Improvising?

I woke up this morning and thought what the hell did I do last night? Don't worry I remember it all clearly, I wasn't very drunk or anything ... I was improvising! Something I'm not very used to. I've previously blogged about doing improvised workshops with the band 4thirtythree. But last night wasn't a workshop; it was a gig. People came to the Red Roaster and paid to watch and listen to us improvise.

Luckily the band 4thirtythree improvise all the time so they are used to it and they held the night together beautifully. And somewhere between the music there were words. Some of them fitted some of them didn't. I'm surprised how we managed to make the performance flow without any particular plan. Well some of us poets had brought material (either on paper or in our heads) so it wasn't totally improvised, but we did some collaborate pieces that were happening there and then and won't ever happen again.

Talking to a guy in the audience he said that he enjoyed some bits and found other bits painful. He thought our collaborate pieces worked best, when we only spoke for about 30 seconds each and then moved on to another person, creating a stream of words. Quite a fair comment I think.

I'm mostly happy what I did/said, but I also felt that I missed the "freshness" from the workshop where I felt more free as I had not brought any material at all. I'm still questioning what the hell I was doing last night, but I feel happy for the experience. A big thank you to Tom Cunliffe for putting it all together!

It has been great working with all those talented people: 4thirtythree, Annie, Yaz, Bernie, Alison and Tom.

Improvised Music & Spoken Word Workshop

Saturday I went to an improvised music & spoken word workshop (organised by poet Tom Cunliffe at the Open House Pub) with an open mind. When I signed up for it a few months ago I thought it sounded cool to improvise words to music. The reality of it was more than cool.

The Safehouse Collective is a group that meets regularly to improvise music and some of the members are also part of a band called 4thirtythree that play live gigs and record albums - all improvised.

Anything can happen and that's what I love about it. The musicians not only use instruments; they pick up brushes, chairs, glasses - anything in the room - to make sound effects. In the workshop the poets were welcome to join in with any words they felt like using. Some used lines from already existing poems, while others made the words up on the spot.

I got a line in my head "I have ice cream in my head, melting in my ears" literally ten seconds before going on stage and later on while I was tuning into the music "my head was falling off." A liberating feeling as I'm a person who normally learn my poems by heart and keep rehearsing ...