We Are the Dinosaur: a street performance by Bob Holman

The 53^rd International Theatre Festival directed by Willem Dafoe, to be held in Venice from May 31^st to June 15^th, will present a very special performance by the American poet Bob Holman, We Are the Dinosaur, on June 8^th (photo: Jay Bolgar).

Theatre is Body, Body is Poetry. As the title recites, the festival places the actor’s body at its centre, “the beating heart of theatre” as Dafoe defines it, around which the aesthetics and ways of making theatre have been reshaped since the twentieth century. Bob Holman performs it in a very special way, embodying poetry as a physical art “to tease out the significance via gesture, dance, and vocal modulation”.

Heir to the great legacy of the Beat generation (he got his poetic training in the Lower East Side, he says, with Allen Ginsberg), master of the spoken word, slam and digital poetry scene of the past forty years and of poetic interventions in unconventional contexts, Bob Holman will bring poetry to that natural stage that is Venice – to its streets, its campi and campielli – to the audience of tourists and passersby that crowd the city. He will perform the verses of We Are the Dinosaur, revealing the “power of sound and the magic of sense nesting in sound” of words.

Bob Holman reconnects poetry to the body and therefore to its orality. This is poetry experienced directly, unchained from the mechanisms of understanding, the product of an “energy transfer from the poet to the poetry to the listener/reader”. He writes: “When there’s no writing, the only way to pass things on is person-to-person, body-to-body. You could say, ‘We Are the Book’. This idea, devastatingly simple, is at the root of this poem, indeed, of my whole ‘body of work’ as a poet. How to capture the way Poetry was connected to Existence, something that was inherent in Oral Consciousness, is what I’m after. It’s what my mother showed me – she didn’t read a book to me. The book was talking. In her voice”.

On June 8^th Bob Holman’s street performance We Are the Dinosaur will travel through the city of Venice, stopping in several places over the course of the morning and afternoon: between 9.30 am and 1pm Bob Holman will wend his way through the Rialto Bridge area, Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, Campo dei Frari, Campo Santa Margherita, Zattere agli Incurabili, the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute, Punta della Dogana, Teatro la Fenice, Campo San Fantin.

In the afternoon, the street performance will move through the open spaces of the city around Ca’ Giustinian, head towards Santa Maria Formosa, Calle Seconda de la Fava, Campo San Lorenzo, Via Garibaldi, Piazza San Marco, before ending in front of the Teatro Goldoni.

A poetry activist, Bob Holman has taken poetry everywhere – into cafés, theatres, radio and television studios, movie theatres, onto vinyl and cds, as well as books and archives – helping to blur the boundaries between literature and popular culture throughout his 40-year career.
First it was the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, founded in 1966, which Holman directed from 1977 to 1984, then the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, founded in 1973 by Miguel Algarín, to which Holman brought the poetry slam as co-director from 1988 to 1996. This experience gave rise to the anthology Aloud Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, published in 1994 and recipient of the American Book Award. In 2002 Holman opened the Bowery Poetry Club to the public, which went on to spawn a publishing company (Bowery Poetry Books) and a record label (Bowery Records). He would also found Mouth Almighty Records under the aegis of Mercury Records, together with the poet Sekou Sundiata and the music critic Bill Adler.
His Poetry Spots, created between 1987 and 1993 for WNYC TV in New York, twice won the New York Emmy Award. He was poet-in-residence at WNYC radio from 2004 to 2005; whereas the PBS television series The United States of Poetry, which was created with director Mark Pellington and featured over 60 poets, rappers, slammers, etc., would be accompanied by a book and a soundtrack by Tomandandy, going on to win the International Public Television Award.
Made in 2015, Khonsay: Poems of Many Tongues was a poetic film-documentary dedicated to his new commitment in defense of endangered languages, a battle to support orality rooted in his study of hip hop and the oral traditions of West Africa, which led to his co-founding the Endangered Language Alliance. He addressed the same theme in Language Matters with Bob Holman, winner of the Berkeley Film Festival. In 2023, the Sundance Festival screened the digitally-restored version of SLAM, the film directed by Marc Levin and starring Saul Williams and Sonja Sohn. It was hatched at the Nuyorican Poets Café 25 years earlier, when Holman was MC, a role he recreated live at Sundance.
Active in theatre as well, Bob Holman is the director and performer of many texts written by contemporary poets, and by Mayakovsky, Tristan Tzara and Antonin Artaud. He also toured with the famous rock group Pere Ubu. He has given over a thousand poetry performances, from Madison Square Garden to stadiums, church basements and to the Ethiopian Tej Bets.

At Biennale Teatro, Bob Holman will be the protagonist, on June 6^th at Teatro alle Tese, of another event: Talking Poetry / More Than Heart II, this time in collaboration with the Industria Indipendente collective, will explore the idea of vocal body and rhythmic body.