~ Poet: Kai Lossgott ~

enough by Kai Lossgott and Mbali Vilakazi

On 1 November, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Dance, Performance Poetry
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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.

read these roads by Kai Lossgott

On 12 September, 2011 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Animation, Author-made videopoems
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A very interesting approach to stop-frame animation by South African videopoet Kai Lossgott, who also organized, directed and curated the City Breath Festival of Video Poetry and Performance last year, and is currently searching for experimental films about climate change for a new exhibition called Letters from the Sky. (See the Moving Poems forum for more details on the latter.)

Kai’s notes about this film at Vimeo are worth quoting in full:

The evaporating water puddle images in this stop frame animation hint at the living systemic relationship between Table Mountain’s hydrology systems, the City of Cape Town’s water system and the biological systems of the human body. This is a video poem of unfulfilled desire for the lost personal bond with the natural world. The soundtrack of the video is taken from Adderley Street in the Cape Town CBD, above the underground storm water drain where the now forgotten Varsterivier, among others, (3 million cubic tons of untapped fresh spring water) runs into the sea daily. Fresh water is one of South Africa’s scarcest resources.