Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 1, April 2017

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Performance Poetry:

Auto-Ethnography and Engagement As Social Activist Theater

 

By

 

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon.

Temple University

 

 Abstract:

 

Poetic Ethnographies are “poetic testimonials”—narratives, in various styles and forms telling the story of particular groups of people. Poetic Ethnographers and Performance Poets remember, contextualize and relay contemporary, near-past, remote-past and historic moments, characters and events in an easy, accessible way for a wider “spoken word”, socially-conscious theater and performance arts audience.

Along with first person testimonials (that have become all the rave in post modern, experimental theater) “Poetic Ethnography” and Performance Poetry are genres of “performance art” that are vying for acceptance in theaters and theater studies departments across the country. Drawing on old world/First World griot/jelli storytelling traditions, call-and-response, rhyme, meter and oral prescription, “poetry: as performance”, (like it’s cousins Storytelling, Rap and Hip Hop) is steadily increasing in popularity--especially among marginalized groups and social activists. By all estimates, Performance Poetry is becoming the new brand of theater of engagement.

Introduction:

As a hybrid genre of African American Theater, poetic ethnographies go a long way to combat the racial framing of marginalized groups and the oftentimes, negative perception of complex positionalities (i.e. race, class and gender) as pathological built on the theatricality of constructed authenticity coupled with ethnodrama, (Frances A. Maher and Mary Kay Tetreault, 1993). These kinds of first-person narratives are folk driven and help to crystallize our national attention to urban issues and city living.

The forms and techniques of this kind of Guerrilla Theater appeal to most cultural enthusiasts and can be learned by all. But, while everyone may try to write performance poetry, successful arbiters of these kinds of expressions are those individuals that spend countless hours working to perfect their craft writing, reading the work of other poet/performance artists, rehearsing and who, of course, have something worthwhile to say. This paper discusses the development of performance poetry as Theater of Engagement and the efficacy of poet/performers who build community through their performance work.

Historical Overview:

According to Carter G. Woodson, we are historically taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and Teuton and to despise the African. (Carter G. Woodson, 2005:1) By its very nature then, most disciplines in the academy calcify and replicate cultural imperialism and hegemony. “Although African Americans are representatives of the African race in America” (K. Anthony Appiah, 1997: 13) in the academy, Afrocentric pedagogy and African American performance and communication strategies are often overlooked or discounted in literature, theater and performance studies.

There is evidence that Performance Poetry has a rich and lengthy trajectory in communities of color. The oldest examples of Performance Poetry can be found in ancient Egypt or Kemet in the Fifth Dynasty (from 2494 to 2345 BC.) in the pyramid texts, Instructions In Wisdom.  According to Miriam Lichtheim, there was always an aura of magic that surrounded written and spoken performance, these texts were written to be read aloud or, in other words, performed.[i] (Miriam Lichtheim, 1975).

But not just in ancient Kemet, in fact, Performance Poets have a long and rich trajectory throughout the African continent, as well. As early as 1352, after a visit to Mali, a North African traveler from Morocco wrote one of the first descriptive portraiture of a West African Griot or jelli. (Hamdun and King, 1975: 34-45; Thomas A. Hale, 2007: 1) According to Thomas Hale, these accounts “provides evidence that the oral tradition maintained by these bards [in West Africa] is at least seven centuries old”[ii] (Thomas A. Hale, 2007: 1)

Precursor to today’s Performance Poets and spoken word artists in the Americas, “African historian or village storytellers” functioned as Griot, as keepers of the history. (Time, Anon., October 19,1992)  Drawing on Old world/First World griot/jelli storytelling traditions such as call-and-response, rhyme, meter and oral prescription, “poetry: as performance” is cousin to the more contemporary forms of cultural performance and rhetoric such as Storytelling, Rap and Hip Hop.

“[I]n the Black community, Performance is considered both high and low art” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2011: 197).  “[W}henever recitation gave way to theatricality and ritualized technique, that was surely an early example of poetry in performance” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2011: 197).  Distinctive because of their socially conscious content, “early African American verse situated socially significant events at the center of its artistic endeavor” (Karla F. C. Holloway, 1995: 112). 

Those performances often happened outside of traditional theater spaces-- in churches, salons, living rooms, storefronts, lodges and benevolent societies (Williams-Witherspoon, 2011: 197). Some of those earliest African American poets who moved into performance included Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1730-1821), Phyllis Wheatley (May 8, 1753 – December 5, 1784), Jupitor Hammon (1711-1806), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)[iii], Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)[iv] and, of course, Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906) (Williams-Witherspoon, 2011: 197-99).

In the 1920’s, poets like James Weldon Johnson would purposely move beyond “dialect poetry” and performance; but still incorporated African American cultural expressions, as with his seminal work of seven poetic sermons called God’s Trombones (1927). When coffeehouse “readings” began to emerge in the 1950’s into the 1960’s as part of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), African American Performance Poetry returned to a celebration of culturally specific language items and authentically colorful modes of expression.

First, in the 1950’s and 60’s with the Beat Poets, Jack Keurac, Ted Joans, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka; then in the late 60’s and 70’s with the Last Poets, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez and Etheridge Knight, Performance Poetry came of age during those turbulent times. As activists/artists who contributed to the Civil Rights Movement, Performance Poetry was the direct precursor to Rap and Hip Hop in 1979  (Sugar Hill Gang, Rappers Delight (Michael Eric Dyson, 1993: 3). But Poetry as Theater didn’t make its legitimate entre onto the scene until the success of Ntozoke Shange’s for colored girls who’ve considered suicide when the rainbow Is enough in 1974.

Efficacy:

Performance Poets make their artistic productions authentic by giving the cultural products they produce their particular brand of truth. In performance, that truth translates into passion and passion into theatricality. According to Richard Schechner, (the father of performance studies) most of us live betwixt and between the duality of acceptance and rebellion. As a genre of performance, like Rap and Hip Hop, Performance Poetry appeals “to the avante garde, the marginal, the offbeat, the minoritarian, the subversive, the twisted, the queer, people of color and the formally colonized.” (Richard Schechner, 2002: 3)

Through rhyme, rhythm, musicality and poetic verse, Performance Poets “mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body; and tell stories.” (Schechner: 22) While the written word is one element of the communicative events, these events are not simply made up of the recitation of words. Rather, Performance Poetry relies on words--meant to be performed –and they incorporate several interlocking elements.

Modality:

Modality means the particular mode in which something exists or is expressed. Likewise, modality references the form and sensory perceptions that a particular communicative event employs or operates within. Just as in traditional theater, there are seven elements of Performance Poetry:

 

·       Performer

·       Audience

·       Producer/director

·       Poet

·       Purpose

·       Point of view &

·       Environment.

 

In this model, under the performance element Environment, that aspect also includes:

 

·       spectacle,

·       stage,

·       set design,

·       costumes,

·       lighting and

·       sound.

 

Language:

If words are merely signs that represent other things, in Performance Poetry. it is through Nommo—the activization of “the word”---through  which sound is transformed into images, symbolism, metaphor, shape, color, meaning and nuance. (Janheinz Jahn, 1989)

Poetry, at its best, (according to Aristotle) should combine

·       Imitation

·       Harmony &

·       Rhythm (Aristotle, 1961)

 

Language and word choice becomes the most important component in carrying out dramatic imitation. Speakers, through intent and intonation, endow language with meaning. Language is, thus, infused with meaning thanks to and because of our field of experience. Language, then, is an abstraction of our experiences.

If “Rap is a product of Black culture,” as Karla F. C. Holloway suggests, then like Rap, in Performance Poetry, “the linguistic acrobatics of the best rappers is like versified scat and its innovative phrasing resembles jazz” (Karla F. C. Holloway, 1995: 105-6). Much like Rap and Hip Hop products, improvisation is part and parcel of Performance Poetry. Likewise, Performance Poetry readily employs African American language strategies (i.e. repetition, call and response, circumlocution, “the dozens”, etc.) along with Ebonics.

Ebonics (a phrase coined in the 1970’s to refer to African American language) is used, as in literature and other forms of African American cultural expressions, as an element of cultural identity and group membership (Robert Williams, 1973; Molefi Asante, 1990, 2010; Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, 1992; Rosina Lippi-Green, 1997; Lisa J. Green, 2002; Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, 2006). In 1975, Robert Williams defined Ebonics (taken from the artistic merging of the two terms Ebony and Phonics) as “the linguistic and paralinguistic features, which on a concentric continuum represents the communicative competence of the West African, Caribbean and United States …descendents of  [enslaved] African origin.” Williams 1975: VI)

According to scholars like Anthony Appiah, African retentions or “survivals” of  “mainly Dahomeyan, Yoruba and Kongo cosmology, ritual and aesthetics” have informed much of our worldview, philosophy and communicative expressions in the Americas. (Anthony K. Appiah, 1997: 14) Developing directly out of the Black experience, Carter G. Woodson suggests that African Americans were gifted with certain attributes. “It is by the development of these gifts that every race must justify its right to exist” (Carter G. Woodson, 1933/2005: 8). Or as Cheikh Anta Diop wrote, “Black African culture set for the whole world an example of extraordinary vitality and vigor” through it’s storytelling, music and performance. (Cheikh Anta Diop, 1978: 5).

According to Foucault, language use has to be considered in relation to who is allowed to speak and, therefore, who is heard.  With that in mind, early African American language scholars like Williams and others recognized that the language of African Americans was not simply Black English; but rather, a contact language that had developed as a direct result of enslavement with identifiable semantics, syntax, phonetics and rules of grammar. Language and word choices are some of the most important features in Performance Poetry because “history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle” (Michel Foucault, 1984:10).

“Younger poets make language choices based on an intuitive understanding of these modes of discourse as vehicles for their ideas (Kirkland Jones, 1992: 149).  “Using ‘folk speech as adornment’ (Jones: 163) to color their literary thoughts and expressions, when the Ebonics or AAVE is successful…there is no such thing as “shocking or pejorative language.” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2011: 204). Just as in other forms of artistic expression like storytelling and dance, Performance Poetry necessitates poet/performers to utilize and draw from their own culturally derived expressive modes of discourse.

Form:

Tapping directly into cultural universals—experiences capture or crystallize invisible memory and “twice-lived’ actions. (Schechner, 2002: 22) As actors learning technique, for the poet/performer the meaning of “to be” can (through performance) more accurately is defined as “to be within”.

Much like the written form, Performance Poetry should have a recognizable beginning, middle and end (otherwise called BME). Depending upon the form the poetic text takes on the page, despite its BME, very often Performance Poetry also incorporates strategies of circumlocution, rhythm, circularity and repetition.

Sometimes there are language limitations. Each choreographed movement in Performance Poetry becomes its own projected reality. When we experience reality we experience the empirical world, the ideal world and then “the world of the Play/poem”. Becoming nothing AND fullness simultaneously, once movement is interjected into the performance, the poet/performer can also manipulate silence and stillness to raise the stakes of each dramatic moment.

“Invisible history”

Across the spectrum of African, Diasporian, and African American performance traditions, just as with Performance poetry, poetic ethnographers and African American playwrights mine the subconscious for suppressed experiences and evidence of an “invisible history” that requires audience/performer revelations (Nakajima, 1997, 5). Like traditional actors for stage, television and screen, Performance Poets employ a purposeful “doubling” of self. 

Sometimes taking on the roles of real-life “stake holders” in the community as characters (particularly with the development of poetic ethnographies), oftentimes these Performance Poets readily employ and are victims of a kind of  “Double-consciousness”—forcing these poet/performers to exist in a heightened state of inside/outside awareness as individuals/part of the community; and as speaker/audience.  This dual state of awareness keenly develops after years of research, writing, observation and critical reflection.

Stage, Space & Setting:

Walk in center and plant your feet. Make every movement purposeful. Performance Poets are adept at wrestling and claiming performative space. “A performance requires a physical, visible place” (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 55). “In narrative(s), space, in the geographical or topographical sense, cannot exist autonomously; it is contingent on the verbal signs that refer to it. (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 55)

In traditional theater, space might reference the kind and type of theater (proscenium, thrust, arena, or found space); set design, the physical space between audience and performer or the negative space that can be created on stage and manipulated for dramatic effect. The narrative space occupied by storytellers and Performance Poets is one-dimensional, Michael Issacharoff suggests,  “mediated by a single (verbal) channel”—that being, the speaker (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 55). In this space, the poet/performer must clearly delineate with words, gestures and the choreography of movement between “what can be perceived and what can not” (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 55)

Content:

Like word and image sculptors, Performance Poetry regularly employs diametrically opposed polar extremes-- to enliven and invigorate static text. In music, musicians employ a similar kind of ethos and improvisation. Performance Poets work to become adept at unpacking these ideas, deconstructing them, and then fusing together polar extremes, not just for theatricality, but because binaries are contextual and interdependent.

Authenticity:

Struggle equates authenticity. Authenticity can then be pulled on for replication and actualization in the performance space.  At times, careful and almost obsessive observation of the world is required for this level of reflection and reflexive expression.

Many Performance Poets perform auto-ethnographies, poetic texts about themselves interacting and reflecting on the world around them. Because you can’t trade passion for experience, the trick in the success and efficacy of many of these auto-ethnographic pieces is in capturing (with words) the feeling, the sensory experience and the locus of revelation or discovery in such a way that audience members mimetically experience or relate in a personal way to that recounted expression. Even in some of these very personal reflections, in those instances, Performance Poets work hard at crafting pieces that capture the experience or instant of a body with eyes “just wide opened”.

Transformational:

To “create” interiority, intersectionality and interconnectivity, Performance Poets often create a dialogue between themselves and their audiences by offering up early considerations of identity and sharing auto-ethnographies that get at questions as to who they are, how they came to be and what their experiences have been.[v] In Performance, Performance Poets explore sensation, construct and connect with sound and, sometimes, become nothing in order to “become” anything and everything.

In Performance Poetry and its hybrid “Spoken Word”, the necessitated “sharing” of ones inner musings and outward journey should own its point to a desire to feel alive and not a narcissistic desire for recognition The pleasure is in owning the performance for yourself rather than audience gratification.

There is a danger to this kind of auto-ethnographic narrative. The danger of the “single story” and the relentless pursuit of extreme experiences night after night in performance can lead to a “burning up, tearing open, fearlessly assuming other identities” (Tanya Calamoneri: 121). For some of us researching the “other” and taking on multiple roles and trajectories through performance is, as E. Ethelbert Miller says, “a deep-tissue massage”. (E. Ethelbert Miller, 2013) The risk, however, for all performers who regularly take on multiple identities is in “loosing oneself” or developing what amounts to an “intersectional headache” from “thinking too deeply” about the benefit and curse of multiple identities.

Social change and accountability

Starting from the specific to the universal (or vice versa) Performance Poets

 oscillate between sharing work about their “home-town landscape” and/or about their position as a citizen of the world. Combating racial framing and the marginalization of groups (race, class and gender) oftentimes Performance Poets employ first-person narratives in free verse and other poetic forms (villanelle, haiku, cinquain, sonnets, ballads, epistles etc.)  to help focus and crystallize our national attention on current events, historic moments and socio-political policy. Akin to griots and social historians (Thomas A. Hale, 2007), in these instances, performance poets operate as repositories of cultural knowledge—collecting and capturing the individual stories from communities in crisis that are battling erasure.

But theirs is not just an Insular nationalism. (Tanya Calamoneri: 64) Performance Poets regularly take on the responsibility of waging vocal battles against injustice, war, violence, political machines and public policies as the vanguard or voice of the people. Publically giving voice to counter the influence and effects of industrialization, capitalism, information disenfranchisement and techno-alienation, Performance Poets, by the very nature of performance and public persona aren’t relegated to the shadows; but rather, seek stages to “stage” critical community discussion as public discourse.

Unearthing many taboo and grotesque images.” (Tanya Calamoneri: 98) allows the poet/performer to mark and recreate a positionality within multiple positions. At times, the Performance Poets’ responsibility is to keep cultural memory intact—particularly in times like national mourning, as with 9’11, (September 11, 2001); national disaster, (like Katrina in 2005) and horrendous violence (like the kidnapping and victimization of a six-year-old schoolgirl in Philadelphia (2012). Similarly, in dance studies, the Japanese dance of taking the “horrific” and making art is called Hijikata or artistic crime. Hijikata Tatsumi defines “artistic crime” as the making of art out of the sometimes ugly mundane. (Tanya Calamoneri: 118) Tackling complex interpersonal and social issues like Sex, loss, torture, death—with concise words and minimal gestures, Performance Poetry texts crystallize and calcify all aspects of human interaction and our social lives, from the mundane to the extreme.[vi]

The Choreography of Movement:

Finding the movement and choreography of these spoken poetic ethnographies incorporates critical reflection, mapping word stimulus/body reflex and repetition. Using this technique, even the absence of physical movement becomes a movement and a useful tool in the combined poetic/dance vocabulary. Unlike pure dance vocabularies, choreographing performance poetry does not require lengthy beats or sustained movement. For the most part, because the choreography for any performance poem is mere accompaniment, the desired movement should operate as suggestion or an allusion to some larger image, memory or metaphor that the word (as poetic text) implies.

In Performance Poetry the choreographic language is rich with metaphor. Oftentimes, those metaphors are camouflaged so that Performance Poets must also be skilled at recognizing the complexity of multiple messaging in their work and then they must become adept at solving puzzles. 

In the African diaspora, “becoming” in performance is akin to “possession” concepts (as in Nandi culture, Nigerian Yoruba, Cuban Santeria and Haitian Vodun belief systems) or, as in Stanislavski’s notions of “becoming” in acting. For the performer/poet, “belief” is the conduit and “becoming” is the portal through which they must cross if the performance is to have meaning.

Like other aspects of identity, “Being” and “becoming”, creates yet another kind of “doubling”. Poet/performers believe that they are navigating a conscious double sense of place. In actuality, in these performances, becoming is a three-stage process. There is a pre-becoming stage, a liminal “becoming” space and then a post –“becoming” stage in which the performer has to physically “come down” or “come back” into themselves.[vii]

To perform, according to Richard Schechner actively involves:

·       Being

·       Doing

·       Showing doing, and

·       Explaining showing doing (Schechner, 2002: 22)

 

In truth, “[m]any performances belong to more than one category along the continuum.” (Richard Schechner, 2002: 2)

Once and for all, Spoken Word is NOT the same as Performance Poetry. Spoken Word artists are distinctly different—particularly those involved in slam competitions because typically they work within the prescribed “three (3) minute spits (or performances).  Logistically, those auditory performances are usually confined to free verse forms and, because of time constraints, eliminate most (if not all) opportunities to incorporate theatrical technique beyond the basics in those spoken word performances.

Unlike spoken word, Performance Poetry is akin to the theater of embodiment. Relying as much on impressive oratory skills as it likewise relies on movement and, as aforementioned, theater and dance vocabularies. Performance Poetry requires poet/performers to incorporate movement styles, movement vocabulary, mime and a style of body memory that, both, couples and goes beyond language. “[Q]uestions of embodiment, action, behavior, and agency are dealt with interculturally” recognizing that there is no “totally isolated group in America (save, perhaps some Amish sects) and differences between ethnic groups and cultures are often so “profound that no theory of performance is universal.” (Schechner: 2)

The key to choreographing Performance Poetry is to “Develop each word for your self and the audience will understand” (Mikami, 1993, Tanya Calamoneri: 101) As a “frozen bone that transcends gender”; in Performance Poetry (just as in theater and in dance) the body becomes a performative site and a vehicle of communication. In these performances, opposites become theatricalized.  [viii] Performers viewing “nothing” as the “container for something” create a temporal space where the Poem can become “anything.”

By coupling dance movement vocabularies with poetic text despite the sometimes “limitations of language” , a performance poem can still work and communicate meaning even if all of the language items or veiled metaphors are not necessarily understood by ALL audience members. Tied to and triggered by particular key words and phrases, the poet/performer programs a kind of body memory into their movement vocabulary, relying as much as they can on cultural universals that can be understood across cultures and linguistic competencies much like the blocking of scenes in theater text. 

In this way, while not all words or lines in a particular Performance Poetry text calls for a corresponding movement, those words or phrases that necessitate emphasis or rely heavily on imagery are punctuated and layered through the choreography of movement A kind of phenomenology, in these instances, for the performance poet, each poem requires a subtle, bodily reconfiguration of “the world of the poem”.[ix] “To be within” the poem becomes a choreographed moment of text and body memory that sometimes leads to spiritual transcendence.

Silence, Presence and Beats:

Using the heightened theatricality of strategically-placed silences, the poet/performer embodies negative space and creates a tension between silenced beats and voiced beats. The pregnant pauses between lines of Performance Poetry text are, thus infused with a theatricality and a dramatic sense of urgency all their own. In performance, within the narrative, the contrast between silenced beats and voiced beats raises the stakes in the theatricalized performance and the pregnant pauses amplify the importance of the lines of poetic text that follow them.

If presence is a heightened sense of “being there”; and stillness defines the strategic use of “negative space”, movement and anti-movement, with its choreographed movement embodiment, becomes that much more telling, in Performance Poetry (like dance) even when significantly altered or halted. In these instances “a condensation of energy…the internal energy continues to move and collect against the edges of the form in a pause of movement through space.” (Tanya Calamoneri: 80)

The performer learns to access “absolute nothingness” as a way to “trigger” acting through bodily senses…a double aperture, if you will, that because of which the process of embodiment is even possible. (Robert Carter, 1989, Tanya Calamoneri: 114) While the Stanislavski technique requires performers to hone in on character goals and objectives, Brechtian technique relies on stereotypes and stock character analysis. The Artaud style promotes the deconstruction of feelings; while the Meisner technique places importance on action; and method acting necessitates adopting the lifestyle, habits and traits of a character. Most performers employ an interesting fusion of some or all of these techniques and the Performance Poet is no different.

Looking at “nothingness as a heightened sense of presence” (Tanya Calamoneri, 21) stillness creates a tension between its juxtaposition with movement. So as not to become distracting or appear jittery to the audience, in Performance Poetry, the choreographed movements must be exact, specific and particular. Each choreographed movement must be timed and attached to fixed word choices in the overall text. With that in mind, just as the choreographed movements in Performance Poetry need to be precise and well defined, likewise, when the poet/performer is not performing a choreographed movement, his or her stillness has to be just as well delineated.

This scholar does not believe that there is a “black” side to nothingness. Defined as the space between, thanks to the work of Victor Turner (1982, 1986), we know that there is a “Between-ness”—or liminality couched between one state and another. Even without words or an accompanying text, silence and stillness still communicates meaning. Like Fraleigh (1999) it seems that the “poetic image” and “poetry” in of itself are intuitively interconnected (Tanya Calamoneri: 38).

It has been suggested by some dance scholars that there is a black side of “nothingness”—what Japanese Buddhist refer to as mu. (Calamoneri, 2012: 35) In this instance, the term black references the absence of colors and the presence of all colors simultaneously. I would also argue that our articulations of “nothingness” are social constructs and, as such, can be culturally specific. If this is accurate then, appropriate to the given text, the absence of movement (just like the imposition of silence) still communicates multiple messages to Performance Poetry audiences based on their group membership and cultural competency. [x]

Intertextuality;

All literary texts are examples of intertextuality precisely because they explicitly or implicitly refract either a theatrical convention or some other given text. (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 45) What anthropologist refer to as cultural competency, “references to specific texts…can take the form of either extensive hypotexts or of mandatory and thus specific and consequential identifiable texts” (Michael Issacharoff, 1989: 46)

The use of extensive hypotextuality in theater often requires audiences to have some vague acquaintance with a Western or liberal arts educational background which might include a shared body of knowledge from sources like the Bible, Shakespearean theater or Greek mythology. In Performance Poetry, Rap and Hip Hop, news events, literature, historical references, the cult of personality, nursery rhymes, television shows, and film, music and R & B songs form the basis for the hypotextuality in these more contemporary cultural products.

Training a New Generation of Word Warriors:

Because most Performance Studies and Theater departments across the country operate under a western paradigm that privileges western modes of discourse, to satisfy department curriculum sensibilities, in my own classes in the Theater Department at Temple University (Poetry As Performance (TH 1008) and Poetic Ethnography (TH 2008), while we begin our discussions of Performance Poetry and Spoken work with an introduction to concepts like “nommo” and West African notions of “word magic”, I am obliged to also require students to learn classic, European poetic forms like Epic verse, tanka, villanelle and sonnets (even when, most times, students themselves would prefer a 13-week examination of “free verse” forms more conducive to modern modes of discourse. 

In my courses, Performance Poetry students become adept at communicating through Western styles and forms of poetry, while still working to find their own voice, niche and writing style.  However, I also encourage students of Performance Poetry, just as with any other performance studies courses, to learn how to analyze why particular forms dominated Western literature during particular points in time in comparison to the kinds of writing marginal groups were producing at that same time.  The second half of our semesters are always spent learning and understanding performance technique and then learning to choreograph and apply theatricality to their poetic performance pieces and auto ethnographies.

As Derek Walcott writes, “The poet is the mulatto of style.” (Walcott: 3-40). These “performances” which often “play” at real life, operate as communicative “events” and, in some cases, “ritual”—they have become ceremonial, in nature, with prescribed actions and behaviors. Performance Poetry and Poetic Ethnography:

·       informs

·       persuades

·       dissuades

·       entertains and

·       contributes to  cultural competency.

 

 

The student conducts research “in the field” (often a “closed” or bounded community---i.e. neighborhood, city, event or special occasion). The poet/researcher observes informants in natural occurring settings (often times, conducting both formal and informal interviews). The poet/researcher records “data” as poetry; interprets “findings”; and then in “performance” (in those same “communities” and in others) disseminates “those findings” to a wider audience.

Continuing the Theater department’s commitment to community engagement, Poetry As Performance and Poetic Ethnography are two of our community-based learning courses that encourage students to become familiar with Philadelphia neighborhoods, and to record their fieldwork and impressions in poetic form. Writing in various poetic forms (i.e. Tanka, haiku, free verse, Ballad, acrostic and sonnet), each class culminates in final performances that blend poetic ethnography, choreopoem and devised theater into riveting pieces of theater that speak to notions of identity, community and social activism.

This new generation of Performance Poets is still working to find their own voices as children of Hip Hop, Rap and popular culture. Students learn to craft narrative choreopoems in and about neighborhoods. These poet/performers are encouraged to critique not just how Performance Poets create emphasis, but also why they do so, choosing to punctuate certain words over others to effectively communicate and frame their versions of social activism.

My Own Work As A Performance Poet:

Performance Poets contribute to their communities as researcher/artists who are uniquely positioned to explore some very difficult social issues. As social activism, Performance Poets are constantly grappling with where and what are the positions of power? Their work offers examples in the public discourse on what the positions of oppression are and, even sometimes, stimulates community discussion on how particular public and social policies must be resisted and acted on by the community at large.

Referencing Critical Race Theory, even with my own work, my performance work is an extension of my own personal activism and, through the work in Performance Poetry; I address the institutional aspects of race and racism. Social oppression suggests that there is no hierarchy in identity; but as an African American female, for me, race and its myriad manifestations creates a hierarchy of lived oppression.

Too often, intersectionality flattens the lived experience of individuals. In my own work as a performance poet, I draw on different constellations of my own identity (ie. Black, female, heterosexual, recovering Pentecost, American, citizen) to invigorate and validate my social change work.

In that regard, my work as a Performance Poet is inherently influenced by complex and sometimes competing positionalities-- anthropologist, playwright, Performance Poet, mother, single-parent, African American female. My social change work is, thus, informed by multiple identities and for me, Performance Poetry is not just a performance technique, talent or a skill. Rather, Performance Poetry is one of the modalities and vehicles I readily employ to create social activist theater.

Conclusion:

We can no longer continue to marginalize performance poetry, along with its role and importance in understanding culture.  Unpacking the tensions between continuity and innovation, there is a tendency to separate out verbal expressive arts (like performance poetry, spoken word, storytelling and stand up) into “high art”/”low art” dichotomies that can be tied to classism, ageism and maybe even racism. (Brustein, Robert, 1998: 66-73)

Performance poets, Spoken Word artist (which, again, are completely different genres) along with Performance artists typically use all of their communicative abilities—both kinetic and verbal—to transcribe and disseminate ethnographic “data” in ways that would make that data or ethnography accessible to the widest-possible audience.

These researchers/rhetoricians regularly use ethnographic methods-- (participant/observation; interviews, surveys, focus groups, reflexive ethnography, field notes and secondary-source “data mining”).   Through “performance”, Performance Poets and Poetic Ethnographers convey meaningful messages about culture and their informants, while constructing social meaning in their lives.

Utilizing poetic styles, formulas and language, the resulting “poetic ethnographies” are layered in multiple language strategies. These language strategies include: rhyme, first person narrative, rhythm, meter, ect; and contribute significantly to cultural competency in a given community and a collective body of social knowledge.

Theatricalized verbal and paralinguistic cultural performances have always been a fundamental component of cultural studies in disciplines like anthropology. (Frank J. Korom, 2013: 2) The study of Performance Poetry and Poetic Ethnography, (as sub-sections of performance studies) mutually-inclusively, relies on four distinct areas of study:

·       Anthropology

·       Theater

·       Folklore studies and

·       Linguistics

 

“[O]ral poetry or Poetry in Performance looks at the ‘nexus between language and social life.’” (Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, 2011:202; Dell Hymes, 1971: 44-45) Providing “linguistic contours” this performative/“socio-performative” use of language finds expression, in performance poetry, as ritual and as alternative, theatricalized fact. (Steiner, 1975; Gates, 1987; Williams-Witherspoon, 2011, 203)

Without inserting a critique on purpose, point of view and content, for those of us who call ourselves Performance Poets, the more integrated the interconnectivity between poet/performer and his or her community, the more recognizable the performativity as social activism. As both performer and social activist, Performance Poets are seldom “egological”—separating themselves apart from the context of their work and their environment.

Even when they don’t take on “stake holder” characters in their narratives, they are still very much invested in the world of the play; and each poem in performance becomes its own one-minute, three-minute or ten-minute play. In these instances, the narrator is not always a “position-less position”; but rather, a social arbiter that can speak to both continuity and change.

Overcoming dualism necessitates a protracted synthesis of identity, experience and “nothingness”. Performance Poets, then, juggle identities as a conduit, shaman, folklorist, characters, images, symbolism, researcher, and performer.

Not all poetry is static on the printed page, similarly, not all of the poems written are worthy of performance. Poet/performers have to be discerning artisans. Although almost any ritual or activity can be made theatrical, Poet/performers must consistently work on craft—employing self-cultivation and critique.

This work looks at the experience of privilege or oppression as it enhances our understanding of Race, class and gender. Using Performance Poetry and ethnopoetics as my methodology, field notes and scholarly product, my work seeks to situate performance poetry as a method of study and a method of disseminating research data.

By developing courses in Performance Poetry and Poetic Ethnography in the Theater curriculum, my work resists academic attempts to invalidate or discount African American cultural expressions (like storytelling, Performance Poetry, Rap and Hip Hop) and instead argues for recognition of the rich legacy of Black oral expression from ancient Kemet and the orations of the Instructions of Wisdom (from 2450 to 2300 BCE) to Griot traditions in parts of West Africa dating back to the 1300’s in Mali through to early African American Performance Poets like Lucy Terry Prince, Jupitor Hammon, Phyllis Wheatley, Francis Harper to Paul Lawrence Dunbar right down to Performance Poets today.

We look at difficult constructs like domination, subordination; identity-construction, self-definition versus other definitions and cultural ‘push back. Like many others, Performance Poets, tackle the intersections of race, racism and culture in their work. Responding to a critical time in our literary history, we don’t subscribe to the notion of “post-racial”. Instead, with the magic of our words, hypotextuality, and choreographed movement, Performance Poets use their words to contest those notions and craft new ideas.

 

Works Cited

 

 

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