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the four horsemen

Me and my friend lilly nipped out to see The Four Horsemen, performed by the dance group Volcano, in the Dublin fringe, last night.

For me, it was an interesting follow up to the Bergen electronic literature conference. Both contained sound poetry, concrete poetry, video; both mixed poetry and performance arts. The Four Horsemen performed dance and sound poetry. They were great fun.

Volcano enhanced their performance with video clips of Canadian sound poetry from the late 1960s (to judge by the shirts), both performers and critics. This gave context for those many people who’ve never heard of sound poetry.

Canadian sound and concrete poetics seem to have taken a different direction to British / European. Over here, right now, most I’ve recently heard is expressive shouting, with post-processing by computer to generate soundscapes (which I think would work better purely as soundscapes, to be honest, but then it’d be plain old music). The performance last night was far more chanting, with no post-processing.

If you get a chance to see them, do so.