When: 14 August 2010
Where: Recital Studio, Esplanade
Details:
This is poetry slam, a spoken word competition where teams of 16-23-year-olds perform their original poetry to judges and an audience.
Through 3 rounds of poetry slamming, the teams will be whittled down to 5 finalist teams. But only 1 will be judged the winner. Who will it be???
Introducing:
* The Slam Master: who will emcee the entire event
* The Judges: who will flash scores immediately after each performance.
* The Score and Timekeepers: who will monitor the progress.
* The Competitors: teams of 16-23-year-olds
* The Guest Performance Slammers who are the pros
A brief history of slam poetry (from www.poetryslam.org.uk):
* Slamming began in America.
* It was invented by construction worker/poet Mark Smith in 1986.
* The first open-mic slam was held at The Green Mill Lounge, Chicago.
* Participants were underground poets.
* He invited the audience to judge the poets using scorecards.
* Mark Smith says: "The slam is about poets performing professionally to an audience they care about, allowing that audience to enjoy themselves, while presenting them with the most profound and heartfelt poetry the poets can muster."
Slam poetry in Singapore:
Introduced formally by Word Forward Limited in 2003.
Produced by Word Forward Limited:
Word Forward Limited is a non-profit organization, dedicated to building a strong, active and supportive literary community in Singapore with regular events for poets, writers and the public as well as arts education programmes for schools. Poetry Slam™ in Singapore and Malaysia is their trademark event. The Singaporean slam used to be held every last Tuesday of the month at Velvet Underground and involved poets from all walks of life and ages and judges randomly picked from the audience. Then in 2006, it spun off into the National Youth Poetry Slam™ League Championship with the support of MICA. Close to 100,000 students and adults have watched or participated in Word Forward's arts education programmes alongside literary-arts and community events.
More information here.
