Spoken Music: Fran Varian visits Zeum

This morning Ari's friend, Fran Varian came and talked to us - she is a spoken word artist. I might have mentioned spoken work in my project in media and self image because that's how I'm performing it. Spoken word is a kind of performance art in lyrics, poetry, and stories are spoken instead of sung. So it's like talking music.

Fran gave us a insight into the world of spoken word like slam poetry, which is a competition with eight people who have two minutes to make up their own piece of work and get judged by random people from the audience. Wow that must take extreme talent to make up something in two minutes... it takes me weeks to come up with something even close to a poem.

The artistic process is different for everybody... but I'm seeing that the base of a spoken word poem is to "be vulnerable". A lot of artists write about things that are really personal. This can be hard because people feel uncomfortable but also really easy because you are writing about a subject you know the most - yourself. When you talk about yourself lots of people might respond to it because they might have felt the same way or had the same experiences.

I have never really performed as myself - I'm use to getting characters and being someone else. But I can be someone else and even be myself at the same time. I talked about this with Fran and the group. Even in getting a script and being a different character can be a way to "be vulnerable".

Fran told us about an organization called Youthspeaks.org it helps teens get into spoken word. It gives them a chance to really have a voice and express their feelings, opinions.

I'm using spoken word in my project so it was good chance to hear about her process and actually hear one of her poems. It was cool because the hardest part for me was to get down and write what I wanted to say. Hearing Fran talk about her process of writing made working on my project a little bit easier. I never thought of myself as a writer but in reality if you write something down on paper you're a writer.