SRO @ MCCC!

From start to finish, Friday was a perfect day at Mercer County Community College!

Academic Theatre Program Instructor Alex DeFazio & I began the day with a great interview by Rachel Katz who hosts the dynamic 'Views & Voices' at WWFM, a classical music public radio station that operates out of Mercer County Community College.

Afterward, we had an at length & many faceted conversation with Mercer Communications professor Alvyn Haywood for WWFM's 'Jazz on 2', Trenton's Jazz Station. We touched on topics ranging from the importance of Jazz in the context of contemporary culture, specific inspiration for me during the writing of JOE SENT ME, the background of my connection and collaboration with Alex DeFazio which led to JOE SENT MDE, future plans, and more.

Professor Haywood & those at WWFM are shaping an immensely innovative and important program, one that reaches out to Trenton & beyond in a broad-minded and all-inclusive way, a model for radio stations everwhere that seek to educate, influence & inspire their audience as well as entertain. Read more about 'Jazz on 2' here.

The students who attended the Q&A were some of the most interesting, inquisitive & insightful that I've come across anywhere. Questions ran the gamut, from the technical, relating to the signing recording contracts, to the personal, concerns about the future possibility of facing the 'casting couch', something every female artist will most likely have to face at one time or another. We discussed the importance of smartly navigating the sometimes treacherous music business waters, the current state of flux & chaos in the industry, the various ways of keeping one's inspiration alive & vital, and the importance of discipline as an artist.

It was a packed room and an amazing conversation! Thanks to all the MCCC students & faculty members who made their presence felt by attending & participating in what was an experience for all to remember! As we approach the JOE SENT MDE performance dates (May 16th & 17th) I'll be creating a virtual document of the experience here, as well as featuring artwork by immensely talented Mercer Art, Design, Dance & Theatre students. Come May 17 & 18th, I'll be adding video & photos of JOE SENT MDE.



See you there!

Vanessa Daou Visits Mercer County Community College 3/27

"The Academic Theatre and Dance Programs at Mercer County Community College are hosting a campus visit by #1 Billboard Dance Artist Vanessa Daou on Friday, March 27 at 12:30 p.m. The community is invited to join Ms. Daou for a Q&A session in the Studio Theatre (CM 122), located next to Kelsey Theatre on the college's West Windsor campus, 1200 Old Trenton Road. The event is presented free of charge.

According to MCCC Theatre Program Coordinator Jody Person, Ms. Daou's visit to campus represents an extraordinary opportunity for Mercer students and members of the community who are musicians, graphic designers, dancers, programmers, visual artists, performers and writers. Says Person, "Vanessa has performed everywhere from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to the Olympia Theatre in France. She's also an interdisciplinary artist who works with music, poetry, visual art, graphic design, and interactive digital art. Most importantly, she's a thinking artist, and this is precisely the quality we are working to nurture in students of the Theatre and Dance Programs at MCCC."

Link to full article on Broadway World

@bendrix on blip.fm

@bendrix on blip.fm: "Vanessa Daou: erotica artist/poet. "Plutonium Glow" (1997) dreamy female vocals caught in an electro space age vortex." codesignal.com

The Daou of Poetry: A conversation with musician and poet Vanessa Daou By Collin Kelley

A portion of my interview by incredible poet, novelist & journalist Collin Kelley from issue #2 of the Ouroboros Review, a stunning new poetry & art journal:

Collin: Let’s start back at the beginning of your life as a poet – who inspired you?

Vanessa: When I was attending Columbia University, I studied poetry with Kenneth Koch. His class was amazing and he was such a communicator for his vision and idea of poetry. He shattered the notion that poetry is something unapproachable and obtuse. I became interested in spoken word because of him and I often read at PostScrypt, the poetry spot at Columbia.

......

Collin: Joe Sent Me is amazing. The music reminds me of Miles Davis’ score for Elevator to the Gallows, and the spoken word element is really strong here; much more so than on the other records.

Vanessa: Originally, I conceived of Joe Sent Me as a soundtrack of sorts to my own life, perhaps a projection of it, as a kind of sonic document of my experience through time. I have a background and interest in research and one of those interests is in code, with respect to words and the kind written for a computer. Joe Sent Me is an old speakeasy password from the Prohibition-era. You said those words at a door and suddenly you were in this hidden, mysterious place. That idea intrigued me. On the digipack for the album there is a quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art that reads, “Words on a page of poetry are a code for human emotions.” That idea is the heart of the album.

Issue #2 also contains poetry by Michelle McGrane, Iain Britton, Rebecca Gethin, Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, and Robin Reagler, and more.

Make sure to view Hunter Ewen's illustrations & listen to his score to Amy Pence's poetry, follow the link in the NEWS section of Ouroboros here

Editors Jo Hemmant of flourescence & Christine Swint of balanced on the edge have created an internet savvy & highly forward-looking Poetry & Art experience.

JOE SENT M(D)E

"The Mercer Dance Ensemble features a group of MCCC's [Mercer Community College's] most talented students and alumni, plus some special guests. This years concert will be a landmark collaboration between the Mercer Dance Ensemble and critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Vanessa Daou.

Choreographed by dance faculty Janell Byrne, with guest choreography by Jody P. Person and others, Joe Sent M.D.E. features music from Daou’s new album, Joe Sent Me, which she named after a code-phrase that was used to gain entry into Prohibition-era speakeasies. Daou says the album is about "the transmission of ideas through time, the secret ranges of the voice, fleeting nights of love and desire, the archiving of dreams, memory, and the imagination." Joe Sent M.D.E. transforms Daou's ideas into a suite of dances constructed around the central metaphor of the album – to discover "secret codes," in a language of the body, that will open doors into illicit paces of rebellion and abandon"

[ Kelsey Theatre ]

Joe Sent Me-poetry & Intangible Culture

"...the sense of here/not here, this want of places to
be, enter & make
sagacious."
Barry McKinnon, from Two from In the Millennium


I've always loved the sounds of words, but words mean nothing until and unless meaning is provided or attached. The beauty of Poetry is that meaning can be sensed, gleaned, inferred, intuited, without the necessity of being fully understood. Poets love to tease out meaning from fleeting things - the evanescence of a street lamp on a dusky day, the sense of absence from the low hum of someone's murmurs heard through walls.

A unique element of poetry is its ability to compress and condense feeling, as well as its portability & flexibility: it can be transferred, translated & transmitted, it fulfills our need for immutability as well as intangibility. Perhaps the reason Poetry continues to thrive throughout the ages is that it fits into Primary as well as Secondary Oral Traditions. And while, at its core, a poem consists of words in one form or another, a great poem speaks to everyone and is appreciated equally by the theoriser and blogger. In the final analysis, a poem is apprehended not by applied knowledge but by the totality of its essence.

While I'm drawn to the intimacy of a poem on the page, I've always loved to hear a poem as it is intoned by its author. One of the aspects of technology that I love is its ability to re-contextualize a song or a poem, and while the debate rages about Poetry's place within the truly unruly realm of the Web, on needs only to look back at the invention of the typewriter to see its effect on the generation of Dada Poets who contemporaneously harnessed and applied its potentialities to an infinite and ever-expanding degree.

I've conceived of JOE SENT ME-poetry as part of a living document, where each poem takes on a life of its own outside of the writer and the written hand. As a featured guest of Barcelona Poesia 2008, I created JOE SENT ME @ BarcelonaPoesia2008 to reflect the way my mind reconstructs my experience of Barcelona, the vibrant clash of its cultures and co-mingling of languages live and breath in my memory in a a vivid and tangible way.

I wanted to flesh out the tonal & vocal nuances of some of the spoken poems on JOE SENT ME, which led to my collaboration with sound & visual artist Raul Vincent Enriquez who shed his sonic insight into THE HOOK and LOVE LIVES IN THE DARK; Bruno Galindo, who shaped flawless & beautiful Spanish translations of THE HOOK & LOVE LIVES IN THE DARK; and Daniel Sisla, fellow guest poet at the Barcelona Poesia 2008, who has so perceptively and impeccably created Catalan translations of LOVE LIVES IN THE DARK, DREAM, and INTO THE NIGHT (both not included on the album). The poems on JOE SENT ME were recorded by Greta Byrum who shared her ear & expertise with their recording at Recorded Books, New York City.

The aim for these pages is to break down each poem into its component parts:

word/sound

structure/form

rhythm/repetition

writer/reader

speaker/listener

creator/viewer

imagination/interpretation

The internet provides the perfect vehicle for the nuances of poetry, for the transportation of its substance & essence, for the transmission of its message through time. For me, raw computer coding languages hold within them pure poetic potential: the hope is to shape new ways of perceiving technology and its relation to language, music, things remembered, things heard, reflection, recollection and the spoken word.

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For further excursions into intangible realms, visit:

Drunken Boat

exoticpylon

UbuWeb

Weird Deer

Year Zero One