Speak easy

>> Victoria Stanton and Vincent Tinguely trace the history of spoken word in Montreal with Impure, Reinventing the Word

by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

To those who practice spoken word in this city, Victoria Stanton and the Mirror's own Vincent Tinguely salute you. Stanton and Tinguely love the mish-mash, poetry-performance cocktail that is spoken word so much, they wrote a book about it: Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice, and Oral History of Spoken Word in Montreal. The Mirror asked Vince and Victoria how they crammed it all into one book with lots of pretty pictures, then we sat back and let them finish each other's sentences.



Mirror: How did you guys get yourselves into this mess?

Vincent Tinguely: We were both in the spoken word group Fluffy Pagan Echoes in the mid-'90s, then Victoria and I did some stuff as a duo. Broken Pencil asked the two of us to do an article on spoken word in Montreal and we ended up interviewing 18 people for that piece.

Victoria Stanton: One of the people we interviewed, Ian Ferrier, said, "Wow, this is a really neat idea. Maybe you guys should think about working on a book."

VT: (giggling) We laughed--

VS: Literally, in his face, and said, "Yeah, right! In your dreams." But then, less than a year later, after the article in Broken Pencil was published and people really appreciated it, we thought, "Maybe there really is more that we can do about this."

VT: Then we applied to the Quebec Arts Council and we got [a grant], so that launched us on our two-year odyssey.

M: The book is pretty heavy on the visuals, with lots of posters and performance shots. Did you set out to make it nice and visual?

VT: Yeah, from the beginning, we wanted a coffee table book--as close as we could get to that, with the budget we had. It wasn't easy to get the pictures, because a lot of spoken word people don't think about documenting their work the way that visual artists do, but I think that might be changing a bit now.

VS: Spoken word is essentially about performance, so we wanted people to actually see someone on stage being dynamic. With the posters, that's the grass-roots side of spoken word. Posters are a big element of advertising any show in any scene.

M: What's happened to spoken word since it was hot for that brief moment in the mid-'90s on MTV with the slams and the hip hop stuff?

VT: The media always picks up on something when it thinks it's new. Spoken word has been around since the '60s, really. Sometimes it's very underground; sometimes it's public. It's got a cyclical pattern and overall, it continues to grow.

VS: Also, someone who's making popular music might then get attention for their spoken word; I'm thinking of someone like Henry Rollins. With hip hop, a lot of it could be considered spoken word, and certainly poetry.

VT: But there's a lot of product being put out now, like Ribsauce, the women performers' CD...

VS: And nah ee lah's got a CD coming out; Alex (Boutros) and Karla (Sundström); Katherine Kidd. Fortner Anderson and Ian Ferrier have both put out discs. Planète rebelle have put out a lot of French ones.

M: How does all this relate to the "Impure" and "Reinventing" in the title of the book?

VS: Spoken word is a hybrid form. The title actually comes from performance artist Nathalie Derome. Over the years, galleries have said she's too theatre, the theatre people think she's too much like spoken word and so on, so she said, "I don't fit anywhere, my work is impure and I'm impure." But it's a badge that she can wear proudly because a lot of us fall between the cracks. We always define in the negative, like "It's not quite this and it's not quite that." So what is it? It's impure because it carries traces of so many different forms.

VT: The title also addresses Montreal as a hybrid city. It's not a French city; it's not even a bilingual city. It's a multicultural, multilingual city.

Impure launch, Oct. 27, 8pm at la Sala Rossa, $20 with book, $5 without