Image credit: Matt Widgery
Roulade is a magazine like no other - a live performance of pages you can literally walk through. Living ‘features’ come alive as you get lost within the labyrinthine space; dancers step through pages, as poetry is read from within giant papier mache frames; sculpture appears within hidden rooms and dark tunnels. Created by artist Llew Watkins and (one of my favourite poets) Wayne Holloway Smith, the events have become widely respected for their inter-breeding of different creative disciplines, in unique and exciting ways.
Living contents page: Eva Orupõld. Photo by Jorge Torres
I created the ‘The Alchemist’ for Roulade’s final issue: the ‘Alchemy’ edition. In my last project, 'Mineralogy Jukebox,’ I had created a series of ‘micro-immersive’ poems: combining one-on-one poetry performances with complementary sensory interactions. My aim was to absorb the listener completely into the subject matter of the poem, via taste, touch and theatre as well as verbal language.
This time I wanted to take this further: I wondered what different reactions might occur if, rather than using complementary interactions, contrasting and contradictory sensory experiences were created. How does the smell of smoke change the way you hear a poem about drowning, or an incantation about breath? Would the same combination of elements produce the same effect for different listeners, or would interactions vary? What more could we learn about the relationship between language and sensory stimulus?
I composed four poems based upon the four primary elements of Aristotolean Alchemy (Earth, Air, Water, Fire). I then chose an elemental interaction to combine with each poem: 'Fire’ was a lit match, blown out but still smoking, 'Air’ was a menthol mint (ideal for clearing airways), 'Water’ was wet ink running down a page, and 'Earth’ was a box of soil. As with the Mineralogy Jukebox, I planted the ingredients of each interaction within a matchbox.
Each matchbox was marked with its corresponding elemental symbol:
Audience members were then invited to take part in the experiment, by combining two elements. The first element (an elemental poem) is selected through blindly choosing a card:
When the card is revealed, the listener was then invited to pick their second element from the chest of matchboxes:
Each performance then became an interaction between two different elements: the physical stimulus within the matchbox, and the verbal references within the poem. I collected verbal feedback at the end of each experiment.
The variations between each interaction produced a range of different reactions in listeners, but similar language was often repeated: many who opened the ‘'Earth’ element, and received a soil massage, described their experience of ‘Water’ poem (which ends with a good old drowning) as “soothing,” and “oddly stimulating.” However, the same poem, when combined with menthol “Air” stimulation was described as “intense”. When successful (ie. wet enough) , the ink and water ritual was repeatedly perceived to be a “prayerful” or “almost religious” experience, but when combined with the increasingly filthy descriptions present in the ‘Earth’ poem: ‘Dirt: smutty fumbles, stinking fingered/ sweaty leather arsecracks,’ I found myself having more than one conversation about the relationship between cleansing and shame.
Air poem in written form (from ‘Alchemy Boxset’)
One listener, who described himself as a regular poetry 'reader’ (as opposed to 'listener’) found the additional stimulation to be a distraction from the words of poem. In contrast, a visual artist, who often finds reading challenging, used the sensory interaction as a focal point, to draw him into the language.
Image credit: Matt Widgery
Wet hands run across an ink-marked page, as the poem is whispered into your ear
Like the event itself, the experiences were fleeting, and disappeared as quickly as they began. If you took part in the experiment, I would love to hear from you! Please leave a comment or drop me a tweet @abipalmer_bot, stating your two elements and any reactions or memories of the experience you had.
For me, one of the most exciting aspects of this project is the ability to actually observe reactions and gain information about the way in which people listen and respond to poetic language. I feel that there may be more concrete ways to glean information from the results of each interaction. I want to further the ‘feedback’ element of the experiment, setting up a series of surveys in which we can record individual responses to the interactions and compare the results. As well as a providing a more concrete analysis of how different elements reacted with each other, I’d love to see what linguistic output could be formed from the survey - a group poem made out of lots of little poetic experiences.
A huge thanks to Wayne and Llew for having me at this incredible event. I’m gutted to know that this issue of Roulade will be the last of its kind, but I look forward to seeing what happens next...
‘Alchemy’ wins Saboteur Award!!!
‘Alchemy’ - interactive boxset
‘Control Room’@ GameCity Festival
