The New Talkies — Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson: September 22, 2017

The Poetry Center in collaboration with Artists' Television Access co-presents a program of seven "neo-benshi" performances, with poets and writers providing and performing new narrations to existing films. An homage to and riff on the work of Asian benshi actors who, in lieu of textual translations, performed live narrations to foreign films, with the audience drawn to the skills of the actor, this gathering of performances is presented under the rubric The New Talkies. Organized by Konrad Steiner and Anuj Vaidya, this program of seven détournements, parodies, critiques, and celebrations of cinema takes place at Artists' Television Access (ATA), on Valencia Street in San Francisco.

Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson present an original narration (spoken word and song) in a tour-de-force duo performance mining the implications for black fugitivity versus plantation culture unravelled from between the lines of the classic Civil Rights-era American musical. The full evening program features, in sequence, performances by Anuj Vaija, Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson, Jaime Cortez, Konrad Steiner, Stalina Emmanuelle Villareal, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, and a concluding second turn by Steiner.