14 Hours of Poetry & Performance
Twenty-minute precis of a 15-hour performance featuring inkBoat, The Long Tone Choir, Thingamajigs, and the poet Stephen Ratcliffe, on Mare Island, California, October 1 2016
TPG is in a multi-year collaboration with poet Stephen Ratcliffe that creates large scale durational works based on 1,000 poem cycles. Stephen writes a poem every day for 1,000 days. Performing these poems takes approximately 14 hours and features Stephen reading each poem, which TPG then interprets as a performance score.
The most recent performance, Continuum, featured TPG with performing artists Rae Diamond (composer and director of the Long Tone Choir) and Shinichi Iova-Koga (artistic director of the movement theater ensemble inkBoat). The first piece, Human/Nature, premiered at UC Davis in 2008; the second, Remarks on Color/Sound, was staged at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2010; and the third, Temporality, premiered in May 2012 and was remounted in the Mills College Art Gallery in February 2013.
In the past, Thingamajigs has collaborated with other groups and musicians such as ThingNY for different kinds of durational performances.