Workshop 4 - Ariel and Katie

in our workshop, ariel and i have been working on spoken word. last week we started off by focusing on the performance aspect of spoken word. at the beginning of the workshop ariel read the poem "Church" by Anis Mojgani twice, once in a tone that conveyed contentment and happiness and once in a resentful, angry tone. after she read both poems we discussed what was effective in conveying intended emotions in each reading, i.e. tone, speed, volume, body language, pausing, inflection etc. we then had everyone perform "Church" in a way that was meaningful to her. we followed this with another discussion about what makes a performance effective. we did the same process of performance ad discussion with the poem "Bedrooms and Battlescars" by Buddy Wakefield. picking up on a writing project we started the previous week, we finished the workshop by writing autobiographcal poems in 30 lines or less, and then performing and discussing those pieces. we plan to continue working on those poems, cutting them down to 15 or 20 lines so as to work on word selection and distill specific strong images and language, and to work on the editing process in general.

the workshop was very small, only two women (well, three at the very beginning), but this actually made the workshop more effective because everyone got to perform each poem and discussion was more fluid than in previous weeks. while the workshop was an overall success, at the very beginning a very negative woman was in the room. from the moment she walked in she seemed to have something against ariel. she repeatedly bashed ariel's performance of the poems. ariel and i handeled the problem well, i think. ariel simply ignored the negativity in her comments and instead probed the woman about why the pice bored her. i took the opportunity to point out that her reaction exemplifies the beauty of spoken word, which is the versatility and personal nature of the poems and their performances. fortunately the woman removed herself from the workshop (she didn;t have her glasses and was aware of her own negativity). at the end of the workshop the two women who stayed for the duration were enthusiastic about the work they were doing, which was awesome to hear.