a call for poets

A good friend of mine, Ryan T. Smith, the artistic director and one of the choreographers for the contemporary dance group RAW, based in San Francisco, is organizing a protest in Union Square responding to passing and subsequent decisions regarding Proposition 8. He asked if I wanted to participate and if I knew any poets who would like to contribute spoken word or any other type of artistic expression to the demonstration.


So, if you’re in the Bay Area July 12th and interested in participating, we would love to work with you. Here’s what Ryan originally sent me, though I’m sure there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of how we can integrate our work; in any case, it should give you a sense of what page he’s on:

so we're down for union square, finally starting to pull our shit together, and would love you to do something for the event. i'm not sure how it would make sense to organize things. right now i'm wondering if we may want to actually integrate readings into the piece, not necessarily dancing to them but using them as intros before sections. or maybe they are totally separate....

do you want to get other poets involved or fly solo on this? talk to me. get your brainstorm on. what ya thinking? my hesitation with opening it up is always a) the quality of the work and b) the dependability of the person. so that'd be up to your history with other folks.

if you have any work already done tat you'd be interested in. i could use inspiration these days.

we are discussing asking a photographer friend of mine who is already doing a project in response to prop 8. but wendy's not sure about how she feels about his work or the addition. we'll decide to approach him or not this weekend.

if you're still down, get me a few sentence bio ASAP. going to get a press release for Monday morning so it comes before the outcome tues. am.. the release will basically say that either way, it goes we are ready and eager to respond.

okay end of business mode.
hugs.
r

I hope to hear back from some of you. Aside from the fact that contemporary dance demonstrations are always in dire need of good text, this will be an amazing and beautiful avenue for queer and allied artists to voice their feelings on this heated and critical issue.

Ryan needs responses by Sunday, June 7th, for a press release, so if you're at all interested and sure you can commit to this project email/text/call/im/harrass me by 12:00a that day. If you won't be sure by then, it's no travesty, just get to us later; the press work will just be deficient information.