Live E-Poetry Performance: An Gorta Mor
“We keep putting on programs about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.” –Daniel Attenborough
After I explored a cultural issue in Asia, I realized that, for the next project, I wanted to explore a world issue. As always, I felt slightly challenged to find an inspiring theme for this project. Luckily, however, one of the songs my Glee club sang for a concert, <Famine Song>, gave me an inspiration, and I decided to explore famine in different countries using live e-poetry, an e-poetry performance using the computer screen as a canvas. For this performance, I found a poem called “An Gorta Mor” which literally means the Great Famine in Ireland (mid-1800s) and typed out the poem in WordPad while performing. I found a video of a newscast on Ethiopia’s famine in the mid-1980s, and a documentary about the Great Leap Forward in China, in the 1950s. By finding elements of famine from different generations and from three different continents (Europe, Africa and Asia), I aimed to examine the different feelings that emerged from this issue such as sadness, disgust, unconditional and delusional worship, etc.
To make the combination of elements more effective, I also included several sonic elements. I inserted a sound clip of Rachel Portman’s “We All Complete,” an OST in the movie <Never Let Me Go> (yes, it is the movie based on Kathy H.’s <Never Let Me Go>), rain dropping sound effects, and, not surprisingly, a performance of <Famine Song>. The toughest challenge for this piece was to arrange different videos and sound clips in a way that is most visually appealing for the audience; I had to play around many times to see what worked the best. I even sketched a blueprint of how I was going to arrange each clip on the canvas. Additionally, since it was a live performance, I did everything all over again whenever I made a little mistake. I wanted to make sure things were flowing well without many flies in the ointment.
As a result of playing around many times, I made several decisions to make this piece as effective as I could. First, for the beginning of the performance, I decided to juxtapose a newscast and my typing of the poem: the newscaster's audible voice and the first few lines of the poem paralleled because they both described the harsh conditions of famine. The newscast was followed by feeble Ethiopian women and children starving to death, the images that may be a little disgusting and also reveal harsh reality of famine. Then, I turned on “We All Complete” because as a soundtrack from a dystopian movie, I thought the melancholic melody intensified the depressing atmosphere. Halfway through the performance, I featured a part of the Great Leap Forward documentary, starting from the part where Chinese farmers praised Mao by holding up a portrait of his face. In doing so, I made a juxtaposition with the lines of the poem “to their God, for their Queen.” I then added sound effects of rain dropping and a part of <Famine Song>, and this attempt also made a parallel between raining sounds and the singers’ representation of rain. Throughout the performance, I moved around the screen of the typing of the poem and the clips so the audience can focus on reading the text. I hope the soloists in <Famine Song> created a nice, relaxed ending of the performance, leaving a lasting impression.
Here is the video of live e-poem, posted on YouTube:
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