Jennifer Ferraro says poetry has become distanced from common people.
That's part of what inspired her to combine poetry with live music and dance in "Intimate Distance: Courting the Beloved," which will be performed at the South Broadway Cultural Center on Saturday.
Ferraro is a creative writing graduate student at UNM who also teaches English 101 and entry-level poetry. She said poetry has gotten too academic.
"With modernism in poetry, it became more academic and people in general in America for the past 100 years have viewed poetry as something for the educated," she said. "I feel people got separated from the sheer joy of listening to poetry."
The distance between poetry and the public is closing some as performance poetry and the slam scene continue to gain popularity, she said. But Ferraro took a different approach.
"I feel poetry needs to be connected to other art forms, so it can reach a greater audience," she said. "Dance and poetry gain something from being combined. They become more relevant to people. We wanted to push the live element and see what we could do."
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"Intimate Distance" is co-directed by Ferraro and choreographer Myra Krien, the director of the Mosaic Dance Company in Santa Fe. Their collaboration began a year ago when Ferraro started taking dance classes with Krien. Ferraro gave Krien her book of poetry Divine Nostalgia, which had just been published.
"After reading it, she felt really strongly about the poems," Ferraro said.
Ferraro and Krien began experimenting and combined one of the poems with dance in a performance last year. Ferraro said they received such a positive response, they decided to create a full-length performance. The piece now includes contributions from the Mosaic Dance Company, the Darbuka Musical Ensemble and special guest Latif Bolat. Ferraro got a research grant from the Graduate Professional Student Association, which she said enabled her to bring her performance to Albuquerque, Taos and Santa Fe.
Ferraro said in the title "Courting the Beloved," beloved means divine, a concept devised from Sufi philosophy, the mystical path in Islam.
"In Sufi poetry, they address the divine as the beloved, connecting the language of love to spiritual longing," she said. "The theme of the performance is about how the making of art is connected to the spiritual longing for intimacy. When an artist sits down to make a piece of art, they do that because they are making an attempt at intimacy."
Ferraro reads pieces of Divine Nostalgia during the performance of "Intimate Distance," and describes her work as being sensual and spiritual.
"That's one of my trademarks," she said.
She said some of the poems are about dancing, rhythm, the human voice and earthly experience. Other poems, she said, deal with more psychologically difficult matter like the separation from one's beloved. She said the poems in the third act are the most spiritual and the choreography attempts to capture the feeling of being ecstatic.
Ferrara said one of her fears for the piece has been that there is too much poetry in it.
"Myra made a comment once that stuck with me," Ferrara said. "She said poetry is like chocolate - a little bit is good, but there's such a thing as too much."
What: Intimate Distance: Courting the Beloved Through Poetry, Dance and Music
When: Saturday at 7 p.m.
Where: South Broadway Cultural Center
1025 Broadway Blvd.
Price: $15 adults, $8 Students
Ticket Info: 848-1320
