"Welcome to the opening night of The Wide Word, produced by The Word, and here at the Horsebridge through Tuesday the 26th. It’s my pleasure as the director of East Kent Live Lit to introduce you to a couple of performances this evening, as well as the Gallery exhibition, organized by Karl Musson. The Wide Word is billed as a celebration of Word-Art, which is one component of live literature. So, what is live literature?
As a term it is a catch-all phrase for any piece or process which allows audiences and readers to engage with literature and writers in a live context. It is fiction, flash fiction, and poetry, but it might also be something else. It isn’t just an author reading, though it can be. It can be poetry read, performed, or slammed. It can hip hop or rap, but needn’t necessarily. It can be a film or installation or piece of art that has words at its heart. It can look like theatre or dance, but does not have to. It might feel like storytelling, but it is not improvised. It can be digital. It can be knitted or stitched. It can transform a physical space. The term live lit is slippery and nebulous. Originally, it was funding jargon, a term devised to fund a new body of work, one that bridged many other live and static forms. It does not have to come in any particular form or style, so it rarely looks the same from one event to the next.
A Twitter survey among producers, promoters and writers yielded a variety of answers to the question: What is live lit?
• An on-line publisher said, “It is literature that is created as it's experienced and consumed by the audience; it could extend to performance or dynamic delivery.” A pretty broad definition, but effective.
• One producer said: “It’s poetry underscored with borrowings from the performing arts - direction, lighting, music etc.” That’s a narrow interpretation, but common.
• A writer said, “Isn't it also something as simple as someone standing up and reading something? Or is it always more of a performance/show?”
The thing is, nobody knows what it is. Even recent live lit conferences have seen writers speaking screenplays, comedians versing Scrabble, and poets performing animatedly before animated sets. All of them are live lit. Aren’t they?
There are no rules. The key to live literature is always the text, not the performance itself. It is about bringing words - bringing literature - to life in new and unexpected ways.
This is what East Kent Live Lit and other literature development funding bodies are for. Not to produce or programme work that already exists, like theatres or music venues do. But it is important to be an advocate for your region, to help encourage others to come in or to tour. This has been the thinking behind our long series here at the Horsebridge with Apples & Snakes, the UK’s leading performance poetry organization. What East Kent Live Lit does, along with other regional development offices, is to encourage the making of new work, of harnessing untested ideas to emerging writing, to make new forms.
As such, we have been pleased to fund novelist Katherine May’s “Re-Authoring Process”, which began with the question: how can writers offer readings that are satisfying events for readers if the writer does not want to be a performer; she ended up with a regional tour. We funded Chalk de Ville, a new touring live lit project with Club Shepway. We have funded two poets who will be running workshops here, Dan Simpson and Maggie Harris, who had ideas for new projects in new places. Recently we funded two poets who wondered what would happen if they wrote and performed together, and we part-funded materials for a new show by The Word. We have also funded a new work by Cathy Streeter, whose Thought Exchange you can see here in the Gallery, and I invite you to be a part of it by exchanging your thoughts with it.
East Kent Live Lit is also interested in professional development, in your professional de-velopment as artists and writers, so that you can be encouraged to produce and promote your own new work, once the funding streams dry up. Because they are always temporary and transitional. That is the thinking behind the kinds of training events that we run and that PANeK runs, or the funding schemes offered by the Marlowe Theatre and local councils. I think that live lit in particular benefits from a guerrilla approach, to understanding what is basic and vital to the work, not be bogged down from making the work by technical demands or venue requirements that would be “nice” but that are not essential to the work itself. With live lit all you really need is “the word.”
Live lit happens all over the world. It happens at festivals and venues in Lewes and Brighton, Norwich and Edinburgh. It happens in series in Glasgow, Southampton and Luton. It happens at the Southbank and numerous upstairs rooms in pubs throughout London. In East Kent it happens in pubs, art centres, universities and bookshops from Canterbury to Folkestone and in galleries and festivals from Thanet and Folkestone. Sometimes it happens in neon. Live lit is happening here, right here, whatever it may look like to you."
If you want to know more about live lit, or if you want some help with your professional development, why not get in touch?
