Emotion in Movement.

Los Angeles - March 4th, 2004

by Teka-Lark Lo

Have you ever witnessed the birth of a movement? The art of spoken word; poetry intertwined into a monologue immersed in emotion and rooted in the political. I had the privilege on Thursday, March 4 to experience all those things at the Aloud series at the Central Library in Downtown LA.

"A Window on Movement and Language" was a presentation by three artists of three generations performing variations on spoken word.

Apparently one of the mothers of the spoken word movement lives and teaches in Los Angeles and her name is Simone Forti. Her training as a dancer, her experiences of life as a daughter of immigrants, and longtime Angelino, has given her the ability to feel people and interpret them and their experiences in an original way.

Her first reading was based on a conversation with her father from her book "Oh Tongue". It put you in the frame of that time in your life, which you realized that your father wasn’t perfect, but it was fine, because no one is. It was authenticity in written form, the way it’s suppose to be when you get everything right.

The next performer was choreographer Carmela Hermann a Los Angeles native in a performance in collaboration with Luke Johnson. Carmela’s piece was less like the traditional spoken word artist and more like a performance piece that borrowed elements of poetry. Carmela along with assistance from Luke, performed the dance of human relationships entitled "Turning My Head to the Left." The questions of where they lovers, friends, siblings didn’t matter, because within their performance they were all those things. A dance of how we come together, fall apart, but in the end fall together again. The performance expressed the discomfort we all feel when followed to closely and the loneliness we feel when we aren’t followed at all. They circled the stage mimicking each others movement, repeating each others words, and then they did the opposite of each other, then they tried to catch each other, but as in life once you get out of sync it is very hard to get back to where you were. Carmela’s choreography was subtle, but layered, like her dialogue, but her point was very clear and the end result was very entertaining.

And then there was the piece entitled "Creation" by chorographer Victoria Marks almost an answer to the "Turning My Head to the Left". "Creation" through movement and comedy created the feeling we all have about living up to expectations, the harm of stereotypes, and the deadliness of inflexible ideals. Victoria in collaboration with Peter Carpenter and Dan Froot, through repetition of movement and comedic commentary expressed in a simple way the very complex way we are forced to live our lives. Victoria repeated a series of movements while her Peter and Dan expressed their admiration of her, their disdain of her, their lust for her, through stereotypes and deifying Victoria portrayed the human experience within the pressure cooker of expectations.

Then Simone Forti performed freestyle in a piece called "News Animation" a spoken word piece in which she crawled on her knees, felt newspapers, and rattled off the headlines of the day giving witty commentary on everything from the Oscars to the War in Iraq. A spoken word performance that gave you an impression of the desperation we all feel to understand, but yet knowing that the resources that we have are lacking in truth and objectivity. Political performances and performances on the human emotion are connected, so the artists combining those three pieces were ingenious.

Aloud is a continuing series at the Los Angeles Central Library which brings art, political, and literary discussion to the LA community at low or no cost check out their website for more details http://www.lapl.org.



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