Victoria Spoken Word Festival
When: March 4 to 9
Where: Metro Studio, Intrepid Theatre
Tickets: $12 regular, $10 students for each event. Available at ticketrocket.org
Storytelling is part of the fabric of any community, so it seemed an appropriate arts festival theme to poet Missie Peters.
“Stories are what we live on, it’s why we watch TV and go to the movies and it’s why we watch the news,” Peters said this week.
The fourth annual Victoria Spoken Word Festival, which kicks off Tuesday, is all about the “inside story.” The multi-day festival highlights emerging artists and fosters an environment for experimenting in new forms through a series of workshops and performances.
But while many poets are accustomed to telling their own stories, Peters said part of the challenge this year will be imagining a new perspective.
“I think a lot of times, spoken-word artists speak from an ‘I’ place. They tell their own personal story, but they may not think more broadly about, ‘What kind of stories can I tell from someone else’s perspective or from a character’s perspective?’ ” she said. “From an artistic perspective, I’m really interested in that.”
The festival asks poets to explore storytelling through hybrid forms. On March 6, for example, poets will pair with puppeteers, including Tim Gosley, for a cross-disciplinary performance.
This year’s poet of honour, Barbara Adler, will unveil a new work called Pathetic Fallacy during the finale show March 8. Peters described Adler as a spoken-word artist turned “punk-folk-accordion poet.” Adler has also undertaken a storytelling project called the B.C. Memory Game, during which she collected stories of small towns from the people who live there.
Other performers include Mighty Mike McGee, a “standup” poet known for his humour and personality, as well as R.C. Weslowski, who will perform his Fringe show The Cruelest Phone Book in the World during a session called Storytelling for Adults.
“It’s about a celebration of instant creation. It’s lots of fun, it’s collaborative,” Peters said.
“I think one of the reasons audiences love spoken word is that it’s so accessible: You don’t need a master’s degree to understand or love it. It’s very entertaining, interactive and visceral.”
This year’s festival is expanding in two ways. First is a new partnership with poets who specifically don’t have master’s degrees: the youth poets who participate in a high school poetry project called Victorious Voices. They can take a workshop with Adler, as well as attend the final show.
“At least 30 per cent of the poets in the festival ensemble are under 20. They’re quite young emerging voices, so it kind of lets [the youth poets] know, ‘Oh this could be me next year,’ ” Peters said.
It has also outgrown the 50-seat Intrepid Theatre and is moving most events to the 185-seat Metro Studio this year.
Peters said the local festival plays a different role in the poetry community than the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, which Victoria will play host to this fall. While the national festival showcases the best works from across the country, inviting about 200 artists to the Island, the smaller local festival is about developing new and experimental works.
“The Victoria Spoken Word Festival is really about growing spoken word as an art form and about pushing the boundaries of what we do. This year, it’s all about storytelling and exploring why we tell the kind of stories we tell.”