Readings as Performance Art

(l to r) authors Victoria Christopher Murray, Tinesha Davis & Kwame Alexander

I've been going to a ton of readings lately to support friends and also to study "reading performance" technique since as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm still trying to get the hang of this reading/interviewing thing. Last month I went to Isabel Allende's reading at Barnes & Noble and I definitely filed that in my "when I'm a rockstar" folder. Ms. Allende took the stage--after a Barnes & Noble rep gave the packed house a full preamble about what was and was not going to go down including no individual pics with the author and no personalized autographs, the room was just too packed for all of that--and read like a star, joking with the crowd about the presence of kids cramping her plans to read certain lovemaking scenes and fielding all manner of questions (there were a few crazies in the house) afterward with the deftness of a pro.

I went with my dear friend Daphne and her friend and when we went to get our books signed we were instructed to have the books open to the page she would sign so we could keep the long line moving. When we got to the table Ms. Allende's eyes lit up at us and she let us take pics of her signing. For the two seconds that we personally interacted with her, she made me feel like I knew her.

A few days later I went to my girl Kseniya's group reading. Kseniya is one-third of the writing group I was part of that helped me get Powder Necklace in shape and her writing is incredible. Reading her work made me want to read Pushkin and Dostoyevsky and all the other literature coming out of Russia/inspired by the tradition. In a darkly poetic bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ks read under a single spotlight to a room of filled seats. I stood on the sidelines wearing my camera like a backstage pass snapping away. In other words, it was very rockstar too, in an underground artist sort of way.

So I always subconsciously knew readings were about "performing" for the crowd in much the same way a musician or actor commands a room, manipulating the audience with body language, eye contact, inflection, and personalization, but last night I went to a reading at Hue-Man that inspired me in all the right ways to find my own reading performance style. I went to see my new writer friend Tinesha Davis read from her book Holler at the Moon. She read alongside Victoria Christopher Murray (who was doing an advance reading of her 14th book Sins of the Mother!) and poet Kwame Alexander who recited vulnerable and rhythmic pieces from his latest And then You Know and what was cool about what they did was when one finished, the other picked up, as if they were continuing where the other left off. Though their books seemed very different from each other as far as content, you got the sense that they were sharing different strands of this intricate story. It was exciting! And it made me want to buy all three books which I did.