OPAQUE is a multi-artist live-art poetry work conceived by me, Bristol-based poet, writer and artist Ralph Hoyte. Five other established artists have agreed to collaborate with me to realise OPAQUE. They are poet Tania van Schalkwyk, movement-artist Itta Howie, contemporary composer Marc Yeats, and the trans-national visual imaging team of Ian Talbot, Desirée Talbot, and Anna Lee Keefer.

We are premiering OPAQUE as part of the Bristol Poetry Festival thanks to the Bristol PoetryCan on April 16th this year at the Arnolfini in Bristol, UK. The performance starts at 3pm and lasts 40 min. We will then tour it and/or morph it into another medium.

We want to make and show OPAQUE because we are all highly experimental. No-one is paid a fee for their involvement, but we do need money for expenses such as props and getting people from here, there and everywhere to Bristol, as train and plane companies generally want bank notes, not musical notes or poetry in payment.

OPAQUE is a 40 minute-long mantic synaesthesia of words, movement, music and projected images. OPAQUE is about the nature of Mind and the human need for Belief. OPAQUE is about nanotechnology, Dork Angels, Manichean malevolence... and the Nanoqueen. You don’t want to meet Her … or maybe you do.

OPAQUE is different because half of us met on Twitter; because it is mainly INDEPENDENTLY composed (each involved artist or artist-team independently creates their own reaction to my script and we DON’T all meet to agree the performance together); and because the actual performance score is ‘reverse-composed’ through a data-mashing process: it’s as if ‘the content’ is chucked into a couple of great big bins, and a ‘grabber’, which is programmed according to something unrelated to artistic aesthetics (such as recent air pollution indices), comes along and grabs chunks of material according to its programming, depositing them on a score that we then use for the performance (it’s explained better at http://opaque.posterous.com/!).

What OPAQUE wants to achieve is poetry for the 21st, not the 18th century. Support us!