gender or ethnicity, will have an effect on the words spoken, though
you may also wish to find ways of inverting or transforming this effect.
If you write texts to be performed by others, on the other hand, there
will be the additional interest of seeing how they interpret your work.- If others perform your work you can give them a very tight script to
work from, or a lot of freedom to have a creative input. For example, you
can write a script which allows the performers to partly improvise so
that there is no totally written-out script: this is a strategy employed by
Jackson Mac Low (1986) and discussed later in this chapter. In fact you
may have no script at all, or it may consist only of written instructions. - You can create any kind of relationship between the performance and
the written word. You can write a piece which is transformed or only
fully realised in performance. Or you can create a piece for perform-
ance which does not exist in written form and then transcribe it for the
page afterwards. Sometimes there may be no way of transcribing the
work, or you may have no wish to do so. On other occasions you may
wish to produce a print version for the purposes of documentation,
even if you do not feel that it adequately conveys the full aura of the
performance. More ideally there might be print and performance ver-
sions: these might have a symbiotic relationship, but also exist as
independent entities. American performance poet Steve Benson uses
his own texts as a basis for his improvised performance, but also some-
times transcribes his performances as texts, with striking verbal and
visual results. On occasion, as in his work ‘Back’, the original and
improvised texts sit side by side in the published text (see Benson 1989,
pp. 77–93). It is also possible to partly translate the performance aspect
of a text into visual markers, through the use of different font thick-
nesses and sizes, and spacing on the page. The result can be a text which
bears the traces of the performance, but is also a striking visual entity
in its own right. - Through the medium of performance you can interconnect verbal
language with non-verbal languages such as gesture, visual images,
sound and lighting to create what is known as ‘intermedia’ or mixed-
media work.
PERFORMANCE POETRY
Performance poetry is a very general term which has been used to describe
many different types of orally based work. It includes sound poetry,
ethnopoetics, dub poetry, and what is sometimes known as slam
poetry. Performance poetry therefore ranges from avant-garde practices
214 The Writing Experiment