Brown's first-ever team destined for the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational — an annual nationwide competition for slam poets — performed for a packed and enthusiastic Macmillan 117 last Friday.
Laura Brown-Lavoie '10.5, Kai Huang '11, Phil Kaye '10, Tim Natividad '12 and Jamila Woods '10 will be the first to represent the University in the invitational, which will take place at Emerson College in Boston April 7–10. At Friday's show, the team performed individual and collaborative pieces, including the ones they currently plan on presenting at nationals.
The team was selected Feb. 17, when 13 hopefuls competed in front of an audience of about 150 students. Accomplished Providence slam poet Jared Paul hosted the competition and selected five students at random from the audience to ultimately decide who made the team. The team members selected are all members of Word!, the campus spoken word poetry group.
Audience members were asked to pay a $2 entrance fee, which will go toward paying for the team's competition costs.
In an interview with The Herald, team members Kaye and Natividad said their feelings were a little mixed when first considering the idea of going to nationals because of the difference between spoken word poetry, which is more collaborative, and slam poetry, which is primarily competitive.
"It is very dangerous" to make the transition, Natividad said. "We have so little experience in slam poetry. It's going to be a lot harder than people make it out to be."
Kaye echoed Natividad's concerns, adding that inflated egos and antagonism between competing slam poets often keep them from uniting as a team. But Kaye said the Brown team's shared experience as spoken word artists gave the team an advantage.
"I think we're really fortunate that everyone on the team is really close already," Kaye said. "We trust each other, know each other's work."
Natividad compared the combination of camaraderie and competition to playing football with one's family on Thanksgiving. "It's kind of like you get to go on a road trip with your friends, plus poetry," he said.
Kaye cited members' close relationships with one another as the reason he is not concerned that they don't have a coach, unlike many other teams.
Both agreed that the team is invested in winning, but that it is not their only — or even their main — goal. The desire to learn from and connect with other students who care about the art of spoken word provided much of the impetus for Word! members' decision to send a group of poets to nationals, the students said. Kaye said the team doesn't necessarily expect to "blow everyone out of the water."
"Slam is a big part luck, but the talented teams tend to be luckier and I have full faith in our talent as a team," Kaye said.
Friday's team performance featured a mix of individual and collaborative poems, both old and new, with interludes of rap as well. The first piece of the night was a collaboration of all the team members pacing throughout the auditorium and prompting audience members to "listen" — to both poignant and serious lines, and to such light-hearted ones as "listen to Snoop Dogg every night from now until Spring Weekend."
The rest of the pieces performed covered a range of topics. A collaboration by Huang and Natividad addressed their frustrations and anger toward stereotypes of Asian-Americans. Another collaboration by Brown-Lavoie and Woods played off "that's what she said" jokes to address issues surrounding gender in communication. Pieces by Kaye and Natividad addressed internal conflicts arising from, respectively, having two separate family histories on opposing sides during World War II, and ambivalence about religion.
"We tried to offer (the audience) something that we haven't given them before," Natividad said.
This offer included a full-fledged rap battle between Woods and Huang in the middle of the show, in which both humorously attacked each other to the beats of Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" and Lil Wayne's "A Milli," complete with backup dancing by other members of the team. The battle elicited roars of laughter from the audience, as the two threw a number of verbal gems at each other, such as Woods' playful derision of Huang: "At least you got a backpack and a bowl of ramen, yes, you and homeless people got a lot in common."
Huang performed two other raps, one called "Sick," which listed things he is sick of, including "free market capitalism" and "policing political correctness," and another that provided a humorous, but also thought-provoking, take on a typical meal at the Sharpe Refectory.
All of the pieces conveyed what Natividad described as each of the members' "very distinct styles," which included incorporations of song, backup instrumentals, repetition and other aesthetic devices. The one-hour performance, infused with each member's unique interpretation of spoken word, left audience members clapping vigorously. The team will travel to Boston next week to participate in a practice slam competition against host college Emerson in preparation for nationals.
