October 24, 2011
Yesterday was rather exciting: I went to a trampoline centre in Uckfiend, where the 12th birthday of a girl called Niamh (Neve) was being hosted by her parents. I performed for an hour and chatted with the kids about poems, big hair, feet biting, paper aeroplanes and being bored…
It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon and here are the audio bites to show how much fun we had. Who ever said children don’t like poetry?!
Sitting in a pub garden in Uckfield having some thoughts before I went to Fun Abounds trampoline centre.
First engagement with the children – getting them vibed up for poetry with interactivity…
After some negotiation it appeared that the boys, and even some of the girls, were more keen on the idea of a scary poem than a soppy one:
When it turned out that The Dribble man was more funnier than scary for most of the children than scary (apart from the one who’s pizza I defiled), it was decided that we ought to delve a little deeper into the dark recesses of the imagination for something truly terrifying…
It was at this point I realised that short of putting these children into trauma by recreating the torture scenes in the film ‘Saw’ in rhyme, that there was NO way I was going to terrify them as they wanted me to… So I decided to give up the ghost, so to speak, and go back to the more preferable message of cosmic love, unity and peace, but still with a high level of interactive requirement and noise making from the children in order to get the poem going:
Due to a miss-boo, I forgot to record Dave Solo – so if you’d like to hear the poem, here is a pre-recorded studio quality version, sans the noise of children throwing paper aeroplanes and quietly passing wind in an attempt to make me pass out during the performance….
And, of course, we couldn’t have one for the boys without also having one for the girls…
We ended with Ally Wangle and the Humpergees, and a special thanks to Mark Rock, the creator of AudioBoo, for making this splendid live performance documentation possible.
There was a final secret poem, a special birthday poem I wrote for Niamh, which I recited without recording as it was a gift for her. It seemed that she very much like the poem, and was very pleased to take a copy away with her, hand written and signed, of course. All in all, it seemed like a thoroughly good party.
