I’ve posted a lot of dance + poetry videos and a lot of spoken word videos, but I believe this is the first in which the poet dances as he recites his poem. This was produced by the St. Paul, Minnesota-based organization Poetry Observed, which according to the description on YouTube “is committed to producing high quality videos of performance poetry, filmed off the stage. Our first series features Minnesota spoken word poets and was produced in collaboration with Button Poetry.”
Another unique video collaboration from South African artist, poet and filmmaker Kai Lossgott, who sets it up for us as follows:
Slums are rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century, both in the developed as well as the developing world. One out of every three city dwellers worldwide nearly a billion people lives in a slum. Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, “a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles”, trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.
This film offers more proof that Steven McCabe is one of the most accomplished videopoets out there. Here’s the description on Youtube:
outside my black hole (2011) is a visual poetry film juxtaposing urban traffic, ink drawings, and dance.
Screened at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts (Toronto) in Oct./Nov. 2011 as the installation component of Steven McCabe’s exhibition A Cathartic Document showing 66 new ink drawings created during 2010-2011.
Video editing & technical support @ A Cathartic Document by Konrad Skręta
outside my black hole
A film by Steven McCabe
Poetry/drawings/narration
Steven McCabe
Dance
Paula Skimin
Music composed and performed by
William Beauvais & Barry Prophet
A marvellous video collaboration produced for a 2009 poetry festival in Cape Town called Badilsha Poetry Exchange, sponsored by Africa Centre, whose description of the film at YouTube is worth quoting in full:
Sometimes you’ve had enough. And sometimes you have enough. A fusion of sound and light, video poet Kai Lossgott’s and performance poet Mbali Vilakazi’s authentic and intimate multimedia poetry performance enough takes you into the dream cycles of obsessive behaviour and uncomfortable truths in the search for wholeness. It is about the breakdown of society, and people at breaking point.
In a lyrical conversation of experimental music and cinema, the poets draw their self-portraits only to erase them, through testimonies that become ciphers in the round-trip between abundance and gratitude, lack and self-pity. Through spoken word, dance, and gesture, they journey with the audience through breathing rhythms of take and give, where insecurity comes up for air and we open like blossoms.
Cecelia Chapman shows how to turn a folktale into a compelling videopoem. (Is that a sickle in the moon-dancer’s hand? Nice touch!) The credits only appear on the screen for a nanosecond, but according to the notes on YouTube, include: “Grat Bodkin music. Christa Hunter. Tara Naqishbendi. Kara Chan. Fancy the dog. Jeff Crouch image.” Chapman also mentions that this was originally featured in The Houston Literary Review, and is part of her video series “Signs, Wishes & Wonders.”
The video is titled “Step,” filmed by Pascal Rekoert and released as a podcast by NYC’s Flexicurve Dance Company in 2008. Anderson recorded the spoken-word piece for her 1982 album Big Science, and that’s the recording featured here.
