants came back out with a bunch of colourful scarves, the music came up, and my friend nudged me. "They're not going to do a Bollywood number, are they?" she asked. I didn't say anything. We both knew the answer. And they did. A slightly haphazard and rather white Bollywood dance number, complete with one of the actors lip-synching some of the vocals, and Lady Bracknell doing hip shimmies.

It was jarring, it was weird, and it came close to driving the entirety of the rest of the play out of our heads. And it went on just that bit too long, with the actors dancing around and clapping in time and waving their scarves around.

It occurred to me what the reasoning might have been: In this day and age, where do you find a romantic comedy that hinges on social standing but in Bollywood? Yup, The Importance of Being Earnest is a great plot for a Bollywood movie, a la Bride and Prejudice. But it seems to me that if you're going to do that, you should go all the way. Get an Indian cast, get someone to write you a couple of catchy tunes, and reimagine the play. The way this turned out, it's like someone had the idea, but then had to invent ways to fit the India theme in so the Bollywood dance number at the end would have had some setup. It didn't work.

Which is a shame, because there was some solid acting, as I said. Stewart Matthews was a lot of fun as Jack - and his timing, especially paired with Garrett Quirk as Algy, was really impressive. He's a really good comic actor, and the two of them pulled off, physically, the same sort of quick, clever wit as is in the dialogue. And Quirk's characterization of Algy was great - he was a completely disarming insouciant rake, and someone ought to register his devilish smile as a deadly weapon (which he deployed knowingly.) In the first half he spoke too fast at times, tripping himself up and burying some of the dialogue, but he settled into it in the second half.

Bronwyn Steinberg, as Cecily, was adorably bubbly, and her scene with Algy, where she explains to him that in her diary they've been engaged for months, was great. I thought Katie Bunting's Gwendolen was a little severe at first, but got used to her by the end of the play. Kel Parsons' Lady Bracknell wasn't quite the force of nature she could have been - some of her great lines ("To lose one parent..." for example) would have benefitted from a pause, or a reaction. Something to set them up before delivery.

But as we walked out, my friend said, "I can't remember the play now. All I can remember is that Bollywood bit."

You know you're hooked when...

The other night I had a fairly vivid dream about retelling Frederik Pohl's classic SF story 'The Day After The Day The Martians Came' at Once Upon a Slam. It's strange, because so far I haven't really been able to picture telling a literary story. I know that people do it, but somehow it just didn't seem like the kind of thing I could do. I couldn't really imagine doing anything but personal stories.

But then on Saturday night I was talking to my friend Simon - who wanted to be at the last story slam but couldn't - and somehow the subject came up of telling a Lovecraft story. I think it was because the last slam's Sacrificial Teller was Marie Bilodeau, and she did a story inspired by 'The Shunned House.' And it suddenly struck me that you could do some Lovecraft stories in five minutes... you'd just have to pick your story. Simon hadn't really realized that you could tell a literary story - someone else's work - and I told him yeah, sure, you could do any kind of story: folk tales, ghost stories, literary stories... you could even do 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' if you thought you could get it into five minutes...

And I think I'd been thinking along those lines. Anyway, I woke up the other morning out of a dream in which I was at the slam, ready to get up, and running the "Martian jokes" that are central to Pohl's story through in my head. Reminding myself that I didn't need to remember all of them as long as I remembered enough. Trying to figure out how to deliver the zinger of a last line.

Ruthanne, who runs the slam, will probably be pretty pleased about this.

She's created a monster.