November 4, 5, 6

‘Spoken Word’ is a catch-all phrase coined in the 1980s for word-based performance arts that did not fit into the established genres of music, theatre and dance. This capsule history touches on its diverse practices, a number of which will be showcased by notable performers from Canada and beyond at the 8th Words Aloud Spoken Word and Storytelling Festival this November.

Today, Spoken Word includes a wide range of performance genres. Just to mention a few from this year’s Words Aloud Festival, upcoming presentations include: readings of written lyric poetry (Nova Scotian Anne Simpson, winner of the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize); dub performance (Lillian Allen, Canada’s foremost dub poet): performance competitions (the Toronto Youth Slam Team): and storytelling (Ayub Nuri, Iraqi-Kurd writer, reporter and TV journalist sponsored by PEN Canada’s Writers in Exile program).

But let us go back to the early 1980s. Artists in all fields were drawing on practices from many sources including popular and high arts and electronic media. Poets were incorporating into their performances jazz, blues, new technologies, and practices from various cultures, and publishing, if at all, in video and audio formats. The focus was on confession and politics as practiced by the Beats of the 60s, but the inspiration was inclusivity rather than white male exploits. Slams appeared, featuring theatrical voices, monotones, gestures, dancing, rhymed or unrhymed narrative, beatboxing, Jamaican dub and African-American rap and hip-hop.

Dub entered the spotlight in the 1970s. Stylized gestures and complex language featuring the literary techniques of alliteration, double entendre and extended metaphor were, and continue to be, performed to reggae accompaniment. Themes are often socio-political.

Experimental sound poetry, ‘verse without words’ using only the phonetic components of words, has been evolving since the early twentieth century. Traditional wordless vocal forms exist in various cultures. For example, from time immemorial, Inuit women have practiced throat singing in face-to-face pairs alternating rhythmic inhaled and exhaled sounds.

Non-literary vocal practices are sometimes cited as spoken word influences: the auctioneer’s singsong patter, circus barking, children’s skip-rope rhymes, stand-up comedy, political oratory, and television news presentation.

Finally, going back to the dawn of human culture, we arrive at the great epics, stories told in poetry. Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and Beowulf are considered to have originated as oral poems long before they were written down. Some of their characteristics - repeating sounds and sequences - have come down to us as literary devices used in poetry and storytelling today.

Spoken Word, a wonderful mix of performance practices, poetry, narrative, and song from across millennia and around the world, continues to evolve, entertain and reveal us to ourselves in new ways.