VitusSpeakz is one of the most celebrated, critically acclaimed and influential spoken word artists of our time. He will be gracing the capital stage this Saturday, March 6 at the Impact Hub, Osu, with a line up of fellow spoken word artists.
VitusSpeakz has been providing the world with bold, and hopeful, live poetry performances over the past few years. Vitus Speakz took the time to come answer some questions on Radio Univers’ Read a book a week show before his upcoming” Creative Convos” event.
Based on your spoken word career, describe for someone who has never heard of it what spoken word poetry is.
Delving right into it, spoken word is actually poetry as there have been a lot of debates around that but spoken word is a performance-based poetry in other words performance designed to be performed before a live audience that is basically a literary act it has to do with expressing thoughts and opinions using literature through words and all that you know so it’s a literary act but when that poetry is taken and designed to be performed before a live audience then it becomes a spoken word.
We know a lot of poetry sounds good on the stage–but how about the page?
Okay, it depends. spoken word as an art it performance is written to suit a live audience, so we factor in some techniques that will appeal more to the audience making it slightly different to poetry that is going to be read especially from a book so there are certain literary devices in spoken word poetry that will be more appreciated by a live audience.
Now let’s talk about you Vitus, how did you first develop the love for spoken word
As far back as I can remember, I have always loved writing. I’ve always been a writer. I think it was back in secondary school where I actually started doing spoken word poetry. I think I took a course in literature where I kind of connected to poetry which was a kind of thing for me and took to writing poems which were appreciated by people around me and I came across videos of people doing spoken word . Instantly, I ventured into it and it turned out well so I shaped my career off it.
What does it take to be a spoken word poet? Do you have to be connected to literature before you could actually hone the skills around it?
First of all, you need to be a poet you need to be someone who actually writes poetry that’s the first and foremost thing.
You need some amount of literary ability or gift in terms of creative writing to be able to write poems and then secondly, you need to be at least a good speaker in some sense because aside from writing it you need to perform to your audience so you need to be a good speaker and performer. With these two things in place, I believe you will be a good performer
What is it like to perform in different settings, such as at festivals or on YouTube? How do you find different audiences?
Basically for me, the kind of topics I focus on are things relevant to the youth to the millennials but I speak on a wide range of subjects like religion to social life to some aspects of politics to Panafricanism and a whole wide range of topics and I basically perform at events that speak about all these topics so conferences, symposia many others not just poetry events .for me finding my audience has to do with place where these things are the talk and they have me on board because people come there with the without expectation and they make it easy to us connect and for poetry, if delivered well can hold people’s attention and for me, it is easier to hold that audience.
So the project/event CREATIVE CONVOS is set to take place on March 7th and where’s the venue?
The venue is at Impact Hub, Osu on Saturday actually a day after Ghana’s independence day which is Friday.
It is ticketed for a cool price of 25 cedis and the time is 6 pm to 8 pm on the 7th of March.
Check out one of his acclaimed works ‘The Movement’…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIYg4Zot5ls
The author of the transcribed excerpts of the radio interview session is Kayleb Ahinakwah a broadcast journalist, freelance content writer and host of Radio Univers’ literary radio show Read a book.
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