Spoken Circus is a fusion of poetry, folk music, and acro-balancing. Spoken Circus is Cirque du Soleil meets Tom Waits: audiences have been moved to standing O’s by the blend of violin, folk guitar, slam poetry, beat-box harmonica, sleight-of-hand, and human pyramids. Spoken Circus picks up where slam poetry left off; complimenting award-winning poetry with award-winning performance.
Spoken Circus is collaboration from the pine-mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona. The city of Flagstaff is known as a college town full of trains and transients with the Grand Canyon only miles away. Spoken Circus is made of three performers that have been influenced by Flagstaff’s combination of nature and city-life. The result is hobo vaudeville meets The Beat Generation with Bob Dylan as the soundtrack.
Primary members of the group are musicians Megyn Neff, Marykate Glenn and poet Aaron Johnson. Spoken Circus was created to showcase the three very diverse performance backgrounds of its’ members, as each comes to the project with experience in oral interpretation, readers’ theatre, slam poetry, underground hip-hop, washboard strumming, blues harp, street art, street magic, saw violin, contemporary ritual and Las Vegas street performance.
Spoken Circus expands the boundaries of performance art and runs like a yellow highlighter through poetry. Both vaudeville circus acts and poetry have been known to lift audiences through difficult times in history, and Spoken Circus could have been a sideshow act in one of Barnum’s tents, a hobo Hooverville show, a poetry slam feature, a basement punk show, an opening for a ghost-billy rock concert, or a spoken-word showcase at a university.
Spoken Circus has performed with Henry Rollins, Social Distortion, Telescope, Garage Voice, Jimmy Sanitago Baca, Sage Francis, Buddy Wakefield, CR Avery and The Underskore Orkestra. Aaron Johnson’s poetry performance won the 2001 International Forensics’ Poetry Interpretation Competition in Rome, Italy (out of 400 competitors from all over the world), has placed in the top fifty the last two years at the National Poetry Slam, and has sold over 4,000 self-published zines throughout the United States.
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