The PerPoSF returns under the thematic title INTRA // BLANC, exploring performance poetry as a liminal art form and an aesthetic field of transition: a site where energy and intensity flow between voice and writing, body and language, the tangible and the intangible, presence and memory, the ephemeral and the documented, the poet and the audience, as well as diverse artistic practices and emerging technologies, all converging into modes of presence that together constitute the poetic event itself.

We are invited to think of performance not as a neutral zone of encounter, but as a multidimensional field of co-constitution where subjects, materials, and media emerge synchronically and interdependently through the generative force of their relationships, weaving together contexts, rhythms, textures, and configurations. Performance poetry does not unfold between fixed points. Rather, it produces the “in-between” itself as a dynamic evolution of relations and forms within a dialogic spatiality and temporality. It is precisely within this generative interval that performance poetry reveals a poetics of the present – open to rupture, contingency, and transformative action.

A Note by Georgia Velivasaki
(Founder & Artistic Director of PerPoSF)

Poetry is the movement of a hand across the blank page, the utterance that emerges from behind the symbol. Words carry meaning, as do the space they open, hidden sounds, the voice, breath, and the body’s gestures. Poetry ruptures surfaces. It points toward the abyss that surrounds us, toward that which remains unspoken or that we do not dare to speak. Like a small child, it unsettles the universe.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Stéphane Mallarmé was the first to activate and animate the Blanc (white space) of the page, transforming it into a dynamic element of poetic composition. What had once been the invisible, asemic space surrounding a letter or a word became a matrix of meaning and signification, a generative interval entering into dialogue with writing to transform it. From that moment onward, poetry came to be understood as an ‘open field’ of action.

In 1950, Charles Olson conceived of the poem as a vectorial transfer of energy from poet to recipient, a “non-literary act” in which the body becomes both bearer and medium for the renewal of poetic practice. Movement, whether a pencil stroke, a voice, or a gesture, is nothing other than energy flowing between the line and the symbol, bringing forth new textual events and new modes of poetic creation beyond the page. Space itself acquires its own internal logic, disrupting the rational structures that define the poem. Here, we can discern a foreshadowing of Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action”, which advances an ontologically performative approach to reality: a non-anthropocentric and non-representational understanding of matter, meaning, and action, in which participating entities are co-constituted through their relations.

Today, performance poetry as an embodied, material practice manifests in a rich diversity of forms, tools, modes, strategies, techniques, and technological media, allowing the world’s plurality of bodies and voices to find expression. No longer merely an observer of external reality, the poetic subject becomes a corporeal node of energy, opening new fields of operation for poetic discourse and moving toward a meta-performance poetic experience.

The Blanc refers to that dynamic, three-dimensional spatiotemporal field in which poetry, poet, and audience emerge together through intra-active relations. Within this performative process, bodies, voices, materials, technologies, and meanings emerge interdependently, co-constituting the poetic act. Nothing precedes the encounter.

INTRA // BLANC is an invitation to inhabit this performative field of emergence, where the poem unfolds as a shared becoming.

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Our aspiration is to introduce and establish a forum for  poet-performers, poet-artists, spoken word, phonetic and sound poets, artists, academics, researchers and the general public, from Greece and abroad, where the creative exchanges of work, views and ideas can take place; a true celebration of Performance Poetry.

We aim to highlight the contemporary Greek presence in this new global poetic phenomenon, underscoring that poetic expression has always been – since the time of Empedocles, the Orphic poets, and Homer – performative, rhapsodic, recited, or sung. The question raised here is: “How can we create a new input, a new contribution, so that poetry can regain its active role within the modern “glocal” Greek society, with the poets becoming cultural mediators, engaging with and conversing alongside contemporary international literary and artistic movements?