In today’s world, when different types of art seem to be merging, it feels necessary to look closely at the newly-popular genre of poetic performance. Public reading of texts, accompanied by visuals and audio or any other enhancements used to intensify the textual content, very often take the form of performance or happenings. It is impossible to characterize this genre strictly as poetry-readings, performance, theatre, happening, or anything else. It is all of this simultaneously as well as a completely new, independent genre. Interestingly, this ‘new thing’ has very strong socio-critical notes, since this type of ‘poetic activism’ very often takes form of a political one.

Throughout post-soviet countries’ history it so happened that conceptual artists and conceptualist poets have been working closely together (some very often were both). But don’t confuse poetic performance with artistic one, since for the poets text is far from being mere form: it is their object.

Laboratory for poetic actions, “Mnogo Burk” (“A lot of letters”), 2010

There are many examples of poetic performance. Keti Chukhrov, philosopher, poet and author of “Just People”, defines her activities as first and foremost artistic. All that we experience through literature goes way beyond it. Concentrating on speech, transmitting it ‘live; when reading it and giving it certain intonation and emotional form she creates a certain “lyrical space” which the viewer becomes part of like in theatre.  

Actionist poet Pavel Arsieniev and Keti Chukhorov

The Laboratory for Poetic Action was recent;y founded in Saint-Petersburg and incorporates poets, artists, philosopher and sees its aim as “unalienation of everyday life through enriching the urban space with poetry”.

 

Laboratory for Poetic Action, “Mnogo Bukv”, 2010

Members of the group (Pavel Arseniev, Dina Gatina, Roman Osminkin) create street actions, space interventions and compositions, which, as a rule, are very closely connected with the use of poetic text and words. They preserve the pieces through videotaping – the only way the performance can be captured.

It can be said that poetic performance is close to cinema (a synthesis of literature and theatre), but that would be missing the point where this type of performance is close to political actionism. Each poetic performance is not just an art-piece, but a social commentary, a reaction to current issues.

It seems that political activism is impossible without including different types of art into the process. Contemporary artists’ political expression, which is hidden behind a safe curtain of artistic expression, is just one of the examples. Poetic performance/actionism is more of a brave example, something that can’t be put solely into literature and aspiring to become something bigger and more effective.

"Mnogo Bukv" insallation. Day-time view. from chto delat on Vimeo.

 

Anna Landykhova