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chapter ten
Tongues, talk
and technologies
This chapter explores writing for performance, and encourages you to
increase the oral dimension of your writing. It is about the various ways in
which you can make your text ‘talk’, explore different voices and untie your
tongue. At the same time it takes you from performance poetry into inter-
media work (which combines words, sounds and images), improvisation
and theatrical presentation. However, it does not encourage you to con-
struct conventional plays, and is not about writing drama.
Although we tend to think of writing as words on the page, there is no
particular reason why verbal texts should always be written. Most of our
daily communication occurs through conversation rather than the written
word. As far as artistic and literary traditions are concerned, most were
originally oral. The persistence of that oral tradition is powerful in many
cultures, and is a strong presence in, for example, Jamaican dub poetry or
Hawaiian pidgin poetry.
Most writers are called upon on occasion to publicly read or perform
their own work, but not all texts which are designed for silent reading are
necessarily enhanced when ‘read out’. So it can be useful to create some
pieces which are particularly designed for this purpose.
In this chapter I will be suggesting, however, that the importance of
performance extends far beyond this kind of utility. An awareness of the
possibilities of performance can give us a whole new and exciting per-
spective on writing. Performance radically changes the author–reader
dynamic: it creates a live situation in which the writer and audience inter-
act in the same space. Performance creates the possibility of unique forms
of communication which are sometimes more immediate and malleable
than those offered by the page alone.