Okay this will be my third and final blog on the festival. I thought I’d mention about the tent itself and terrors. I think most people can relate to the horror of standing up in front of an audience and reading aloud. I think I mentioned this before, but I can stand up in front of an audience and talk until the cows come home (I know a lot of people struggle with this) but reading is a very different matter.
We all get nervous and then what happens? We start to shake. So now I'm are trying to read from a script that keeps bobbing up and down. As I'm talking about stopping for dinner and grabbing a snack of sparrow’s bum I reach the end of the line and move down only to realize that I'm about to stop and grab a snack of sparrows bum again! I’ve nearly read the same sentence twice. Whoops! So I do what everyone does and I jump too far back then can’t find either where I finished or where I were going. Then I get more nervous and the whole thing starts over again. The throat dries up and as if they knew what was going on my wisdom teeth decided to grumble all day. All this and I was still trying to move on from sparrow’s bum snacks.
The Colosseum
I suppose the answer is to have memorised your work so well that you simply repeat it out loud rather than actually reading it. And although it sounds obvious now I didn’t think of this until I watched the poets in the tent. Each of them was brilliant. There were pieces on O.C.D and A.C.D.C, on Hash cakes and Hadron Colliders, but each were smooth and professional. They knew their pieces inside and out and were able to recite them rather than read them. It gave each piece a drama and an air of performance that I certainly couldn’t match.
The Arena
As Jane Pugh called up each of the readers there was a sinking feeling that I hadn’t prepared enough. Eventually I could no longer hide behind the other students and made my way up to the front, where the carpeted floor was as even as a pitching ship. Each of us had to stand in front of a microphone, which was recording our work for The Source FM, and an impressive video camera whose nefarious purpose was never revealed to me. The audience, the mic and the camera really helped to settle my nerves I can tell you.
A deep breath got me through the first piece about a lady archer I watched one morning in Kamakura, Japan, which became the opening of my Silk Road manuscript. And then, because we only had 3-5 minutes to read, I asked the audience whether they would prefer an embarrassing piece (from the Beijing chapter) or an execution piece (from the Uzbekistan chapter). Taking up Jane’s lead the assembly of course asked for ‘embarrassing’ and so a little more relaxed I told them of the tale of the Beijing Hairdressers. There were a few laughs and everyone was very kind and then it was done. All that was left to do was open my gifts for performing while watching a brilliant piece by a young poet who had cut up a news article from the nineteen thirties and made it into a very funny and original piece.
I learned a lot in a small space of time and look forward to having a second stab at it next year!
Before next year I’ll buff up my wellies and my accent, too.
