On the Interface between Page and Stage: Interview with Patience Agbabi

Novak, Julia; Fischer, Pascal

doi:10.1515/zaa-2016-0033

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“…The spoken-word community evidently conceives of this extended form of performance work as a genre of spoken-word poetry rather than associating it with theatre or drama. For instance, in a 2014 interview, Patience Agbabi remarked that the popularity of the “one-person show” – rather than “play” or “drama” – has created new opportunities for poets to attract public funding (see Novak and Fischer 2016 , 360). Osborne ( 2010 ), too, stresses the distinct spoken-word element: “The use of ‘I’ [...] is also further shaped and constrained by the poetic systems to which the writers adhere as poets, first and foremost, rather than as dramatists” (232).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing Black British memory: Kat François’s spoken-word show Raising Lazarus as embodied auto/biography

Novak

2020

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Since the 1990s, Black British poets have been at the forefront of developing the “one-person poetry show” or spoken-word play, an apt format for negotiating diasporic history and cultural memory in a public arena. The focus of this article is Kat François’s one-woman show Raising Lazarus (2009/2016), which stages the poet’s own quest for information about her Grenadian relative Lazarus François, a World War I soldier. A media-specific analysis explores how François’s text is semantically enriched when translated into a live performance. The authenticity effect typically produced in spoken-word poetry through the unity of author and performer is compounded in Raising Lazarus by textual and paratextual keys that frame François’s show as embodied auto/biography. Merging life writing, monodrama, and spoken-word poetry, Raising Lazarus reveals the one-person show to be an effective and popular medium for Black British poets to articulate personal experience and negotiate collective identities through performance.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%