Invading Stages : Interview with Pete Bearder and Review of Stage Invasion: Poetry & The Spoken Word Renaissance

Gräbner, Cornelia (2020) Invading Stages : Interview with Pete Bearder and Review of Stage Invasion: Poetry & The Spoken Word Renaissance. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 16 (1). ISSN 1557-2935

Text (stage invasion review)
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Abstract

In October 2019 I have the opportunity to talk to Pete Bearder about his recent book Stage Invasion: Poetry & The Spoken Word Renaissance. To the backdrop of a railway station in the UK we delve into some of the issues that his book has raised for me. As we talk, we are surrounded by the rampant consumerism and profiteering promoted by the privatisation of what was once a public, not-for-profit space. The time and space of reflection we carve out and performatively create through conversation in a cafe that sells the simulacrum of benign bourgeois comfort, has more in common with the location of our previous meeting, which took place on a mountain during a festival where I saw Bearder—then in his role as the poet Pete the Temp—stage an interactive performance for children and teenagers, sharing the stage with protagonists of various ages. All of them together created a momentous example of poetic-political education and expression.