What is the Slamalama Love Swamp?
Part 1: Slamalamadingdong as Ritual
Written by founder Michelle Dabrowski
It is 8:29pm on April 19th 2012 at the fourth ever Slamalamadingdong.
There is no more preparation I can do. No more loose ends to tie. No more spots to offer in the slam. No more time to spare. No more hopes to cling to. My worries such as a) whether earlier events in the month like the Trans Tasman Slam might overwhelm our regular crew of attendees or b) whether the palpable excitement which Sarah Kay’s visit caused, might show a drop in numbers from last month; have all but faded away with my lipstick. Right now, it’s divine show time. I feel most myself in this practice. In this ceremony of spoken word poetry initiated by the religion of hip hop.
Slamalamadingdong is a space I am offering for everyone and anyone to celebrate in, provoke thought in and give voice in on a monthly basis. To me, it’s a ritual, a way to mark our beginnings and ends. A moment to situate ourselves within, ground us in the word, in the act of witnessing each other perform. Performance for me is ritual.
Rituals throughout our lives help us to mature, grow and elevate into the next stage of our lives. So this ritual, I believe, helps our community to do this as a collective each month. For some, it’s just a poetry slam. For others and for me it’s a transcendence experience. It’s psychedelic. It’s an alternate reality. It’s a sacred activity. It’s a Love Swamp.
I am standing in the elevator sized wing of the stage at Bella Union and everyone is here. Everyone is here with me. So many new voices ready to take the risks. All of you, as Emilie Zoey Baker would sing it, are big shiny golden balls; and you are bumping into one another under the iconic Bella Union roof like little Poet pinball’s. Imagine Chaucer and Byron and Rumi and Shakespeare and Saul Williams and Lauryn Hill and Gil-Scott-Heron all rolling around in a pinball machine. This is what we are... and in this game our hearts pound against the inside of our chests, our palms get sweaty and our hugs are like fire. (Kirsti K-Dawg Whalen, 2012)
Tonight our much adored resident MC Simon Taylor plays one of the last of his comedy festival shows at the Butterfly Club and I am granted the privilege of playing Poetry Shaman this month... Am I equipped to guide this trip? With clipboard as compass I am moments away from launching us into the “Love Swamp”... the liminal place between reality and story from where the Poet’s voice calls out to us. The place where we use our stories to try and right the world. It is between fantasy and reality and anything is allowed. In the moments before we fall in, it’s as though we are huddled on a cliff top in Fiji looking down a skyscraper waterfall. Down below the wordsmith’s are waving and encouraging us to jump- to take that leap of faith with them into a pool of magical unchartered vocal territory. We jump- into the Amazon of patterned language and rhythmical flow.
By the end of the night we will be gone splash drown (from poem “Sister Divine” by Melbourne Poet Tariro Mavondo) sinking deeper into ourselves as the alpha waves carry up our own locked up lines of meter and rhyme. I step on stage, I start the show, I am a bumbling red globe grape that needs to be pressed and fermented by each poet I introduce... I need to be tenderized in order to find my own Mc flow. Notebooks are thrown into the audience as prizes for impromptu “inspire-off” battles and by break time everyone is glowing in anticipation for Omar Musa’s feature set. My close friends and concubines walk toward me with a sparkle in their wide eyes telling me that something really special is happening here as they flail they’re arms pointing to the crowd. I shrug and wonder because I am so deep in the Love Swamp and my role as Mc, thinking about the next set of proceedings, that I cannot fully see myself what is happening from an objective perspective. The show rolls on, more poetic ninja’s appear, Omar’s performance brings us to a climax. The night is capped off with the distribution of gifts and prizes while Jill Scott’s voice blares us a melodic outro.
I am still exploring exactly why I have this urge to try and send people home re-fuelled, more connected to themselves, more connected to people they would for no other common thread than poetry feel a relation to. But every month, every show, I learn more. I am humbled and made better by this space to create a slam in. The audience’s acceptance is my permission. Slamalama is a poetry gas station and we pump words to keep the blood flowing, to keep our lives going.
I peek out from the wings and I see a sea of bodies all striving for the same thing: to make a life to be creative in. Not just once a month or outside the parameters of a nine to five- but all the time. I see myself in this sea. The projector behind me is flipping through images of all of us, the community, at other rituals we call slams and workshops, doing what we come to do here: practice, celebrate, listen and evolve.
I come from various performance based artistic practices which carry me. They are magnetized to my cellular memory and they hammer and nail the ‘frame’ I see all of this through: Theatre and Community Development, Dub Poetry, Bio-Myth, Hip-Hop, Blues, Creative Therapies and Ritual, Social Transformation. These are such basic labels and I am sure I am forgetting many. Through this frame I see us holding up a big tribal mirror for one another. This mirror says:
“This is you. I see you and in some instances, I am you.”
We all want to feel realized.
We all want to feel our voices big and resounding.
We all want to hear someone else say our name.
This is the self-realization part of the slam ritual, the part where we feel the immensity of our own power and divinity. Just like Latifa, a new voice to grace the stage tonight, she wrote on her bio card:
“I have a voice and I have something to say.”
Bing! She be realized!
Yes, I have been labelled “naive” and “5 hearts full” and I know that as a species (sharing this planet) we have a far way to go before true equality has a chance of being ingrained into our genetic coding.
Underground movements like The Centre for Poetics and Justice, Passionate Tongues, Global Poetics, Sweet Talkers and now Slamalamadingdong are where we are planting the seeds. Not so much for a revolution, but instead, to re- evaluate ancient practices and tools at our disposal for steps forward. And we just so happen to be honing our craft while doing it, utilizing the cultural phenomenon of Spoken word and in this case the Poetry Slam.
The scores, for me, have always been a simple side dish on the most eclectic platter of voices you could hope to sample in one sitting. There is no other medium of expression more synonymous with the roots of hip hop and able to organically unite an array of religions, beliefs, ages, gender orientations, personality types or sub-cultural preferences.
So when the beautiful Mc Nay from the Indigenous Hip Hop group “The Last Kinection” sings:
“Where do we start at? Where is the heart at?
Pump this in the park to give the dogs something to bark at
Evil will prevail when good people are just not doing nothing
So when I spit on this beat, I believe I'm doing something
Using my heart through the hardest parts as my navigation
Using my art, if I start losing all my concentration
A lot of us are debating about the destination
The rest of us are just waiting and waiting and waiting
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
When are we gonna get there
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
(Next of Kin, The Last Kinection 2011)
I want to have reason in my life to sing back to her:
“No... But we stand in solidarity with you, a whole group of us using our voices to try and make it so.”
Before we start every show, we call all the poets to the greenroom for a little pow wow. We highlight the importance of connecting as a group before the show. We highlight that even though we all might have different opinions or come from different backgrounds, everyone is loved and accepted for their courage to speak and take the mic. That courage is acknowledged and celebrated.
Usually, my own after show glow doesn’t hang around for long. After the last poet’s have helped me lug my suitcase full of clipboards and lollies down the steps of trades hall; after we have dribbled out of noodle kingdom past midnight ; after I rest and dabble in some sitcom escapism; I am left with the task of maternity, asking what entrepreneurial nourishment my baby needs to keep expanding. How can this ritual take us deeper, farther, higher, longer, better? Like a natural slam viagra!
There is so much opportunity to make Slamalamadingdong an invitation. As well as an invitation for cross cultural re-mix and healing, I am interested in making it an invitation for inter-disciplinary practices and mediums to step into the competitive format. I envision them conversing with Poets while we honour the Slam Papi philosophy. In this way Poetry can uplift other art forms. Our community can highlight the poetic nature behind the performance of a hula hooper or the rhymes of a rapper, or the cadence and gesture of a string quartet and the luscious swoops of a street artist’s mural. Because all art has poetry in it. At the same time efforts will be made to connect our slam community to the wider network of Poetry Slams in Australia.
When I left Toronto, Ontario, Canada four years ago many of the regional city slams (London, Kingston, Kitchener, Mississauga etc) did not exist yet or were at the very least seedlings. I do think that this is inevitable for Victoria if the medium of Spoken word is to have the opportunity to flourish to its full potential. But we will not wait for you, oh holy network of slams... we will be busy forming our own identity. We will be building a reputation as the MAD PROFESSORS OF SLAM experimenting with the form while keeping with its core values. We will engage and team with our network of communities in order to hopefully be THE event that every poet will want to perform at. We will let you pinball in. Hug you like fire and ask you to pound your chests to the beat of the *clicks* in the Love Swamp. As a village we will re-define the statement: MAKE SOME NOISE.
SLAMALAMA Mama
Michelle Alina Dabrowski
April 2012
