The Poetry Project

The Dreams of Poets Theater

Maxe Crandall

The San Francisco Poets Theater Festival has been an ongoing DIY community enterprise for decades. Kevin Killian founded the festival in 2001, which ran off and on until it went into hibernation in 2016. In 2012, I arrived in San Francisco to meet Kevin in the flesh and attend my first festival. I was obsessed. In March 2024, thanks to a commission from Syd Staiti, I revived the SFPTF to celebrate 50 years of Small Press Traffic.

The literary legacy of San Francisco is founded in cross-disciplinary conversations and collaborations—art actions incubated in cultural hubs such as New Langton Arts, The Lab, and, indeed, Small Press Traffic. As a practice of dreaming together, Poets Theater is community theater. Community-centered theater that is 1) experimental, meaning we try things we’ve never done before; 2) anti-institutional and improvisational, meaning these cross-disciplinary collaborations are made with what we already have, together; 3) meta, meaning Poets Theater performances are often about the social aspects and implications of art-making.

I arranged the 2024 SFPTF as an unfolding dreamscape, where commissioned performances erupted from an ongoing performance of voiceover text guiding audience members through my meditations on The Dream of Poets Theater. My goal with a curated format (as opposed to an open call) was to reconstitute an audience for Poets Theater in the Bay Area and bring new artists into the practice. To this end, I included plays from the repertoire alongside new commissions. Co-curator Elena Gross and I invited artists who are already Poets Theater icons or whose practices either seemed suggestive of Poets Theater or so far afield we couldn’t resist proposing an experiment. We pushed the collaborations to open up new directions in the artists’ practices while extending Poets Theater into newly imagined forms. I’m lucky to live in the Bay where writers and artists work in community, lift each other up, honor and contest legacies, fight back against censorship, and demand a free Palestine. Below is one account of what we made together in a time of galvanizing energy and great loss.

Composer and saxophonist Phillip Greenlief presented his debut play playing, an imaginary rehearsal he performed alongside ghosts of literary ancestors in order to sift through competing literary legacies and the interior dramas of making performance. Greenlief’s piece provided a cold open to the show, providing meta content interspersed with my opening voiceover. His work demonstrated how we often revel in and are most changed by the processes behind performance—by the many mysteries and questions hovering just inside the dream. playing ended with the demonstration of an ongoing, built-in (beyond) land acknowledgment wherein all things are animated.

Next, I presented my deep cut of Kevin Killian’s The Big Keep, impossibly condensing a full length play into 15 minutes. The Big Keep was a pointed choice for the festival, which hoped to raise funds through ticket sales (we sold out). Anne Waldman commissioned the play as a fundraiser for Naropa in 2003. As I billed it: “When $100,000,000 goes missing from the SFSU Poetry Center, local poets, divas, and diva poets join forces to solve the most complex financial mystery of all time.” After the show, Camille Roy raved New Narrative style, dishing, “You know Kevin’s plays often needed an editor.” Love to get a feather in my cap as an untrained professional in the theater.

Event tech and Big Keep star Kevin CK Lo pointed out how the ramshackle histories of Poets Theater resemble the ramshackle worlds of dreams. I often think of Poets Theater as theater but about to fall apart. Also: how to do theater without the theater. The impromptu style of Poets Theater sometimes means no rehearsal—you hand people scripts without much warning and see what happens. This style emphasizes embodied live performance as experiment, risk, adventure, and isolates a central aspect of the dream of Poets Theater: its radical embrace of joy and mess, the virtuosic within the erratic. I decided to present The Big Keep without rehearsal, to allow the audience to partake in the sweet chaos of Poets Theater in the raw. My players were fantastic, unhinged. This Big Keep ended with an eruption into Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” as an homage to Kevin performed by The Indigo Menace, my drag artist production assistant for the festival.

They used to say you have to sleep to dream, so in perhaps the greatest genre twist of the night, the Bay Area’s answer to Tom of Finland, visual artist Poppers the Pony (Dorian Katz) & friends performed an erotic bedtime story, The Pony and the Hyena. Dramatizing the dreamspace of a scene of reading, Poppers created a hypercolor image with pony and tiger costumes, wherein performance became an act of transformative animation, fur touching (astro)turf. Poppers’s performance had me thinking about scenes of communal reading as a protest form. From drag story hours to critter kink story hour—all actions within the bounds of Poets Theater.

After bedtime, dawn broke. The fake grass rolled away, and we ventured to the seaside, where we experienced visual artist Torreya Cummings’ stunner production of Hannah Weiner’s RJ (Romeo + Juliet). It was important to me to stage three works from the Poets Theater repertoire, and given Cummings’ long-standing work on nautical, environmental themes, RJ seemed just the ticket. RJ is one of Weiner’s code poems that was performed by off-duty coast guard in Central Park, 1968. Rather than semaphore flags, Torreya presented Romeo and Juliet atop ladders communicating from different corners of The Lab with megaphones and binoculars, literally heightening the stakes of PT performance. I referred to this as our festival Happening (a dextrous feat requiring the vision of Production Manager Daniel Jackson), and I believe it to be the first time RJ has been performed since 2019.

Bay queer art heroes, artist and curator Margaret Tedesco and visual artist Leila Weefur presented a collaborative performance, In Two Voices, about the cinematic shadows of colonial violence. They built a poetic image-scape to hold cinematic narrative, underscoring the play between text and subtext, absorption and spectatorship, interpretation and response. Working with Duras’s India Song and Sembéne’s Black Girl, Tedesco and Weefur utilized a poetic cut-up technique to scrape away at “colonialism’s façade.” The dream of Poets Theater involves a shimmering like theirs where the political and the aesthetic merge source with life, and with death. In reimagining and refusing the bounds of traditional film analysis, they mobilized poetry and film toward critical reperformance—an emergent method and genre for Poets Theater.

Visual artist and performer Cliff Hengst has been in everybody’s poets plays since the 1990s. Much of his visual art tends to the surprising arcs that language takes in the streets, pop culture, and slang. For the festival, he cast Tanya Hollis, Jason Leggiere, and Scott Hewicker—Poets Theater legends all—in his first play, Empire Today, a clever undoing of commercialized corporate horrorspeak complete with live jingles sung by Hengst himself. Deep within the dream is the feeling that what’s about to happen has already happened. At the core of the dream is something about the ways we grow together, how we witness each others’ change.

I commissioned the samulnori group Kkiri Kkiri to make a piece that would honor Theresa Huk Kyung Cha. They created a powerful multimedia tribute to close the show. History, the Old Wound allowed their practice in traditional drumming and singing to be further activated by video, performance, and the construction of an altar. Kkiri Kkiri’s offering doubled in its purposeful contextualization and call for collective liberation, as members tended to the ongoing traumas of the Korean War and Palestine. Their engagement of Poets Theater in ritual practice concluded the show with a burning candle as the final image of the festival and an invitation to engage with the altar.

Inherent to Poets Theater at its most collaborative, open, and unpredictable is the magic of ritual. There is a quest for a particular style of imaginative collectivity. The process and the performance of poetry emphasize all languages we use to communicate, reminding us of the infinite ways. Part of the social subterfuge of Poets Theater emerges from its iterative insistence on the social and political bonds we make through art. In Poets Theater those bonds are the primary element of the work; the scripts of Poets Theater merely conjure their illumination.

#278 – Fall 2024

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