On the back of the Centre’s ‘Long Minute’ series, we created ‘The Poetry Minute’, curated by performance artist, musician and writer Bongile Lecoge-Zulu. The focus here is on the physical text of poetry performed as miniature animated films. The project is interested in how text might perform itself outside of more familiar spoken and embodied forms.

In Bongile’s words: ‘Poets and writers have been invited to create or find an intriguing piece, fragment, or moment of text. The ask is then that they explore the treatment of it so that it comes to life as a text film to present on the rather transient stage of social media. I’m intrigued by how the text itself may want to collaborate and in which ways a poetic text can be read in the constraints of a minute.

An initial incubative workshop discovered animating fonts and typographies, cinematographic devices and punctuating music and sound design. Text began to appear, disappear, float, and scratch itself out, it crumpled, was thrown, etched, dissolved and shuffled. The text was inviting play and through it we followed the impulses beyond the initial idea, we distilled and decluttered and sought out the less good idea.

Over 3 months we regularly shared the outcomes of these negotiations and balances between form, meaning, scale, depth, lightness, quirk, profundity and the broader conversation that the pieces have with one another. Everything packed into a series of poems in a form of unspoken poetry that can not exist as print or spoken word.

Cinematography and Editing by | Noah Cohen
Sound Recording & Mixing | Zain Vally

PRODUCTION FOR THE CENTRE

CO-DIRECTOR | Bronwyn Lace
ANIMATEUR | Phala O Phala
STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo
LIGHTING DESIGNERS | Wesley France & Matthews Phala
SOUND ENGINEER | Zain Vally
CINEMATOGRAPHER & EDITOR | Noah Cohen

PHOTOGRAPHER | ZIVANAI MATANGI