"Everyone Can Do It" : Francesca Beard and the Performance of Poetry

by Carmen Nge


“Poetry in most people’s experience is slim lines in a little book or a big dusty book with words you don’t use anymore,” Francesca Beard says, candidly. “Actually it’s not about that.”

Hailed as the Queen of British Performance Poetry, this Penang-born, London resident chatted with Off The Edge while in KL touring her solo show, Chinese Whispers. Professing to be “quite evangelical” about the virtues of poetry as performance—rather than merely poetry as written text, lifeless on a page—Francesca is a vivacious and luminous testimony to the power of the spoken word.

Her two shows at the KLPAC last month were an unusual cocktail of poetry, comedy and banter with an audience expecting an hour of literary seriousness but then found themselves answering questions about the meaning of their names, pontificating their animal preferences and voting on how they’d like to die. When Francesca gleefully quipped at the start of her show that audience participation would be required, the parameters of performance poetry became decidedly elastic.

The primary offshoot of spoken word, which has its roots in literature, performance poetry flowered in the 1980s, and its advocates reveled in its grassroots appeal. Poetry and music collaborations were not unusual and performance poets from principally US and UK often traversed a wide artistic arena.

“I’d say there are storytellers who are classified as performance poets, there are comedians, there are performance artists, there are rappers,” Francesca corroborates.

The popularity of performance poetry lies in its interactivity. Rather than remain rarified as great literature in academic circles, poetry now mingles with regular people who don’t need a literature degree to appreciate the rhymes and rhythms of a live show.

“[Poet Paul Celan] said that writing poetry was like sending out a message in a bottle. Basically because you never really know if anyone is really going to pick it up and get it. So it’s an act of faith and I’ve found that to be really true as an experience and also incredibly moving and quite sad. One of the things I love about performance poetry is that you don’t have to just send out your messages in bottles and never know whether anyone’s going to pick them up because you’ve got a live audience,” explains Francesca.

The “live” element in Chinese Whispers is very much inspired by the poet’s fascination with stand-up comedians—her partner is also one—and their ability to entertain and engage the crowd. “If you have moments of improvisation, it instantly gives an energy to a performance. The more active you are, the more work that you do with an audience, the more fun you find it,” Francesca acknowledges.

She is also rather realistic about what she expects from her audience: “An hour of poetry is a really big ask. I know from my own experience from being an audience member, I get very tired listening. Even if it’s the best thing in the world, after awhile I get tired.”

Although a little over an hour long, Chinese Whispers managed to entrance. Francesca’s mellifluous voice proved to be a powerful instrument—oftentimes sonorous and resonant, rich with embellishments and rhetoric; other times light, airy and sotto voce in tone, capturing a merry sense of mischief and a jocular whimsy. When she sang, Francesca’s voice was hauntingly beautiful and her soft focus form, bathed in shadow and light, conjured up smoky cabarets and seductive tunes.

Francesca performed long, ruminative poems about the multi-cultural London scene and the cacophony of languages reverberating through its streets; interspersed lyrical memories of a Malaysian childhood with funny alliterative paeans to her pet dog Fluffy (who was anything but); impressed audiences with dizzying poetic factoids gleaned from hours sitting in front of the TV watching the Learning Zone; boggled the mind with awe-inspired lines about quantum mechanics; and spun sassy stanzas about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And her audience lapped it all up.

It’s really hard to believe that Francesca was really scared when she first dabbled in the art form in her mid to late twenties. She had just ended a relationship with a musician from New York, who had been pressing her to perform her poetry.

“So I was in my flat in London,” Francesca recounts. “You know when you’ve just been dumped… you just can’t be on your own and you can’t be with anyone and you’re just going kind of a bit crazy in your mind. So I looked through the listings magazine and I saw an open mike and I went along to this open mike. I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew me—it was great! I signed my name up and I read my poetry and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a performance background or anything. But for that whole time that I was there and riding back on the tube on the way home, I just was completely high.”

“And I’d forgotten entirely about the bastard,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper. “And then, of course I remembered! So, the next night, I looked and found another open mike,” she continued, smiling. “It became a kind of painkiller for the end of that relationship. And it was actually an incredibly empowering thing as well.”

Apart from touring, and attending and participating in international poetry festivals and events, Francesca also works as a workshop facilitator in creative writing, poetry and performance. She has traveled to Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic and Russia to run workshops and master classes with the British Council Live Literature Department.

Live literature, Francesca tells us, is a new term used by the British Council and the Arts Council to encompass practitioners who are interested to animate literature, to make it come alive for audiences. Being a poet in education enables Francesca to make a living but she clearly derives a great deal of joy from her role as an educator.

“Like a lot of my contemporaries, I believe that performance poetry is a democratic art form and that actually, everyone can do it. I know that’s a really risky thing to say; as soon as you start saying everyone can do it then you start getting to the lowest common denominator: if everyone can do it then what’s so special about it? But actually I think that everyone can do it,” Francesca emphasizes.

“I really dislike the way that art has become, in certain cultures, this thing that only certain people do and other people don’t do. I think that everyone has the right to express themselves creatively. And can. It’s like libido, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.”

Workshops appear to be integral to Francesca’s vision of performance poetry because they facilitate the kind of poet-audience exchange that would not be possible in performance alone: “I think that the performances and workshops are very integrated and organic in a way. They can really go together. When I do a performance, I don’t want an audience to go away thinking, ‘Oh, that’s amazing. I’m blown away but I could never do that.’ I’d like them to think, ‘That’s really great. I had a really good time. I could do that.’ So when you do the workshops, then they kind of facilitate that [thinking].”

Francesca’s love of performance is deeply rooted in the social; poetry is, for her, not an individualistic enterprise. To her, performance poetry is “a way of getting instant feedback and a way of not being self-indulgent and actually not being egotistical, weirdly. I think there can be something very egotistical about saying, ‘Oh, my work is so wonderful but I’m not showing it to anyone.’ Whereas if you actually stand up and read it out, you have to be prepared for other people to be bored or say that they disagree. You have to be prepared for people to judge you and so you have to be a bit free.”

The freedom that Francesca speaks of is deep rooted in a desire to communicate, to engage with and to genuinely care about the dialogue between the performance poet and her active audience.
“Really, with performance poetry, all you need is the desire to communicate with your peer group and the desire to communicate needs to take the form of spending enough time and energy to make it meaningful for people to listen to you and to try and make it entertaining for them. It doesn’t have to be funny, as long as it’s somehow worth people’s time to listen,” she says earnestly.

In a world where the lines of communication are increasingly stifled or broken down, performance poetry continues to flourish—from the popular, celebrity-endorsed Def Poetry Jam on HBO in the US to open mikes in KL organized by local poetry outfit Troubagangers. Perhaps Malaysian youth will soon cotton on to the raw potential of performance poetry as a legitimate outlet for expression and real life connectivity. But not before Malaysian parents appreciate its worth.

“Both my parents were amazingly supportive,” Francesca reveals. “My dad’s a chartered accountant so he was always saying, ‘Don’t be an chartered accountant, don’t be a lawyer. Do what you want.’”

Her mother, once well-known DJ Lisa Quah of Radio Malaysia, would often attend Francesca’s performances, sitting quietly and not looking at her daughter so as not to put her off.

“She was amazingly supportive and just so sweet,” Francesca reminisces about her mother. “She died 3 years ago so one of the rituals I have before I go on stage is I always think about my mum.”

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This interview was first published in Off The Edge magazine, November 2006 issue.