Echoing The Ghosts
Written by
After 10 months of writing, editing, workshopping and rehearsing, The Literatti's new collaborative, multi-media, spoken word project is ready to hit the stage!
Since November 2009, The Literatti have been working with instrumental music that Nine Inch Nails released onto the creative commons (Ghosts I & II; 2008), in a process they came to call The Ghosts Project.
Riffing to the theme 'the ghosts of the modern age', the five poets crafted performance poetry that would take a character from history and interact with them in some way. Poets selected tracks to write to, from the first two albums in Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts collection, building an eclectic mix of poetry that spans every genre and emotion.
The outcome is a 60-minute show called Echoing The Ghosts.
"Echoing The Ghosts confronts characters that have shaped our world/view, dresses them in poetry and makes them dance to music from Nine Inch Nails."
The show encompasses solo performances that discuss such characters from history as The Wright Brothers, Kerouac, Billy Holiday, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll. We've got poems in three-voices about Te Whiti & Marilyn Monroe, and poems in two voices about Huxley, Friedman, Rosa Parks, Da Vinci and Jung.
We go partying with Sigmund Freud, cooking with Kate Sheppard, to Family Planning with Ettie Rout and we have coffee with the famous artists of renaissance Florence. There is the melding of song and spoken word, the layering of multiple voices and as always, brand new frontiers to play with.
Poetry is performed to the music on the album that inspired the project, thanks to the freedom provided by Nine Inch Nails' decision to release the music under a creative commons, Noncommercial-Share-Alike agreement. People can download & listen to the albums by following the links on the Nine Inch Nails website.
Echoing the Ghosts opens at Corban's Estate Arts Centre, in the chapel building, on September 18th at 7pm.
There will be a second performance at Galatos, in association with the Moving Image Centre, on September 25th at 7pm. This performance will be opened by a screening of an MIC group's visual poetry experiment, which will be conducted in the next three weeks through a series of workshops with The Literatti.
Tickets are on the door, but can be reserved by emailing theliteratti@gmail.com
With a cast comprised of slam winners, musical-poets and the odd Poetry Idol champion, and a year spent workshopping since Growl and the Def Jam collaboration, Echoing The Ghosts is set to take things to a whole new level.
Cast: Miriam Barr, Christian Jensen, Daniel Larsen, Sabrina Muck & Anna Kaye Forsyth.
Directed by Miriam Barr - her last stint as creative director
Co-directed by Christian Jensen - his first stint as creative director
Supported by First Scene, the Moving Image Centre, and Metonymy