Poet Vs Pageant

Throughout history, poets have been known to put themselves in some perilous situations. Dante braved the circles of hell, Coleridge braved the seas – and now, poet, actress and theatre-maker Telia Nevile will be facing the 21st Century poet’s worst nightmare in her upcoming epic Poet vs Pageant.

The show, which will be as minimal and stripped back as sitting around a campfire listening to a story, will take the audience on the journey with a socially awkward poet who, for the first time in her life, must put aside her prejudices and ‘tortured-soul’ disposition as she competes in a beauty pageant. ‘There’s a whole culture surrounding beauty pageants’, Telia tells Milk Bar Mag. ‘They have podcasts, coaches, particular dress shops that cater to the market, runway coaches, talent coaches, people who will coach you for your final question…It’s a massive, massive business’. The pageant will be based on USA’s Miss America, where ‘sticking a pedant who has an over-inflated sense of self into an arena full of people who she thinks are dumb…where the focus is all on how she looks rather than what’s actually in her head…will be extreme’.

Poet vs Pageant is all about challenging the stereotypes of poetry, and challenging the audience to loosen their preconceptions of what poetry is supposed to look like. ‘Poetry isn’t (always) stiff and stave and black turtlenecks and merlot’, Telia explains. ‘Sometimes it’s rap. It’s Saul Williams, it’s Jay-Z. Because poetry is kind of a flinch reflex for a lot of people, I don’t want them to be scared, I want them to be excited…poetry is a curiosity about the world expressed as beautifully, or as pithily, or as percussively as you can possibly express it.’

The performance, then, essentially pays homage to the beauty of the English language and the power of poetry – the power to transport an audience to a completely different world simply by the means of words. ‘I want people to hear the story, I want them to forget when they listen to it’, Telia explains.

Telia has been travelling around Australia making experimental and original theatre since the age of 18. Poet vs Pageant was conceived when Telia asked herself what the scariest thing is she could do in theatre. After all her experience in writing and theatre making, ‘writing an epic poem is absolutely the scariest thing I could think of. I think if, when you’re making something, it doesn’t scare you – then it’s probably not the most interesting thing you can do.’ Challenging herself and her audience, Telia takes the risk putting one spoken word poem – an art with a niche following in Melbourne – on stage for 50 minutes. Keeping the audience’s attention for that long is one thing, but enthralling them in this way is another thing altogether. This epic has the potential to confirm assumptions of poetry as blandness, or to destroy that assumption forever. The only way to find out, though, is by experiencing it.

Poet vs Pageant
Fringe Hub – Son of Loft, Lithuanian Club, 44 Errol Street, North Melbourne
Saturday September 26 – Saturday October 3
melbournefringe.com.au/program/event/view/d7ec89e6-eb14-49a9-bc5a-f7755cfc1f74