Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant

As a follow up to the fantastic Bathhouse Readings and seminar on Textual Orality, I would like to chime in with a few of my observations, ideas, and responses.

Douglas Kearney was fantastically energetic and his performance style really woke me up to the possibilities of performance as a method of demonstrating text. I think the thing that really struck me during his performance was that he admitted to not being sure how to read his poems, or that his poems could be scored in many different ways allowing them to work as their own individual tracks. In this way, each poem becomes it's own entity depending on the performance. I've always been keen on the ability to transform text or work through it in many different forms, that way it can turn into something new and engaging. I enjoyed Douglas' keen ability to know what the audience wants. Coming from his strong performance background, it was no surprise that he was so powerful. the performance verged on being too loud for comfort at times, but that was intentional and reasonable as a method for staggering the audience so that they may listen.

The performance of pieces from The Black Automaton really gave the words life. Truly, this work is meant to be heard and not just read. There are even parts to the book that cannot be read in a conventional sense, but exist on the page as their own entity or art form, they can be seen and experienced, but trying to push them into so small a box to simply be read is unfair.

Tisa was also lovely to hear from, her work of prose did not play as harshly as Douglas' poetry, but it was a nice change of pace and a very smart move on her part to go first for the readings. Her piece was so descriptive, which we addressed in class. On Wednesday, she showed a few examples of the illustrations that were described at the beginning of each chapter (or section).  She was so intelligent in her explanation of hoe she engages with the themes and sensibilities of film that are integrated into her stylistic format.

I thoroughly enjoyed both of their performances on wednesday, Tisa's Neo-Benshi was so smooth and interesting, a fantastic format for hybrid art performance. Strong racial and feminist ideas were able to be woven with words into the cinema reel of the footage she showed. Kearney's critical karaoke was also very interesting, but like his readings, was uncomfortable and difficult to work through. There was a sort of racial tension that Douglas addressed through performance, which was subdued by Tisa's performance. Her acting as the calm, while Douglas acted as the storm. altogether a fantastic duo, and a wonderful experience.