The crowd yelled “One, Two, Three Throw!”, and the spoken word artist walked onto the stage; nervously adjusted the mic and then she started to weave her magic in words. We were at the Divan Orange, a dive bar on St. Laurent… and I use “dive” in the hipster sense; a small place with a few tables in front of the stage, benches along the walls, fun and unpretentious. The place was filled with the young and excited, but we able to snag the last empty places at a table where one guy was sitting alone.
She was the “calibration poet” and not part of the Slam contest itself, so she only had the pressure to perform, and not the pressure to out-preform. She enchanted us with her poem “Rachel Street”. Her voice was melodic and she built images; throwing words together in coherent and sometimes chaotic phrases; juxtaposing images to mean many things at the same time… “I lost my virginity on Rachel Street”; intimating how this street saw many of her life changes, and with each stanza always ending in the phrase “On Rachel Street”.
The crowd was silent; enwrapped in her performance but not passive; they egged her on with a snapping of their fingers at a delightful word image or poignant phrase. We were all transfixed, transported and transformed into participants of the world view she was creating.
The night of magic had just started. The 4 judges gave her performance 9.2, 9.4, 9.6, 9.0. Yes, our table was drafted to be a judge and we gave her the 9.6. After each score was announced, the crowd yelled “Higher!”, intimating that we were either mark misers, or Idiotic imbeciles.
“One, Two, Three Throw!”, was yelled again as a ritual before each of the spoken word artist started their performance. The performances were all very good, and some were even great. They treated us with wonderful and clever word images, or interesting tone poems, or personal exposés bearing their tortured souls and social injustice.
I had never been to a Slam before, it was an adventure that took me to a new level of creativity and insight; but one where I will never be brave enough to Throw my soul on the stage.