Making Poetry Happen: Poetry Performance by Women & Gender Nonconforming Artists
Connecting the performative to your poetic, inspired by innovative contemporary practitioners.
Join us as we shine a spotlight on women and gender nonconforming artists who explore performative approaches to poetry. From the poet’s relationship with their audience and the sonic potential of language, to embodied writing processes and the physicality of text itself, this course offers various ways of exploring, unlocking, and experimenting with the performative possibilities of poetry. Each assignment builds new connections between poetry and performance through a fascinating set of works by some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary practitioners performing in the UK, including Hannah Silva, Nathan Walker, Maja Jantar, Verity Spott, Camilla Nelson, Harry Josephine Giles, CAConrad, Sarah Dawson, and Karenjit Sandhu.
Making Poetry Happen also introduces students to a variety of writing techniques and forms with which to experiment, as well as providing concrete tips for devising and delivering IRL performances.
This course is suitable for students of all levels of experience including poets interested in performance and performers interested in poetry, as well as artists with more established hybrid practices. Students will be welcome to share videos, sound recordings, and visual scores, while also being free to stick to page-based pieces.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to administ[email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @sharonmccutcheon
About Iris Colomb 
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Iris Colomb is a poet, artist, curator, editor, lecturer, and translator based in London. She builds connections between visual and verbal forms of text through projects involving performance, object scores, improvisation, sound, chance, multilingual writing, and experimental translation.
She has given individual, collaborative, interactive, and durational performances online as well as in the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Austria, Romania, and Chile; at Intrications Poétiques Transnationales (Paris), the Bucharest International Poetry Festival, the international transmedial poetic festival räume für notizen (“room for notes”, Vienna), and the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International Festival, among others. She has published three poetry pamphlets: I’m Shocked (Bad Betty Press, 2018), just promise you won’t write (Gang Press, 2019), and Flakes of Fickle Quicklime (Earthbound Press, 2020). Her pamphlet of improvised poetry, Ridiculous Unlikely Attempt, is forthcoming from Hesterglock Press. Her poems have also appeared in several UK magazines and anthologies, as well as French, Russian, Austrian, Spanish, German, Brazilian, Chilean and US publications.
Iris is the founder of the investigative poetry and performance platform SLANT, the Co-Editor of HVTN Press, and a founding member of the interdisciplinary collective No Such Thing. She is also half of the performance duo Soft Play, half of the text-sound duo [something’s happening], a third of the improvising band Daylightbulb, and a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra. She is currently working as a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.
More information about Iris’s practice and projects can be found at www.iriscolomb.com.
"Poetry School offers the most innovative and creative poetry workshops I've had the pleasure to attend. The tutors are world class and the themes and topics varied and interesting."
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