Word travels fast
Wordsmiths, adventurers and lovers of mystery are in for a treat this October as the inaugural Word Travels Festival hits town. Created from the Australian Poetry Slam, the festival will play host to the annual spoken-word competition and many more hip events.
Festival coordinator and spoken word poet, Miles Merrill, explains what a poetry slam is. “Basically people get up onto the microphone with their story, their poem, monologue or lyrics. The judges are chosen from the audience randomly and as people perform, they get a score out of ten and whoever has the highest score at the end of the night either wins a prize or can go on to compete in the next round,” he says.
“When I think of spoken word I think of a variety of things. It can be poetry but it can also be lyrics and stories and monologues and kind of anything that you’d get up and perform with words.”
Merrill, who is originally a native of Chicago, tours his Word Travels company to communities internationally, inspiring people to write and perform their own stories. He originally wanted to be an actor but couldn’t find any scripts that were up to scratch.
“I realised that there were no scripts that I really liked. Especially being African-American in the States, but even in Australia it’s the same thing, you end up waiting a long time before you see a script that is about something you identify with,” he says.
“What I’ve discovered here is the diversity of writers. In the States the slam has been really utilised by more marginalised communities and these marginalised communities don’t have an audience of people who feel the same kind of empathy for oppression.”
So what does the Australian community have to wax lyrical about?
“In Australia it’s often the case that people aren’t going through as much suffering, certainly in Sydney, so it’s harder to see people getting up to do just identity poems about race or about the difficulties of growing up poor. What you do get is a lot of gender politics and a lot of political poetry in general,” says Merrill.
“Then I see even more diversity when I go out to the regional areas in Australia and hear the different perspectives there. It’s not so much a struggle as a different perspective of poetry.”
Aside from unearthing poetic voices all over Australia, the Word Travels Festival is also a great opportunity for established Australian performers to introduce new elements to their art. Successful Sydney historian/storyteller, Vashti Hughes, is one such person.
“I’m one of a team of performance poets and storytellers who will be performing inside of a mansion in the Rocks,” she explains.
“There are a whole lot of rooms in this mansion. There are five storytellers and poets who are all really well renowned. In these rooms we each do a little performance piece to an intimate audience and then the audience switches rooms. So you keep moving around this amazing mansion and keep seeing different storytellers and poets.”
Innovative events like this are changing the face of poetry and lifting the art out of dusty old history books and high school english classes, it forces performers and writers to ‘speak outside of the box’.
Hughes is a performer though who has had striking local success using history by recalling the characters of Sydney’s past.
“My piece is going to be a 1920-30s inspired piece. I’m going to be a criminal called Tilly Devine. It’s going to be really nice to bring a piece of Sydney history into that historic setting.”
Merrill says that the thing that gives this form of entertainment an edge over any other is its honesty and “an immediacy between artist and audience”.
“There are very few buffers and gate-keepers, so we’re not looking at documents or archives seeing video or listening to CDs. This is an actual person in front of you saying what’s on their mind,” he explains.
“Without waiting around for the editor or a publisher to decide what the audience will appreciate, it goes directly to the audience and the audience has a direct response. They either acknowledge with wild applause and high scores or the applause is mild.”
Spoken word is grass roots at its most pure.
“They’re up there with a message, but they’re not up there with a campaign or trying to sell you something,” says Merril.
“It’s from the heart.” (LC)
Word Travels Festival, Oct 11-13, various Rocks & Circular Quay locations, wordtravels.info
