Claire Sammons
4/15/08 Rodrigo Toscano & Kristen Prevallet

Rodrigo Toscano and Kristen Prevallet read last Tuesday at the Bowery Poetry Club. Both poets share a common interest in performance and the space between the Page and the Stage. Toscano’s interpretation of this is best displayed in his Collapsible Poetics Theater (though this was not part of the afternoon’s reading). Prevallet works between these two arenas by integrating the performance into the poem itself, experimenting with voice, facial expressions, and the contact zone, or the relationship between the performer and the spectator.

Toscano’s presentation flowed between the realms of reading, song, and chant. He hummed droning notes of monosyllabic words, punctuated sharply by loud bursts of single words, or a rushing spewed line. His read his recent work as a chant; the sustained high followed by seven lows, acted as the chorus. Conditioning shifts to:
CON…
DISH…
UNN…
ING.

His words become sounds, pieces of a puzzle, then reassemble into the same word from a new angle. An angle where the word breaks down to sound, then harkens back to a memory, or creates a new picture, or triggers a feeling before turning back into a word again. This realization may be what he means by the contact zone. A volatile act, indeed.

Prevallet’s second piece took on the quality of a play without props, set, or rehearsal. It was Prevallet’s translation of a play by Tanzi, a South-African playwright. Titled His Majesty the Stomach, she and Toscano performed the piece together, in character voices and awkward impromptu blocking. It seems that a play without props, a set, or any rehearsal time is reduced to a failed negotiation between poetry reading and theater.

Aside from bridging the gap between the Page and the Stage, this reading had a theme of possession. Toscano’s poetry was haunted by the ghost of cyber communication. His earlier works, read from To Leveling Swerve were meditations on the cyber experience. Instant messaging, emails, voicemails, text messages, online social networks; the obsession with constant social interaction from the comfort of one’s own isolated anonymity. He considers the life of the technophile and what it means being “instatouched,” to be a little pod in a pod world filled with millions of other pods.


Kristen Prevallet’s possession is of a more traditional quality. While introducing her reading, she spoke on the importance for a writer to leave herself open to possession. Her first piece was a response to her father’s suicide. The poem was hypnotic as she drew the audience in with clear nostalgic imagery to a place where a memory sits. A memory we don’t a share, but can sit quietly and watch drift by.