Kuwentuhan (Talkstory): Collective Performance

Saturday, April 23, 2016, 7:00 pm
Detail of painting of city street with homes of electrical poles
This collective performances features Arlene Biala, Javier O. Huerta, Urayoan Noel, Barbara Jane Reyes, Aimee Suzara, Lehua M. Taitano and Angela Narciso Torres performing their poetry while encouraging audience participation. The performance will be documented for an experimental short film by the Documentary Film Institute. This event concludes a three-day festival featuring collaborations between artists, audiences and The Poetry Center, as a way of enlarging this circle beyond ethnic boundaries, in contested urban spaces. Free to $10.
Location: 
McRoskey Mattress Company, 1687 Market Street, San Francisco
Directions: 
Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/844823975626489/
Sponsor: 
The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives, The Green Arcade
Contact: 
The Poetry Center
Phone: 
415-338-2227
Event extras: 

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory)

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) takes the Tagalog term, a phoneticized form adapted through the colonial Spanish, as its title, proposition, and starting point. Kuwentuhan (“necessary step toward big talk,” by one definition) is orally based, informal in nature, usually spontaneous, and is always an opportunity for people to converge and share. It occurs in all kinds of social spaces as talkstory circle.

The project’s aim is to open up precisely the kind of human space that barely exists in our technological and “globalized” culture, by allowing a select group of American poets out of widely disparate and polyglot cultural and geographic backgrounds to actually talk face to face, sharing stories, poetry and conversations among themselves and with audiences. They are interested in work that originates from a communal basis, and in shaping a project that encourages collective creation, by putting into action mechanisms for creating “live” person-to-person exchange between and among artists and audiences.

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) is a project of The Poetry Center and Barbara Jane Reyes, supported by the Creative Work Fund.

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