Poetry and Performance: Embodied Poetic Experience in Public Spaces

This scholarly and practiced-based project studied the audience’s experience of publicly-performed poetry, in contrast to silent reading from the page. It addresses the role of sensorial experience and movement both in the making and sharing of contemporary poetry as ‘common’ experience, responsive to the specific (in this case Scottish) cultural context. It focuses on the live performance of print, sound and digital poetry and seeks to analyse the role of the body, of both performer and spectator in experiencing poetry. One of our key objectives is to explore creative approaches to collecting data on the way both poets/performers and audience engage with poetry events and on how they may perceive themselves as part of a cultural community. This project constitutes a key step in understanding the way performance as an embodied poetic experience contributes to (re)defining poetry’s social function.

This project was funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh through the Research Workshops in the Arts & Humanities scheme (2016/17).

It was supported by The French Institute of the United Kingdom.

It was a collaboration with StAnza 2017 and the Scottish Poetry Library.

P.I. Dr Elodie Laügt (University of St Andrews)
Co-Investigator: Prof. Andrew Roberts (University of Dundee)
Collaborators: Dr Jerome Fletcher (Falmouth University); Sabine Macher (poet, independent)

If you are interested in this project and would like to know more, please contact P.I. Elodie Laügt ([email protected]).