Vivek Narayanan and Sophea Lerner will present a suite of site-specific, pre-composed and improvised poems, sound objects and audience interactions. They would like to explore and unveil disconnections and echoes around time, place, language and voice, using their toolkit of poetry, performance and sound art practices.
Public contributions to this performance can be found at:
phonebox.org/vnsl/khojlive
Sophea Lerner is an Australian sonic media artist and broadcaster based in India. From 2002-7 she ran media and sonic arts courses at the Centre for Music & Technology in Helsinki where she directed the experimental open content fm/hybrid broadcast project niradio in Helsinki from 2004 and the particle/wave festival of hybrid radio in 2005. In 2006 she was artist in residence at free103point9's Wave Farm in New York. She is currently affiliated with Sarai-CSDS in New Delhi, where she is engaged in practice based research towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney. Lerner's work brings together experience in group devised physical performance with many years of experimental radio and new media art into a collaborative art practice which explores mediated temporal experience. Her radiomaking encompasses intricately composed radiophonic projects as well as engineering and production and collectively devised, rapidly executed semi-improvised live broadcasts. Community and creative networks are integral to collaborative aspects of her practice.
Vivek Narayanan s first book of poems was Universal Beach (Harbour Line, 2006). He has been publishing his poetry since 1994, and has been performing it in various locations since 1995. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including the Boston-based international poetry annual, Fulcrum (where he is also an Associate Editor), Harvard Review, Agni, Open Space India and Tehelka, and in anthologies like Reasons For Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking Penguin, 2002) and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). He is currently based in Delhi, where he works at Sarai-CSDS. He is also Consulting Editor for the international online literary journal, Almost Island, edited by Sharmistha Mohanty. In Narayanan's performance, the idea is first that ritual chant, old talk, performance art, song, rap, and slam can all aim to flow into and out of the classical tradition of English literary performance on record: he is equally interested in reviving late 19th century / early 20th century styles of poetry recitation and bringing them in contact with 21st century possibilities. Over the years he has moved from thinking about performance as a way to make poems more entertaining and accessible, to thinking about the radical contextual possibilities of performance, and collaboration. He is interested specifically in the active performance of difficult poems.