Last Friday night I met a hero of mine. They say you should never do that, but I had a much better experience meeting Geof Huth than "they" must have had when coining clichés! I certainly did my share of fanboy tail-wagging, and took a little bit of friendly ribbing for it, but none of that was bad.  Geof's performance was called forty-nine, referring to (I suppose) the "Experiment" number it was assigned in the Red Rover series, of which it was a part. I went not just to meet him, and to support the series, but also to learn a thing or two. (That's why I got teased--I told him I was there to learn). See, we do similar things, and I'm always looking for new ways to perform the more visual poetic work I make. I also have been really wanting to bring my whole body into the performance of poems, branching off from my default nervous prowl across the stage or into the audience. As a once-agile person in my forties, plump, strong but with bad knees, I can't use my body the way he does. But I did get the inspiration I came for. My sense of the possible in poetic performance is much broader having seen what he chose to do. The broadside pictured here (or one side of it, anyway) offers a sort of mnemonic key to the performance, but by no means can it be said to fully represent or document it. In fact one thing I loved about the performance was that Geof documented us--the audience--as he performed. By bringing his camera into the performing area and turning its eye-snout onto us as we watched him, he reminded us that we are also material; we are phrase and phoneme and pixel and pigment. |
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