Next week, Georgetown’s Davis Performing Arts Center will host two interactive installations, an unprecedented event for the venue. From the British Council U.S. comes the Black Atlantic Project (BAP), an experimental musical collaboration that evolved from seven British and American musician poets who sampled and re-mixed each others works to create a trans-Atlantic hip-hop conversation. Joshua DeMinter (COL ’08), instrumental in bringing the project to Georgetown, thought that in addition to BAP, “we need our own response,” and so the Echoes From The Melting Pot project was born.
After bringing together a group of thirty or so poets and artists from Georgetown and D.C. through an online listserv, DeMinter sent out a few e-mails to the Echoes group with content from BAP. He received anonymous responses from participants in the form of poems, pictures, videos, bits of conversation, news clippings and single words. Then the next batch went out and the group responded again, answering each other through a dialogue in free verse, or expanding a few lines of conversation into a rondeau.
To really work with the poems, you had to “let go of your autonomy,” DeMinter explained. “Everyone wants to know who did what.” But the ideas and poems have gone through the listserv so many times it would be impossible to define a single creator.
The Echoes contributors initially responded to themes from BAP, such as the black Diaspora across the Atlantic. Poems touched issues of war, love and identity; one participant sent in a news story about a Russian gay rights parade, which sparked a discussion on homosexuality. DeMinter, as editor, accepts that his voice affects the final product, but stresses that the exhibit investigates what it means when many participate anonymously in a creative work. He may see hints of different contributors who like to submit PostSecret images, or tend to get fiery about love, or have a particular affinity for dropping the f-bomb, but in the end all the voices meld together.
On Echoes’ opening night, the only opportunity to experience the performance aspect of the exhibit, the Davis Center will open its aisles, hallways and lobbies to a poetry reading that explores how the genre can be shared. Ten members of the Black Theatre Ensemble will act as poet troubadours, stationed in various locations throughout the entire building, each reciting from any part of the Echoes body of work.
Wandering from one to another in a self-guided tour of the piece, you may chance to hear ten different poems, or ten different voices performing the same poem in ten different ways. Part of the experience is what happens when the hour-long performance is over, and the audience compares what they heard. In fact, DeMinter sees this casual conversation as part of the piece itself—a continuation of the oral tradition.
Echoes is academic, bringing together aspects of performance studies, literary theory, questions about copyright laws, African-American studies and European/American cultural studies. But it is also accessible, personal and artistic: it tries to engage the audience, lift poetry from the page and form connections through the often impersonal space of the internet.
The Black Atlantic Project will run from Oct. 5-Dec. 25 as a sound & object installation in the Davis Center Lobby. The Echoes Project will open on Oct. 5 at 7 p.m. at the Davis Center and continue as an installation.
