reading response #1

So, over a month ago I went to this event in San Francisco at CounterPulse that included a performance by "Universes," a cross-genre performance group. It was BAD ASS.

Ritual is on my mind because Kiala & I are writing these poems about tradition and ritual in our own lives (and the ways those rituals intersect). Universes’ performance(s) redefined, for me, the idea of hip-hop/spoken word/music as ceremony. It was obvious to me as soon as I arrived that I had never considered my own readings and performances as ritual, even though I often do the same thing before each performance. I wear the same shoes (a uniform, of sorts), I jump up and down in the same ritualistic way that busts out some extra adrenaline, and I always sign the first few lines of all of my pieces to myself while mingling with folks beforehand as the crowd is settling or other performers are backstage prepping. I had to watch this happen at CounterPulse in order to recognize it in myself. This seems just as important for the performer as it does the audience. There is the ritual of waiting for the doors to open, the awkward but buzzing meet and greet outside, the rush for the right seat, then the patient flipping through of programs.

While Universes was a great indicator of how, exactly, to truly engage an audience and how to seamlessly piece a show together, the performances seemed most illustrative, at all times, of ceremony. The lights, the patterns in which each member spoke or performed, and the obvious ease with which the rehearsal of this ceremony had made possible, all conveyed, very seriously, that they had command of the room. As an audience member, I felt transported. I was not sitting in the corner of a blackbox theatre with an intimate crowd, I was somewhere else entirely. More impressive, however, was how the sole woman on stage seemed to grasp her position as implied Master of Ceremonies throughout the evening. The sound rarely stopped, the bodies rarely stopped and loop after loop, the breaks kept coming.

Politics, code-switching and a variety of literacies were definitely at play and I appreciated not having full, VIP-access to every single section of the "ceremony." Even without knowing her language or understanding all of the inside jokes, I still felt like I was invited to partake by the one woman on stage. She shut down the room with her voice, with their stories, and every time the stories shifted and looped back to the music, the break was definitely the point of heightened possibility, regardless of who you were or where you came from. That kind of accessibility is essential, I think. I also found it really interesting that even when the rhythm was strong, if that lead female voice maxed out and cracked (which it did, because they were tired or sick or on the road for a long time), then that break broke too. She was the conduit to that alternate space and only she, in that moment, could keep it looping.

Universes taught me a lot about the importance of seamless performance and the necessity of layering. A single layer is impressive, but it doesn’t move on its own. I felt like Chinaka Hodge’s “Mirrors In Every Corner” excerpt (she performed before Universes as a kind of "opener") illustrated this in indispensable ways. Despite being the only person on stage (during the excerpt), she used the space, the lights, her body and her words (not to mention the way she dressed and talked) to create those layers without needing other folks on the stage. She broke my brain. It was like seeing Karl Iglesias from Madison perform for the first time and not knowing what I was seeing, but feeling it. I cannot wait for the rest of Chinaka’s play in 2010. She gave me so much to think about. Years worth in five minutes.

xomegday