by VINCENT TINGUELY

Motion in Poetry has been rocking the T-dot for more than a decade, but it was in 2002 that she really started making waves when she won the national CBC radio Face-Off poetry slam. "It put me in contact with poets I probably wouldn't have had contact with otherwise," Motion explains. "It exposed me to more people doing poetry, spoken word and slams across the country." Since then things have taken off. She published her first book, Motion in Poetry. The CD version, Motion in Poetry: The Audio Xperience was nominated in the 2004 Canadian Urban Music Awards for Best Spoken Word recording. She's appeared on ZeD, helped out hip hop outfit Butta Babees on their "Man in Motion" and "Swing" tracks and made enough of an impression at last November's Coco Café gig to be invited to perform at this year's Voix d'Amériques spoken word festival.

"There's always been a performance element to my life," says Motion. "For me, it didn't begin with poetry. It began with dancing, singing, playing piano, playing with bands. A big part of my experience is rapping, being an MC and rhyming, coming straight up from the hip hop musical roots."

It was the quality of her lyrics that led Motion to explore spoken word. "I was told a lot of things I wrote were poetic, so I was given different opportunities to drop my lyrics a-capella. Once that form opened up, I started to get up the mind frame to perform pieces that I didn't necessarily write for music."

Motions' pieces can be gritty, angry, reflecting the rougher side of urban experience. "But people also talk about the love and humour I express," she points out. "People who are lyricists, spoken wordists - we talk about experiences, observations of what's around us. Race, class and gender are some of the things that would come out of what I write because I'm a woman of colour, and I'm living in this society. I'm usually writing straight from the heart - I might have a theme I want to drop, but I find a lot of things are inspired by hearing something, feeling something or doing something. I was told by a writer, Althea Prince, that writers are basically expressing memory, what is in your DNA, your experiences of yourself and those who came before you, in an emotional or spiritual way."

As an educator, Motion in Poetry has inspired at least two spoken word dynamos Montrealers are familiar with, d'bi young and Nah-ee-lah. "FreshArts was a youth organization that was running in the mid '90s," Motion explains. "I was given the opportunity to put together my own program and work with some other young artists and learn about the industry, the performance technology and the history of music and performance. Those workshops have had a long-lasting effect by creating opportunities for artists like myself, d'bi, Nah-ee-lah, Kardinal Offishall. That was a foundation that was there for us."

Motion In Poetry performs with Lillian Allen, Sheri-D Wilson and D. Kimm in Body And Soul 2 on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 8:30 p.m, at La Sala Rossa, $10. The Festival Voix d'Amériques runs Feb. 11–18, with eight big shows, various round tables and smaller events, and a nightly open mic. Visit www.fva.ca, or call 844-9669 for more info

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