Lecture Poiesis
Lecture poiesis is a neo-narrative performance following verbal and nonverbal body language through poetry, percussion and multimedia. Deviating from the traditional poetry recitation and bringing a new angle to reading poems through verbal and nonverbal narration, the poet aims to generate a new form of performative poiesis through lecture. It involves the presentation and aberration of multiple truths drawn from social, philosophical and other everyday knowledge networks from a quasi-didactic perspective. While traditional poems utilized standard structures, in part to serve as mnemonic devices, this performance calls upon experimental rendition as a means to absorb an audience in the auditory and visual experience. By the use of subtle body language, voice variations, pause, tempo, gesture, and other para-linguistic techniques, the poetry is lifted from the cold print on a page and energized as a live discourse.
Waking from the dream interred sleep, my legs had turned into clock hands. Thus, theories of time vanished fleetingly. A man without atman watches the time. Does body without atman abide the chronometers of life? I feel like moving my body within the entangled ‘times’ of impermanence. My movement becomes the act of the time that I weave. To say something, I must make my body act. So, I decided to talk on impermanence through a Zoom window.
Using theory-fiction-act as a method, this Lecture Poiesis simultaneously narrates the life of a microbiologist as well as a poet in search of a peculiar bacterial strain. While researching on the soil microbiology in the Western Ghat region, the performer (microbiologist/poet) finds a partially degraded sheet of paper on which the script of Malayalam language is written. Later he tests the degradation rate of paper with written script of Malayalam in a laboratory setting. After the scheduled experiments in a microbiological lab setting, the performer finds that certain scripts were degraded by the microbes and the microbiologist/poet decides to write a poem out of the remaining script of the language. The performance creates a conference space where the performer presents a scientific paper on his findings on the microbial reaction on the Malayalam script. During the performance, the formal gestures of a scientific presentation unexpectedly slip and turn towards the iterations and utterances of a poem.