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.”

Film by Jessica Bass; poem and performance by Katie Frank.

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.

For more on Bandile Gumbi, see her page on the Creative Africa Network.

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

Director of Photography
Eric Gerard

Editing
Konrad Skręta

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.

For more about the poets, see their websites: Mbali Vilakazi and Kai Lossgott.

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.

Natasha Pantazopoulou and Gerry Domenikos (uncut productions) made the film for This Collection, where you can read the poem. According to the description on Vimeo, this is

A film and dance response to Niki Andrikopoulou’s poem about Edinburgh— The Athens of the North. The experimental interpretative dance with performer Vanessa Spinassa was filmed in the Ancient theatre of Ilida, Peloponnese.

Unlike most videos in the Dance category here, the filmmaking is as experimental as the dance, which gives this full videopoem status, I think.

This film is an artifact from a performance called Black Over Red, “a multi art-form choral work combining live music, dance and video on a grand scale with a cast of 25.” It was staged in 2001, a co-production of the Latvian Radio Choir and the Scottish dance/theatre troupe Cryptic, directed by Cathie Boyd, who uploaded the video. The composer was Anthea Haddow.

Epilogue (from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem)

1

I know now how the faces have fallen,
How from under lids gazes out terror,
How cuneiform’s coarse pages are
Incised by suffering upon their cheeks,
How curls from ashen and black turn
In a single moment completely silver,
And a smile withers on defeated lips,
And in dry laughter shudders fear.
So that now I pray not for myself only
But for us all, who stood there with me
In the intense cold and in July’s heat
Under that red and blinded wall.

*

The eternal flame, a memorial for the spilled blood of the innocent that burns throughout the middle, third minute in the bottom of the trinity of images that form this film, accompanied by the spine-tingling bass hum of the choir and the mournful vatic tones of Akhmatova’s own slowed down, staggering, ponderous reading, do honor in their faithfulness to her poem as a whole. The black (& white) documentary images of the upper third corner, while tonally appropriate, may be misleading to anyone who has no context for this, perhaps Anna Akhmatova’s best known single poem, through which she has become identified with the fate of all Russia. As she says in the prologue:

I remained with my own people then,
Where my people, in their misfortune, were.

Unlike the source images here, referencing the destruction visited upon Russia by the German Wehrmacht during WWII and, more specifically, some of the worst of it wrought upon Akhmatova’s adopted hometown, St. Petersburg during the 900-day siege in which a million people perished, most starving to death, the context of the poem is the auto-cannibalistic predation by Stalin and his henchmen upon his own people during the various purges of the late 30s. The red wall is that of the Crosses Prison, referred to earlier (in part 4,) outside which the women (mothers, wives, sisters) of the mostly male political prisoners day after day awaited news of the condemned. Again from the preface: “During the terrifying years of the Yezhov repression, I spent seventeen months in Leningrad prison lines.” And from part 4:

Three hundredth in line, care package in hand,
Under The Crosses prison wall you’ll stand
And with the heated waters of your tears
Dissolve the surface of Christmas-time ice.

The images of Orthodox churches and icons quite appropriately suggest the unifying theme of the poem as a whole which, in calendaric and apostolic fashion, consists of 12 parts and in which Akhmatova and her prisoner son are transformed into the universal mother and child so that what is symbolically enacted here is the Passion Play.

The concluding images of St. Petersburg are again faithful to the crux of the poem in that they represent a particularly Russian self-identification of the Poet with her People, Akhmatova as Russia’s conscience and Muse, a Mother Russia so to speak, an ethical, nurturing balance for the Fatherland that requires sacrifice. As she wrote in one of her most famous miniatures, contemporaneous with Requiem:

In Memoriam

And you, my close friends till Judgment Day!
I have been saved as though to mourn you,
To not be stilled as a weeping willow above
your graves but to cry aloud your names
For the whole world to hear. Enter the Saints;
All fall to your knees!–the light breaks through,
In smooth rows stream the citizens of Leningrad,
Living with the dead. For God there are no dead.

August 1942
Dyurmen’

*

NOTES

Other translations and musical settings of Akhmatova’s Requiem:

• Judith Hemschemeyer
• Lyn Coffin (beginning)
• Sasha Soldatow
• D.M. Thomas
• Stanley Kunitz reads his and Max Hayward’s version (02/11/10 Poetry in Time of Crisis; END OF PROGRAM)
• The Stanley Kunitz/Max Hayward version at Google Books
• You can listen to 30 sec. samples of all 12 parts of John Taverner’s Choral on Amazon

There’s an extensive literature comparing the available translations; here’s a summary by Wendy Rosslyn (via Google Books). See also the paper by George L. Kline. Lastly, I’m curious but have yet to track down Robert Lowell’s version that appeared in Atlantic Monthly 214 (1964) pp. 62-65.

Akhmatova may be heard reciting the Requiem in its entirety here [mp3] and may be seen reciting “Muse” in a YouTube snippet from a feature film. A complete collection of Akhmatova audio files in Russian are also on the web. Finally, here are five more of my own translations of Akhmatova miniatures.

The two poems that comprise the closing section of Men Think They Are Better Than Grass, the Deborah Slater Dance Theatre production based on poems by W. S. Merwin. “To the Hand” is read by Ellen Sebastian Chang and “To a Coming Extinction” by Peter Coyote — an excellent, if terrifying, choice of a final poem. This is also the only one of the videos uploaded to Vimeo that gives a good impression of the film playing behind the stage during the production.