Date: Saturday, 2nd February
Time: 14:30 – 16:30
Venue: National Gallery of Modern Art, Auditorium
Conducted by: Jeet Thayil

This two-hour workshop will deal with the basic technical aspects of performing poetry to an audience. We will talk about voice, music, stance; what to do with your hands, your body, your face. We’ll watch performances by Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, and Charles Bukowski, and identify the qualities that make these performances interesting, or not.

We’ll discuss what makes a poem work on the page and what makes it work on the stage and whether it is possible for a poem to do both. And we’ll ask if the skills required for performance are entirely different from those required for writing.

I’d like participants to send poems in before the workshop, and I encourage participants to memorize the poems they want critiqued.

(More about the workshop leader and details on how to register below the fold.)

Jeet Thayil is a poet and musician who has performed with The Chronic Blues Band in Bangalore, with Bombay Down in New York, and, most recently, with Suman Sridhar at the Galle Festival in Sri Lanka. He is the author of four poetry collections including English (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008); and the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry (forthcoming in 2008) and Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). He is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundations, among others. He lives in Bangalore.

To register
Please mail kalaghoda DOT workshops AT gmail DOT com with the subject line ‘Poetry in Perfomance.’
In your mail, please include:
1. Your name, an email address and a phone number (preferably cellular)
2. A line or two about your previous experience in this area.
3. A line or two about what you’re looking for from this workshop.
4. One of your poems, one that you think has potential as a performance piece. Jeet would prefer that you memorise that poem in time for the workshop.

There are only 20 seats available. Please register early!

Please inform us well in time if you need to drop out, so we can free the seat for someone else.

Please make sure you are at the workshop venue 15 minutes before the posted start time.

We will inform all registered participants about any changes in schedules. But please keep an eye on this post as well for any changes.