the other room 21

Full disclosure before we begin. Of the performers at this night I know both Richard Barrett who is one of the co-organisers of Counting Backwards with me, and Louise Woodcock with whom I share studio space and who has performed at Counting Backwards.

The Other Room 21 had an unfortunately reduced audience due to the weather. Although they did better than Counting Backwards which I co-organise the following day.

They were also reduced by Ken Edwards. But the returning Richard Barrett was a more than capable replacement.

Richard joined Neil Addison reading from his soon to be released Apocapulco and Louise Woodcock with a new variant of her eating words performance that I've seen a couple of times. Louise herself was a replacement for Matt Wand.

Throughout the evening between, before and after the performers a series of photographs by Craig Marchington were projected on screen. I really liked a lot of the images. There was a composed enigmatic stillness about many of them that defamiliarised places I know quite well. Manchester was rendered almost alien.

The performances opened with Richard reading from recent sequences. He was much more comfortable than he appeared the last time he read at The Other Room. This helped his communication with the audience which in turn helped the poems lift off the page.

Later in this review after I discuss Louise's performance I have some potentially quite harsh comments about innovative poetry in performance. These apply to varying degrees to both the readers at The Other Room, to Richard Parker who read at Counting Backwards, and more widely to the majority of innovative poets I have seen perform.

I hope that these comments will not be taken as an attack on these poets or to suggest that they shouldn't perform or that I have a prescription for how they 'ought' to perform. They certainly shouldn't be taken to mean that I don't like the work of the poets in question.

Richard Barrett seems to have developed a solution to one of the problems I identify later on. This is the failure of poets to emulate the defamiliarisations and ruptures of their poetry on the page. His solution is the breaking of sentences into smaller separate units.

This has the effect of creating dual readings. There are the two apparently incomplete sentences that are read out. And there is the sentence the listener retrospectively reassembles even as the reading continues. Whether this always matches with breaks on the page - for instance across lines - isn't clear without reading the text at the same time. It may be in some cases that it is not always apparent where sentences have been broken in this way. Or even that wholly discrete units are brought together by listeners.

I believe this also makes the audience more alert to the multiplicity of tones and 'voices' in the poetry. Having previous performances to compare with I think this was one of the better I've seen Richard deliver.

Neil Addison's poetry was less familiar to me and I hadn't seen him perform previously. My superficial initial impression was of a mass of allusions, references, near-puns and wordplay. This made the poetry reasonably easily digestible in the sense that you could simply experience it and assemble fragments of meaning without frustration.

Having read some of the work on the page I'm uncertain whether this facility is better served in print or in performance. There is however something I can't really identify that I have reservations about. I think it's a kind of pulling of punches, a smoothing out of the surface which seems to apply to both the words on the page and the performance.

Please remember this is a personal opinion. Your mileage may vary. Please share your disagreement in the comments.

Like many poets (innovative or otherwise) in performance I found a lack of nuance and dynamic in the reading. Which may well be a deliberate choice - and I'm not advocating a crowd-pleasing poetry-slam/rock n roll kind of approach. On the contrary I'm interested in the work being more prominent than some persona the performer wishes to project.

But this lack of colour means that the poetry gets lost. Only the puns and jokes get through. Or any unpleasantly visceral images as well if there are any. For what it's worth I think there are some more interesting things going on in Neil's poetry but they tended to be flattened out.

Louise Woodcock ended the first half with a new variant on her eating words performance. In simplified outline this involves Louise sitting at a table set for dinner reading quietly from a number of books. These usually include a copy of the Bible and a old book of stories for girls. She will then tear out a page or part of a page and put it on her plate, then using knife and fork isolate a word or series of words and eat them.

There was a major difference to the dynamic this time that I want to explore through some specific contrasts. This will probably be at some length as these thoughts led to me reflecting - again - on the apparent lack of consideration of performance by most innovative poets I've seen.

The major difference in dynamic was that there were two performers this time. Louise sat opposite Scott Thurston and both read silently from, and ate from books.

The most obvious contrast for me was the nature of the performance. When Louise has performed the piece previously there has been a strong ritual element to the performance. It is a personal ritual between Louise and the books. This places the audience in a slightly uncomfortable position where they are uncertain quite what their role is or how they should respond. With a second performer there are suddenly questions about the performance - how much of it is or should be acting, what the nature of that acting is, and the role of the audience. We are much more accustomed to watching people act. Acting and people's relative familiarity with how the relationship between them and the performers works serves to erect a kind of barrier. My feeling is that the performance is more affecting and troubling when it's just one person.

Another contrast was the set-up with the two performers facing each other. This is quite unlike the set-up previously which has consciously echoed Da Vinci's Last Supper. This plays on religious associations and gives life to a static image. To my mind it also opens the performance to a relationship with the whole space. But with the performers facing one another we have a different more domestic dynamic. A dynamic that seems to turn its back on the rest of the space.

There is also an obvious durational element to the performance. I'm undecided how the dynamic of two performers affected this. I don't think it made the time feel either longer or shorter. At least for me. But with the absence of the ritual aspects mentioned previously perhaps making the audience less participants in the piece than spectators the piece may have been less imaginatively engaging, and may have made the time seem to drag. Certainly some people seemed to find it an intolerable bore and wandered off to talk about something else and complain among themselves about it.

I think it was a worthwhile experiment, and it's good to see a performer considering ways to develop a piece. I found it fascinating and it sparked a lot of reflection about performance.

Which brings me to the bit of my review that I'm afraid is probably going piss off a few people. But to repeat myself this is not an attack on particular poets, it's certainly not an attack on their poetry. It doesn't mean I don't like their work, and it doesn't mean I think innovative poetry shouldn't be performed.

I'm also aware that I'm repeating some things I've said previously.

For me there is a real deficit in the way many innovative poets perform their work. It lies in a failure to reflect the difference between work on the page and work in performance.

I should admit here to a degree of discomfort with completed (art) work of any kind. Writing and painting, but also recorded music all give me this problem. There's a deadness and lack of dynamism that place a barrier between you and the work.

Innovative poetry takes steps to counter this deadness on the page. In performance very often it seems innovative poets believe that reading the poem is sufficient to overcome any potential deadness and to communicate with an audience.

Either that or perhaps some feel that performance is an irrelevance or imposition. In which case why bother reading?

But reading or performing a poem to an audience is very different from people reading a poem on the page.

Spatially the arrangement of text on a page is quite different from a person standing in a room reading or reciting from memory. Especially as the majority of the audience will not be looking at the text as it appears on the page.

Temporally the poem exists while it is being read. The audience unlike readers can't re-read sections, go back and compare sections or different poems. or put the book down. A performance is a linear and obviously durational experience.

Sonically the audience become more aware of rhythm, of any echoes or rhymes of words that might emerge. They also become more aware of the performers accent, phrasing, pronunciation etc. I am aware that this - and especially the potential for audiences to perhaps hear a reading by the author as a 'correct' or definitive reading - is a reason why some poets are not fond of performance. I can also see it being a reason why poets would seek to expunge personality from readings.

There is also a relationship between audience reaction and the performer that simply isn't there on the page.

These spatial, temporal, sonic and interpersonal dynamics are a part of performance whether poets like it or not. Other performers - actors, dancers, musicians, performance artists have to consider some or all of these dynamics as part of their practice.

I am not arguing that innovative poets should be ingratiating or outgoing, or that they should wear costumes or have complicated staging, or that they should act or project a persona. What I am arguing is that too many poets just turn up and read their poems out loud. This shows no consideration for the poems and it shows no consideration of the audience.

Going back to Louise's performance, what has worked for me in the past is that fact that when she performs on her own there is an element of ritual. I don't believe this would be the same if she just turned up and ate some words out of a book. Superficially it seems to be the same thing. The difference though is the quality of attention that she brings to the task in hand. The act of eating the words is important. The spatial and temporal aspects of the performance have been considered.

Stanislavski talked about similar things in the chapter Concentration of Attention and elsewhere in An Actor Prepares. For me there is a world of difference between a performer who has found a point of concentration and purpose in the actions they are carrying out, and one who is superficially doing the same thing.

Most poets I have seen reading have no quality of attention or focus, no understanding of the dynamics of performance. They just turn up and read. I really don't understand why innovative poets who have evidently thought about their words, their spatial arrangement and so forth should have this blind-spot about performance.