marionette: a performative biography

This one-hour performance of spoken word, music, voice and sound is a collaboration between myself (poet) and Simon Charles (composer), to adapt my book 'marionette: a biography of miss marion davies' into a performance piece. The final work was performed by myself, Jenny Barnes (voice), Matthew Horsley (percussion) and Kim Tan (flutes). This performance continues my creative and critical foray into the field of nonfiction poetry and poetics. This new field interrogates (among many other things) the potential of the poetic line to expand our conception of nonfiction writing. 'marionette' in its printed form is a poetic biography of early cinema actress Marion Davies, attempting to find ways to recover the silenced voice of Davies, which was stifled by her lover of 35 years, William Randolph Hearst. The performance takes this exploration further by extending it into the performative dimension.

Nonfiction poetry is a term I coined in early 2012 through the literary journal Rabbit, for which I am Editor-in-Chief, and which just released its 8th issue. I have also developed the concept through: my book 'marionette: a biography of miss marion davies' and my PhD thesis (2011), 'Recovering Traces: The Contemporary Poet-Historian and the Articulation of Marginal Voices.' My examiners' comments indicate that this research is cutting-edge and provocative, on an international scale.

This performance represents the first of its kind and its success at the quartetthaus has led to subsequent performances at Montsalvat (Eltham), UTS (Sydney) and at Conduit Arts Space, after which the following review was written: http://partialdurations.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/manteia-marionette/

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http://www.anam.com.au/2012-events/anam-quartetthaus-660
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