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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Vancouver Poet Sees Purplein Buenos Aires and BerlinVancouver, BC, Oct. 24, 2006 — Heather Haley’s new videopoem, Purple Lipstick, is quickly garnering kudos, having been selected by VideoBardo 2nd International VideoPoetry Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the 3rd Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany (from over 600 entries.) Completed in July, it features actors Bazil Graham, Ripley and Cairo Ferguson and accomplished performance poet, Alexandra Oliver-Basekic. Purple is the colour of a fresh bruise and domestic violence the single greatest cause of injury to women in Canada. Purple Lipstick confronts its insidious nature with compelling juxtapositions. A woman’s disembodied voice recites language vivid and absurd against a backdrop of banality, images of normalcy. A wife and mother prepares dinner—still in her nurse’s uniform—numbing isolation invoked through excruciating tension. Inherent terror, brutality, is only alluded to. “I wouldn’t have depicted the murder even if I’d had a huge budget,” explains director Haley. “What the viewer’s mind imagines has far more impact.” Heather Haley has long cultivated poetry through media. Architect of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre—publisher of The Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first e-zines—and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, it’s the source of much of her public recognition. Her life has shifted modes through the years, from performing in the post-punk underground and spoken word scenes to writing and childrearing on Bowen Island. In recent years, Haley has hosted and curated See The Voice: Visible Verse @ Pacific Cinémathèque, North America’s sustaining venue for the presentation of artistically significant poetry film and video. At the same time, she’s developed her own art. Anvil Press published a book of verse, Sideways, in 2003. Surfing Season, an audio CD of song and spoken word, was released in 2004, along with Dying For the Pleasure, her first videopoem, which she defines as a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard. The Vancouver Review will publish Window Seat in their September 06 issue, a poem featured in her new book of the same name. Early in 2007 she will launch Two Redheads, a podcast, and a cd of song and spoken word, Princess Nut, both produced in collaboration with composer/sound designer, Roderick Shoolbraid. One of Haley’s primary goals is to find and/or establish niche marketing and distribution for media poetry, in all its guises. Purple Lipstick will screen in Vancouver Nov. 16 at Pacific Cinémathèque. For more information or preview copies, please contact Executive Producer, Josef Roehrl. Read about other events and news |