Stepping up the performance gears

I started teaching creative writing partly because I wanted to hone my performance skills and get comfortable talking in front of people.  I did a decade of that, and then went on to run a private manuscript critiquing group for another five years.

That helped me get comfortable with presenting in a structured, formal setting.  It also gave me experience of connecting with a wide variety of people as my students.  But the one thing it didn't do was give me experience of performing my own work.  And doing that requires a completely different set of skills.

At Nine Worlds Geekfest, an SF con, I signed up for a performance skills for writers workshop.  That was about six years ago now.  It was an intense workshop, with a professional actor getting us to perform our own work.  I can still remember him asking me what my character felt about the mountains she could see in the distance, and to put that emotion into my reading. As an introvert who keeps my emotions private, I found that workshop very challenging.  It pushed me way out of my comfort zone.  But it did get me thinking about performing texts rather than just blandly reading them out.

At an Eastercon a few years later I stepped up to read poems.  In my novels Panthera: Death Spiral and Panthera: Death Song I have an AI, the title character, Panthera.  He's newly sentient, and when he's troubled by something he writes a poem to examine the issue.  I performed several of those poems at that Eastercon session, and they went down well.

Fast-forward a few years, and now I'm performing stories with a relatively new Portsmouth-based spoken word group, T'articulation.  I've done three or four of these events now.  They've taught me how to write to a certain time slot, and are honing my performance skills.

Tomorrow I'll be stepping this up a gear.  I'll be part of a group from Portsmouth Writers' Hub who are performing stories at the Subaquatic Steampunk Weekend at Gosport Submarine Museum.  This year we're on a proper stage, and we'll be right in the middle of the crowd.  The setup has the feel of a music festival, and will be very different from last year, when we performed in a tent.

I'm looking forward to the experience, and to the increase in exposure.