Campfire Poetry was conceived in order to give poets a new venue for audiences to engage with their work, and to provide audio-visual artists with the maximum freedom to follow their creative intuition within the framework of poetic texts/ Bringing together voiceover artists, composers, animators, dancers, photographers and painters, poems are adapted through a process where one artist interprets a text through their own specific experience and lens, then passes it on to the next artist, who builds off of the canvas that the initial artist created. The process fully coalesces when it reaches a visual artist, who takes the elements originally inspired by the poem and puts their own spin on it, resulting in an animated short film, dance performance, or series of photographs or paintings capturing the spirit of the original poem while revealing the work’s hidden depths. Through this process, work is created that reveals not only how the emotions and themes guiding storytelling remain the same no matter the medium, but how the motivations underlying the creative process are innate to the human experience. By passing a story from one artist to the next, in the vein of traditional campfire storytelling, new modes of artistic expression can be applied to one of the earliest forms of communication.
