Features Published 7 May 2014

Ancient Rhymez

Poet and performer Tristan Bernays on how his show The Bread and The Beer, merges the ancient and the modern.
Tristan Bernays

As a theatrical art form, spoken word is about as urban as you can get. The chewy rhymes, the muscular rhythm, the pacey heartbeat, it all perfectly reflects urban life: a grimy hotch-potch of the brutal and the beautiful, the mundane and the sublime. Spoken word, it would appear, is the perfect modern medium.

Except, of course, that it isn’t modern at all. Far from it. We’ve been doing it thousands of years. From before Homer to Beowulf and Shakespeare, on through Allen Ginsberg and Gil Scott Heron, all the way up to contemporary spoken word artists like Inua Ellams and Kate Tempest. Along the way the spoken word has evolved, mutated and adapted – it’s created new rules and destroyed old ones – but it is still here today, very much alive and very much out loud. It is a medium that is both historic and contemporary.

I was fascinated by this paradox: that something as apparently modern as spoken word was actually ancient. I mean, they appeared so totally different – formally, structurally, thematically they seemed millions of miles and thousands of years apart. Ancient poetry has all these strict rules and forms.

It’s beautiful and lofty and poetic. It’s pure escapism, recounting these well-known fantastical stories brimming with gods and monsters. Spoken word, on the other hand, is formless and free-flowing. It can be any shape you want, about anything you want. It’s deeply personal, it’s about you and your real life. About the here and now, and what it’s really like with all its dirt and diamonds on show.

But despite these differences, they share one powerful thing in common: live performance. As the name suggests, the word is meant to be spoken (obviously) and watching a performer tackle spoken word -not only telling the story but wrestling with the verse and the meter and the imagery – can be exhilarating.

They take you on this wild imaginative journey, so frenetic and fantastic that you think it might all fall apart at any moment until, just like that, they grab a new hold of the reins and you’re off again. The performer plays with the words joyfully, revelling not only in the meaning but in the sound – the music of it. Like a symphony, the musicality of the text leaps out, the sound waves literally wash over you. It’s a profoundly physical experience.

When you witness poetry performed out loud rather than reading it on a page, it comes alive. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 2,000 year old poem carved on a sandstone slab or something typed on an  iPhone – those old differences cease to matter. Right there and then it becomes concrete and real.  It’s powerful stuff.

The more I explored these two worlds of the ancient and the modern spoken word – and the more I saw that for all their differences they were profoundly similar – the more I liked the idea that you might be able to mix them, play with them. What if you combined the structural rules and the epic scale of the ancients with the wildly chaotic, free-flowing verse of the modern poet? What if you used an ancient poem to explore our modern world?

I struck upon the idea of writing a modern epic poem. A real, honest-to-goodness modern epic about an ancient English god who woke up in the fast paced and chaotic modern world – and all that bristling, urban chaos would be contained by the ancient rules of the epic form. It would be in iambic pentameter. It would have a hero of colossal stature: the hedonistic, party-loving god of beer, John Barleycorn. There would be gods and monsters and sex and violence and high lyrical verse, it would span time and space and heaven and earth – but at the end of the day it would be about here and now. The imagery, the world, the voice and the heartbeat of it, would all be rooted in modern London. This might be an epic poem but it would be looking at our world and ourselves, her and now.

By combining the two worlds of the past and the present, I wanted to see how they might affect each other: how the lofty words of the ancients might elevate our dreary modern world to heights of poetic ecstasy; and how the gritty, realism of the modern world might help root the ancient world and make it something real, something tangible. In the end, these two worlds complement each other beautifully, and created something that is both ancient and modern, traditional and utterly new.

It goes to show that we can learn as much from the past as the past can learn from us. Just because you’re a 2,000 year old god, doesn’t mean you can’t be real and down-to-earth. And just cos you’re rapping about the 149 bus from Liverpool St to Clapton, doesn’t mean you can’t make it an epic journey.

The Bread and The Beer will be at Soho Theatre, London, from 2nd – 4th June 2014 before touring the UK.

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Tristan Bernays is a contributor to Exeunt Magazine

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