POESIA EN VIU A BARCELONA (1991-2003)
Live Poetry in Barcelona (1991-2003)

Habitual Video Team


Poesia en viu a Barcelona (1991-2003) is a videographic album made by Habitual Video Team. It compiles twelve years of live poetry that lives and has lived in this city; in bars, festivals or on the street; local and international poetry; oral, sound, phonetic, polypoetry, action poetry... live poetry.

During the 90's we have seen how this type of poetry has grown: the Festival de Polipoesia directed by Xavier Sabater, readings in the G's Club, the Revista parlada ("Talked Magazine") and the Revista caminada ("Walked Magazine"), organised by Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay, the Viatge a la Polinèsia ("Journey to Polynesia") or this festival, PROPOSTA, among others. Such a live poetry boom had never been seen before. We should go back to the avant-garde times, at the beginning of the 20th century, to find a similar moment. However, these contemporary live poets do not manifest themselves as a specific group of artists, a certain generation or a uniform aesthetic concept. It is a non-labelled mixture. The only thing that brings them together is live performance. 

Therefore, in this album there is a wide range of poetics. On the one hand we find all sorts of sound poetry representatives: from Jordi Pope, Enric Casasses or Josep Ramon Roig's naked voices, to Jaap Blonk, Mark Sutherland or Valeri Scherstjanoi's phonetic poetry. We can also see Nobuo Kubota's vocal improvisation, Lydia Lunch's spoken word, or the syncopated poems by New Yorker John Giorno. As for voice/sound combination, we can listen to one of the creators of text-sound composition, Sten Hanson (Sweden), and one of the most veteran representatives of French sound poetry, Bernard Heidsieck.

On the other hand, the tape compiles several action poetry performances, such as Valencian Bartomeu Ferrando's, and also polypoetry, a name given in the late 1980's by the Italian poet Enzo Minarelli and often used during the 1990's in our country. It refers to a kind of poetry where voice is the guide element of other languages used in the show business; that is sound, image, lighting, costumes, props...good examples of this are the duo Accidents Polipoètics, Xavier Sabater, Julien Blaine, Noel Tatú or Minarelli.

Habitual Video Team shows both a peculiar and an important moment for poetry. Word power and the need to convey it in front of an audience in order to make complete sense have been rediscovered. All the performances shown at the G's Club from 1991, some episodes of Viatge a la Polinèsia, the three PROPOSTA festivals and several sessions in the Conservas hall and other places in town have been compiled in this video. Twelve years is a long period and it is worth putting all this work together. The idea is not to present an exhaustive compilation but to show poetical activity drawn together with the common characteristic of live performance. 

Lis Costa