Poet Zachary Schomburg watched his poems travel from the page to the screen Sunday night in the form of the fringe-media format of shadow puppetry.
"There's a Built to Spill line, one of my favorite bands, that goes, ‘I want to see the movies of my dreams,'" Schomberg told The Herald after the show. "It's like I get to do that." In his reading of about 20 poems before the puppet performance last night, the Portland-based poet — who has released three poetry volumes and will be publishing his first novel next year — told the small audience, "About half of my poems are from my dreams."
In the intimate McCormack Family Theater, a crowd of about 50 gathered to watch Schomburg's dreams with him in "Fjords," the contemporary shadow puppet interpretation of his book of poetry by the same name, told in 15 audiovisual shorts, each based on a different poem.
This was the most recent stop of a touring collaboration between the Chicago shadow puppet troupe Manual Cinema, the Chicago Q Ensemble, Kyle Vegter, who wrote the score, and Schomburg, whose most recent volume inspired the performance.
While Schomburg's reading of his work sounded lighter — almost wistful — the presentation of shadow puppetry retold a series of his poems in the dark, desolate dreamscape in which he first imagined them.
"I think they translated perfectly, from my perspective," Schomburg said. "There's this real inherent loneliness and sadness and longing and pining in those poems, and I think they really understood that, and with images were able to capture what I was trying to capture with text."
To personify Schomburg's terse, idiosyncratic poetry, Manual Cinema used multiple overhead projectors, a collection of cutouts to make the silhouettes on the screen, color pictures to set the landscape and two live actors to navigate this dreamscape. Though the entire show was created with just light, paper and a projection screen, the audience did not hesitate to go backstage after the show to see how it was made.
There were no technical innovations or truly astounding effects in the presentation, but the creativity inspired by such a simplistic medium was a fitting channel through which to express Schomburg's simply worded yet deeply evocative poems.
Schomburg only read his poems before the puppet show. The actual presentation featured only the images on the screen and Vegter's powerful original score.
The performance was accompanied by a live string quartet for the first shows of the tour in Chicago, but last night a recording was used. The score switched deftly between unexpected sound effects, atmospheric ambience and what sounded like a minimalist classical string symphony, all serving as a well-timed counterpart to the visuals on the screen.
"I realized that he said they had live music, and I lamented at the loss so much," said audience member Manvir Singh '12 after the show. "But it was still really neat, and the fact that there was recorded music means that they had to line everything all up, and I thought it was really impressive."
The entire presentation, including the reading, a five-minute break and the puppet show, lasted just under an hour and a half. But as there was no poetry to actually accompany the visuals — with the exception of title lines projected on the screen like in a silent movie — the audience seemed a little tired during the last few vignettes.
"I enjoyed it for the most part, maybe like two thirds of it," Singh said. "In the beginning, it's really novel, and it's pretty impressive. After that, the novelty wears off."
Schomburg said that while he is most dedicated to working with text on a page, he appreciates the energy and longevity that new media can provide to his work.
"If I write a poem, I want it to be a poem, but naturally I'm kind of interested in the fact that it could be another kind of thing, too," Schomburg said. "Like it could have a new life as a new thing and kind of continue to live through different mediums and be able to get translated and re-translated and re-translated and not just get stuck on the page."
