Site Specific Performance Poetry 

This class involves the combination of multimedia, performance and poetry.  During this class students are given the task to perform poems in distinct locations and document their poems as well as the thoughts feelings and reactions of their fellow students' work.   We will review and analyize the poems and videos in class.  All poems are expected to be memorized.

For the student: 

Site-specific performance of a poem allows the performers' ideas and bodies to interact with the place. Sites have peculiar physical features to interact with: a big, open space tells different stories to a small space with many hidden corners.

Sites have moods. A performance finds ways to animate a space imaginatively. Sites have habits and rules: people who use the space implicitly agree to a set of acceptable behavior. A funeral home allows certain behaviors (crying) while forbidding others (a strip show). A performance can interact with these.

A site has history. People have owned it, lost it, died on it, made love on it. It is not the neutral black space of the theatre stage, which excels at make-belief. However, it doesn't mean that site-specificity is all about actuality. Sites have histories, and this certainly informs the poem you will choose. You can use your poem to uncover memories and stories hidden in the space which no humans have witnessed and documented.