Competition Definitions
Performance Poetry (SLAM Poetry)
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically written for performance before an audience. To put it simply, poetry SLAM is the competitive art of performance poetry. It puts a dual emphasis on writing and performance, encouraging poets to focus on what they're saying as well as how they're saying it.
SLAM poetry encompasses a very broad range of voices, styles, cultural traditions and approaches to writing and performance. In the mid-1990s, it became more and more closely associated with the vocal delivery style found in hip hop music and drew heavily on the tradition of dub poetry, a rhythmic and politicised genre belonging to black and particularly West Indian culture. Many people think that a 'hip hop style', is required to win a poetry slam, but it should be noted that the 2005 Individual World Slam Champion was not considered a hip hop poet.
One of the best things about poetry SLAM is the range of poets it attracts. A diverse range of work can be found, including heartfelt love poetry, searing social commentary, uproarious comic routines, and bittersweet personal confessional pieces.
Storytelling
Storytelling is the ancient art of conveying real or fictitious events in words and sounds. Stories have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and to instill knowledge and values.
Even now we think in narrative and tell anecdotes, urban myths and personal stories almost without realising it. Stories are learned image by image, rather than word by word, and are retold from the heart in gatherings with friends or in public performance. Each telling will be different as the teller chooses their words to suit their audience. This is oral storytelling.
For the Power in the Voice competition, we will be judging each contribution according to content, performance and originality. You might like to create a completely new story of your own. Alternatively, you could take the plot from an old folktale, and rewrite it and perform it in your own way, adding your own description, innuendo and dialogue. In Power in the Voice, we really value originality and innovation.
Rap
RAP stands for Rhythm And Poetry. It is the rhythmic delivery of rhymes that occupies a grey area between speech, poetry, prose and song. This form of vocal performance can be traced back to its African roots to the time of the griots (pronounced gree-oh) - West African praise singers and wandering musicians who were entrusted with the oral tradition of recording stories, rhythmically delivered over drums and sparse instrumentation.
Rapping generally consists of complex cadences, rhymes and wordplay. To successfully deliver a nicely flowing rap, a rapper must also develop vocal presence - a distinctiveness of voice, enunciation and breath control. Enunciation is essential to a flowing rap and breath control is an important skill for a rapper to master.
Aside from flow and rhythmic delivery, the only other central element of rapping is rhyme. A common way MCs judge how to flow in a verse is by writing a rhyme so that the most stressed words coincide with the beat's percussion in a way that makes one's rhyming sound musical. The ability to rap quickly and clearly is sometimes regarded as an important sign of skill.
Where a group of rappers are performing, synchronisation is common and it refers to the organisation of several rappers into one song either by overlapping or through call and response.
