Sponsored by Writers Guild at Bloomington, Urban Deer Performance Series, National Audio Theatre Festivals, Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, The Media School

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what pure music would have done better.” – William Faulkner

“Where words leave off, music begins.” -Heinrich Heine

Impressive sources, but what if we were to free ourselves from these categories? What if we harness the beauty of words, sounds, and music as one, without depriving ourselves of one or the other?

Sound poetry, performance art, or just composing words to be heard out loud, call it what you will. The Electroacoustical Poetical Society is offering a fun afternoon workshop during which we’ll throw genres to the winds and explore the sound in words and the ideas in sound, for performance. We’ll start with some examples for discussion and then explore the joys of making words and sounds into equal partners.

For the workshop, bring a short poem or just bring yourself, with your voice or instrument.

Marjorie Van Halteren is a poet and radio artist. Her productions in the United States include over a dozen original radio plays for WNYC’s The Radio Stage and others. She relocated to France in the 1990’s and created work for BBC Radio 3 and 4. In recent years she has turned to live performance of poetry-stories, composing podcast material, as well as composing and performing sound for dance. Her radiophonic essay, “Hexagon Heart,” was commissioned by Radiophrenia, Glasgow in 2019. Marjorie has performed improvisational music in France and Belgium, and is a member of the Muzzix experimental music collective in Lille. Marjorie collaborates with a group of adventurous poets to create podcasts for “The Electroacoustical Poetical Society.” http://www.electroacousticalpoeticalsociety.com

Brian Price is a writer, director, and audio producer. He has worked in radio and audio publishing since the 1980s working with groups such as the Iowa Radio Project, The Grist Mill Horror Series, Native Voices at the Autry, and the National Audio Theatre Festivals. His short comic skits, plays, and monologues have been performed by community groups across the country and two of his plays have been translated into Croatian and Chinese. He is a founding partner in Great Northern Audio Theatre which created and produced 20 years of live Mark Time Radio shows for Minnesota’s Convergence Science Fiction Convention. Their feature-length “In the Embers” received an APA Audie Award for Best Audio Drama in 2017. He has published two books of short fiction, monologues and poetry, “The Old Cart Wrangler, The New Silence, and Other Notions” (2020), and “The Wrong Side of the River and Other Points of Interest” (2022), He has some concerns about the general future of mankind, and often gets paid in T-shirts and “gimme hats.” He is a member in good standing of the “The Electroacoustical Poetical Society.” http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com

Tony Brewer is a poet and sound effects artist from Bloomington, Indiana. He performs spoken word widely and is author of 9 books. He has taught and performed for the National Audio Theatre Festivals since 2001 and has performed nationwide, from Florida to Minneapolis and from New York to Washington State. He was made a Kentucky Colonel for his work at the International Mystery Writers Festival, and he received the inaugural Bradshaw Award (named for Firesign Theatre character Lt. Bradshaw) for Service to the Field of Audio Theatre. He frequently collaborates with the Electroacoustic Poetical Society as well as the experimental audio collective Urban Deer Record Co. http://www.tonybrewer71.blogspot.com