Four-day poetry festival captivates crowds with linguistic wizardry, stage bravado
By Chris Crews, Athens NEWS Contributor
April 24, 2008
It’s not every day that a talented group of writers, poets and spoken-word artists get together, but when they do, it’s not an event worth missing.
This past weekend in Athens was no exception, as the town played host to a four-day spoken- and written-word festival called Dancing Words.
With an impressive mix of written- and spoken-word artists, the festival offered a chance for dozens of talented young performers to strut their stuff and entertain attending Athenians.
The festival also demonstrated the continued strength and appeal of public performance art in society today.
Festival events including a youth open mic and storytelling event at the Athens Public Library, two nights of poetry readings at the Blue Gator and Pyramids, a hands-on workshop on poetry and stage performance with noted New York poet Jon Sands (a former Athenian), and a no-holds-barred poetry extravaganza at Donkey Coffee & Espresso on Saturday night.
The festival started last Thursday evening with a relaxed reading by local poets and continued to gather steam as the weekend progressed, hitting a raucous climax on Saturday night with the best spoken-word performance to grace Athens in years.
One after another, the assembled poets thrilled, teased and mesmerized the crowd with their verbal loops and deft wordplays. By the end of the night, no verbal stone remained unturned, and the back room at the donkey was thick with the smell of sweet words.
The continual flow of new spectators into the back room swelled an already crowded space.
The performers were adorned in a variety of attire, ranging from the standard t-shirt and blue jeans uniform of 20-somethings (emblazoned with slogans like “My heroes have always had FBI files”), to those decked out in ties, vests, sport coats and black evening gowns.
The crowd, a mix of local poetry aficionados, literary bohemians, aspiring writers and performers, curious spectators and supportive friends, was treated to a literary cornucopia of epic proportions during the course of the festival.
Perhaps as important as the social networking that was going on throughout the weekend was the subtle — and at times not so subtle — undertones of social and political commentary in many pieces.
Whether discussing expanding global conflicts, imploding economics or daily race relations, many of the performers served up poignant and insightful analysis.
While poetry and politics often go hand-in-hand, the festival highlighted the continually subversive role that personal, intimate and unmediated interactions play in our hyper-mediated world.
“One of the things that I like most about this festival is how we are all challenging each other, and ourselves — with our work and our ideas — to take things up a notch, to push at the boundaries and make people think again” said performer and local poet and Word Arts Foundation (WAF) founding member Zac Fulton. “It reminds you that you’re alive, and that what we are doing matters on many different levels.”
One of the most noteworthy things about the festival was that each performer offered not only a different style of poetry to the crowd, but also a different style of presentation.
The kids’ “read” at the Athens Public Library on Saturday morning helped to involve some parents, and even librarian Amy King, in the storytelling bonanza.
Some venues saw poets swaying back in forth gently in front of the mic stand, the words gently rolling off their tongue. Elsewhere, other performers took over the stage with dynamic hand gestures and roving antics that sent the microphone cord flitting here and there around the stage. The crowd even joined in for several acts at Donkey — at one point helping to sing a few lines of the Reading Rainbow song.
As the night progressed, the entire room slowly became part of the show, breaking down the audience-performer barrier and creating what, by the end of the show, was a fully engaged audience — replete with drums, forks, whisks and spoons handed out by St. Louis poet Erin Wiles to help accompany her closing piece — “Apocalypse Now.”
“This is going fabulously well,” said Wiles, a former Athenian and author of “I and Apocalypse.” Wiles was another founding member of the WAF.
“I love this stage,” said headlining NYC poet Jon Sands, author of “Being Human Being,” as he laughingly leaned into the mic. “I miss this stage.”
One of his poems, entitled “Subtle Surgeons,” elicited many excited hollers from the crowd, to which he jokingly replied: “That is like one of the original poems that I wrote, and for some reason it always finds its way into my set when I come back to Athens.”
The Dancing Words festival, the creative genius of the WAF, a recently formed Athens group dedicated to promoting written- and spoken-word artists, was intended to be both a national talent show and a local fundraiser. One of the primary goals of the WAF, according to founding member C.J. Kearns, is to highlight and promote the talent that exists within the spoken- and written-word community, both here and regionally.
With performers coming from as far away as New York City and St. Louis, the festival organizers hoped to highlight the importance of developing strong networks between communities of writers and performance artists. Additionally, the WAF hopes to begin sponsoring its own events, as well as helping financially strapped artists enter their works into various literary festivals and contests around the country.
“This festival is the next step that associated poets need to take,” said “kids read” performer and WAF board member Jon Taylor. To learn more about the Word Arts Foundation, upcoming events and contests, or to get involved, visit their Web site at www.wordartsfoundation.org.
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