Hullabaloo B.C. Youth Spoken Word Festival, April 21 to 23 at the Vancouver Public Library. Part of the Verses Festival of Words, which runs April 21 to May 1. Visit youthslam.ca or versesfestival.ca for details.
Eighty high school students from across the province will engage in a war of the words when the Hullabaloo B.C. Youth Spoken Word Festival returns for its sixth year next week.
Among the 16 secondary school slam poetry teams descending on the Vancouver Public Library to compete at this year’s festival are North Vancouver’s Argyle and Handsworth schools, and West Vancouver’s Mulgrave School. All the teams are vying for the championship title and the coveted Billy Sharkspeare Trophy, which will be awarded the night of April 23.
Beyond the competition segment of the festival, and perhaps more importantly, Hullabaloo gives young poets a forum to showcase their talent and participate in workshops.
“It’s a bit of a mix of a developmental festival for young artists and a festival that celebrates youth poetry and puts youth in the spotlight,” says one of the event organizers Johnny MacRae, a Handsworth alumnus.
“It’s a great environment where the youth are really the ones who are the loudest cheering for each other.”
MacRae, a spoken word artist himself who does outreach work in schools through Vancouver Poetry House, sometimes hears from teachers that slam poetry club members get bullied because their extra-curricular activity is considered so alternative.
“I think in some cases students are coming out of environments that are not only non-supportive, but might even be outright hostile to what they do,” MacRae says. “So to have the space where they get to be celebrated, they get to meet 80 other kids who are equally as passionate, or nerdy, or however you want to look at it, about the art form, is a really powerful experience for a lot of them.”
When the students aren’t reciting their solo poems and team pieces in the slam bouts, they’ll have the opportunity to attend workshops facilitated by established spoken word artists and watch all-stars take the stage.
Headlining this year’s Hullabaloo festival is Victoria’s Janet Marie Rogers, a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario and Victoria’s Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2015. Also performing are Lishai Peel, an award-winning poet, creative consultant and animator, and Winona Linn, a poet, visual artist, performer, teacher and spoken word artist currently based in Paris, France.
The festival aims to gather poets from across B.C. and connect them into a community.
“It’s created the possibility for young writers to get really intensive development at an early age,” MacRae says.
Though spoken word may still be considered an alternative form of artistic expression, MacRae says the oral art form has entered the mainstream consciousness. There’s no longer the deep set battle between “the stage versus the page poets” that existed 10 years ago, he says, and that’s largely thanks to the work being done at the high school level.
“Spoken word has really sort of carved out an air of legitimacy for itself because of English teachers at high schools and because of the way the youth engage with it and recognize it,” he says. “The youth movement has become probably the strongest part of spoken word because, if anything, I think a lot of youth recognize spoken word and slam as a well-developed contemporary art form that they understand very intimately on an intuitive level.”
In MacRae’s high school days, there was no such thing as a slam poetry club. But he was a member of his school improv team and got introduced to spoken word through his drama teacher.
“I always wrote from an early, early age and I always was keen on performance,” he says of what drew him to the genre.
The thought of getting up on stage and sharing one’s creative work can be daunting. For teens interested in giving spoken word a try, MacRae encourages them to check out the Vancouver Poetry Slam channel on YouTube or come out to the monthly Vancouver Youth Poetry Slam event at Café Deux Soleils on Commercial Drive.
“If someone has something that they want to share, I just say bring it to the open mic first. There’s always an open mic at youth slams, there’s always opportunities to read poems without having them judged.”
