Last week I participated in a very ambitious creative collaboration. The event melded the words of slam poets from Budapest and Brooklyn (the New Yorkers were piped in via webcam), a modern improvisational dance troupe, and the jazz stars of the evening: Trio Midnight.
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by an enthusiastic, fast-rhyming Budapest poet who I had met at an event last year. I told him I was interested in slam poetry, so he emailed me and invited me to join this event.
For a quick background, slam poetry was created as a Chicago man's answer to a dull poetry reading. Tired of too much finger snapping and monotonous paeans, he proposed turning literary recitations into a performance-based competitions, and thus slam poetry was born. The rules of slam poetry events are fairly simple: poets must perform original work, their performance matters as much as the poem itself, no props are allowed and the recitation can not exceed three minutes or the offending poet's score will be penalized. Meanwhile, the audience is encouraged to vocalize their praises or censures, and after each poet performs, five audience judges score the performance on a scale of 1-10. After multiple rounds of poetry, which often take on social activism themes, the poet with the best score wins. As this movement blossomed throughout the 1990s and still goes strong today, it birthed a new genre of writer: the spoken word poet. I would describe this style as writers whose deliveries are nearly like hip-hop music without the instrumentation and who aim to entertain.
The event I performed in this week was not actually a poetry slam because there was no competition, but the performers all recited slam pieces, so it was a spoken-word show. On the week leading up to the event, I rehearsed with the other bards, dancers and Trio Midnight's bassist. Although I loved the actual event, the practicing and rehearsals were equally rewarding. I haven't been in a collaborative poetic environment where I exchanged feedback with other performers since I was co-chair of the University of Colorado's poetry club and a member of our slam team, the Melo poets. In the future, I hope to perform more with this slam group, although it's a challenge since most of their shows are for a strictly Hungarian-speaking audience.
On the night of the show, I was thrown by how big the audience was - probably at least a hundred people directly in front of the stage and more than a few hundred more outside. The venue,
Gödör, is right in the heart of downtown Budapest where the three metro lines connect, so it's a favorite place to hang out, especially because it hosts concerts nearly every night, as well as art installations and exhibits, design fairs, plays, etc.
The show was held to honor the 20th anniversary of
Trio Midnight, so they played a solo set and then we joined them on stage fittingly at midnight. Our act started with some improvisational jazz, and then the modern dance troupe grooved for a few minutes, and I was on stage next.
In poetry slams, the first poet who reads is called the sacrificial lamb, because it is always roughest spot - the judges haven't quite got their bearings and the crowd is not warmed up. Luckily, this event wasn't too bad, since there was no competition involved. And, although I couldn't see them because of the blinding pink stage lights in my eyes, I knew I had my little fan club in the back row, so that was all the support I needed (it is a sure sign that you have an amazing husband and friends if they are willing to stay up until 3am on a work night for you). I began one of my pieces called "Rise," and as soon as I said the first two lines, the jazz band started up behind me, mellifluously supplementing my poem with the subtle taps of brushes and slow melodies on the bass and piano. My words and their music flowed together so well, that it cinched my belief that jazz and poetry were meant to be married. After the first performance, I wasn't nervous any longer - I was just having fun. Here are my fellow poets and me awaiting our next turn at the mic:
After my whole group did one set, we paused and let the poets from Brooklyn perform, which was streamed through the Internet. Their stage lighting was so dim, and their performances were not very engaging because they read off the page, so I was a little disappointed. As Mike aptly described, the scene looked like a low-production hostage video, and the poets were reading their ransom notes.
The next set went really smoothly, and then all the poets did one last collaborative piece that was written by Muller Peter, a Hungarian alternative musician who was one of the founding fathers of Budapest's largest music festival, Sziget. He wrote a funny poem called "Czardas," which is a traditional Hungarian dance. We read lines in unison chanted the final lines about the dance - "two to the left and two to the right"- over and over until the dancers came back out and flitted for a few minutes. After the show, the owner of the club brought us champagne, and we all celebrated and sung happy birthday to Trio Midnight.
I was invited to attend the opening ceremony for the festival, which was held at the Museum of Ethnography - a stunningly ornate building built in the early 20th century for Hungary's Ministry of Justice. Anytime I get an invitation to go to that museum, I take it. Although it was hard to capture using just my Ipod, I took this picture of the lobby while a Gypsy musical group performed.
