Word up!

>> CDs, zines and spoken word series past and future

by VINCENT TINGUELY

The year 2000 was marked by the loss of two major spoken word series. Last spring, Alexis O'Hara brought her third year of organizing the Montreal Slam to a halt in order to pursue her own artistic goals. And after five years of hosting YAWP! Jake Brown decided to wind things down last summer for similar reasons. This left Coco Café, established in 1997, as the only long-running anglo spoken-word series in Montreal.

According to Ian Ferrier, who started the monthly Words and Music at the Casa to help fill the gap, organizing shows is no picnic. "There's a lot of demands to the job and there's not much money. You have to be pretty altruistic about why you're doing it." Besides Ferrier's new series, spoken word finds a home at Wednesday's Child, a bi-weekly open mic series run by YAWP! alumnus Larissa Andrusyshyn, and at Paula Belina's popular series of launches for her Streeteaters zine.



Celebrations and cabarets

While the loss of YAWP! and the Montreal slam might not seem to bode well for an art form that depends on live performance, in fact the spoken word scene in 2000 remained robust. Large audience turn-outs were the norm at one-off or irregular events like Legba, Ian Ferrier's Exploding Head Man CD launch, Debbie Young's When "The Love" Is Not Enough CD launch, the Spoken Word Celebration: a day of griots and poets, the HOWL festival, Planète rebelle's second annual Cabaret littéraire multidisciplinaire, and the Impure benefit.

Montreal audiences caught plenty of out-of-town spoken word artists, including slam champs Roger Bonair-Agard and Steve Coleman, New York diva trio Jezebelle, Dutch experimental vocal artist Jaap Blonk, former Four Horsemen member Paul Dutton and manic Boston recording artist and author Ken Cormier.

Thanks in part to the new Canada Council program for spoken and electronic words, a number of performers have been concentrating on long-term projects this year. Victoria Stanton is putting the finishing touches on Split: The Second Half, a spoken word video; Corey Frost is working on the Bits World CD-ROM; Catherine Kidd and Jack Beets are developing Metaphormoses, a series of live performances based on Kidd's novel Bestial Rooms; both nah ee lah and word duo Alex Boutros and Kaarla Sundström are recording CDs; and Ferrier is producing print and sound anthologies of women spoken word artists for Wired on Words and Véhicule Press. Ferrier predicts: "That stuff's going to start hitting next year. There's going to be another boom."