Poetry with its heart on its sleeve
- Natasya Parker Review

It was astonishing and deeply moving
- Adam Munthe, Ledbury

Airpoems in the Key of Voice

Airpoems was a creative collaboration to bring Sign Language Poetry to the world of spoken poetry festivals in the UK for the first time.

This radical translation project was created around signartist Paul Scott’s works: Who Stole My Heart and Five Senses, and emerged from Kyra Pollitt’s previous work with signart, creating a transcript of the poems indicating time, location and handshape indicated by a grid of letters and numbers. I then created a set of vocal gestures which I mapped onto the transcript combinations, which enabled me to perform live in immediate response to Paul’s signart. Overlying the performance was a projected poetry film by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, of Elephant’s Footprint, creating an immersive sensory experience.

From my practice journal:

“The wonderful thing about the final vocal track is that, if listened to alone without the visual Signart, it sounds odd, and has little meaning. This dependency on the Signartist keeps the integrity of the project intact, as the aim is not to provide a standard translation and pull Signart closer to the land of the hearing, but to pull the hearing audience closer to the Signart. The difference is subtle but important. This is where the vocals sit, drawing the audience deeper into the experience, reflecting attention onto the Signartist.”

Airpoems* was performed at Ledbury Poetry Festival and Bristol Poetry Festival in 2017. View the promo video HERE.

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* Mentioned in :

Pollitt, K (2018) Affordance as Boundary in Intersemiotic Translation: Some Insights from Working with Sign Languages in Poetic Form, in Campbell, M. and Vidal, R. (2018) Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders. New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg