The showcase, the recording and who agreed to what
Putting on the showcase
A spoken word performance is a poem written to be heard and then said out loud to an audience, and the end of term showcase is the version a workshop builds towards: ten to fourteen young poets, one microphone, one room, and an hour that has been planned in far more detail than it looks.
The evening is not a test and it is not a competition, and saying so out loud at the start changes how the whole room behaves.
What the evening actually looks like, hour by hour
The evening runs on a timetable that starts long before the doors, and the schedule below is the shape most school and library poetry showcases settle into once they have run twice. Times are examples for doors at 19:00 and a 19:15 start; what matters is the order and the gaps, because every problem on a showcase night is a problem of time.
| Time | What happens | Who holds it |
|---|---|---|
| 17:00 | Room set: chairs, stage light on, microphone and stand up, spare cable at the side | Two adults, plus any student crew |
| 17:45 | Sound check, one full line each at performance volume, and everybody stands on the stage once | Whoever is running sound |
| 18:30 | Poets arrive, running order on the wall, printed copies collected into one folder | The workshop leader |
| 19:00 | Doors, music low, filming positions agreed and the unfilmed seats reserved | Front of house |
| 19:15 | Host opens, states the ground rules, and reads the consent position for the room | The host |
| 19:20 | First half, six or seven poems, no introductions longer than the poems | The host |
| 19:55 | Interval, twenty minutes, which is where a nervous second half poet is checked on | The workshop leader |
| 20:15 | Second half, six or seven poems, then thanks and out | The host |
Three rules do most of the work. Nobody goes on cold, so every poet stands at the microphone in the empty room during the check. The host introduces with a name and nothing else, because a build up raises the pressure on a fifteen year old for no gain. And the folder of printed poems sits at the side of the stage all night, so a forgotten line has a floor under it rather than a drop.
Building the running order
A running order is built by contrast rather than by quality, and the sequence changes the evening more than any individual poem does. Put a short, funny or collective piece first so the room learns it is allowed to react. Never open with the strongest poem, which leaves an hour of anticlimax, and never close with the quietest. Separate poems that share a subject, because two bereavement poems in a row make the second one inaudible. Give a nervous performer a slot three or four in, early enough that the waiting does not eat them, late enough that the room has warmed, and deal with the nerves themselves as Nerves, and what to do with them sets out.
Length is the discipline nobody enforces and everybody needs. Fourteen poems of two to three minutes, plus introductions and applause, is already 60 minutes, and a welcome, an interval and a thank you take it to 90. Spoken word poetry evenings that overrun lose the room in the last fifteen minutes, which is exactly where the second half performers are, so cutting two slots is kinder than cutting nobody.
Slam poetry or spoken word: which one a showcase is
Slam poetry and spoken word are not two kinds of writing, they are a format and a practice, and a showcase is neither of them exactly. Spoken word is the wider practice of poetry written to be said aloud. A slam is a competitive format for presenting it, invented by Marc Smith in Chicago in 1984, in which judges picked from the audience score each poem and the poet with the highest total wins. A showcase borrows the room and the microphone from both and drops the scoring.
| Slam | Spoken word showcase | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides | Judges drawn from the audience, scoring each poem | Nobody. There is no result |
| Time limit | Three minutes, with a short grace period, enforced | Set by the host, usually two to three minutes |
| Props and costume | Conventionally banned, along with music and other people's words | Allowed if they serve the poem, and usually unnecessary |
| What it is for | Competition, and the energy a competition creates | Finishing a term's work in front of the people who matter to the writers |
The slam rules are worth teaching even in a showcase, because they carry one principle that applies everywhere: the poem is the poet's own work. Beyond that, a showcase should stay uncompetitive on purpose. Ranking teenagers against each other at the end of their first term is the fastest way to lose the half of the group who will not win.
Consent: what is filmed, and who is in the frame
Consent about filming has to be settled before the doors open, and in the United Kingdom it is data protection law rather than only good manners: a recognisable image or recording of a person is personal data under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and the regulator is the Information Commissioner's Office. The ICO's long standing position is that photographs taken by a parent purely for their own family use fall outside data protection law, while a school, library or youth organisation filming an event and publishing it is processing personal data and needs a lawful basis, which in this setting is normally consent.
Consent under the UK GDPR has to be specific, informed, freely given and as easy to withdraw as it was to give, which rules out the single tick box collected in September covering a clip posted in July. Ask each poet three separate questions and record the answers next to their name on the running order:
- Ask whether they agree to be filmed at all on the night.
- Ask whether the recording may be shown outside the room, and where exactly, since a private link to families is a different answer from a public channel.
- Ask whether their name may appear on screen or in the caption, because some writers will perform in public and not be searchable.
Then deal with the audience, which is the part everyone forgets. A camera at the back facing the stage puts nobody in the audience in frame, which solves most of the problem in one move. Reserve two rows at the side as unfilmed seats, announce them at the top of the evening, and ask families to film only their own child rather than the whole running order. The law fixes no age here, but a school, library or youth group should take a parent or carer's agreement alongside the poet's own for anyone under 18, and if the two disagree, the answer is no.
Where the recording is allowed to go afterwards
Where the recording ends up should be written down on the night, not decided a fortnight later by whoever has the file. Agree four things in advance: which single platform it goes to, whether it is public or unlisted, who holds the original, and how long it is kept before deletion. A named person and a date turn a vague promise into something a young writer can hold you to.
Two separate rights sit inside every recording, and both belong to the young people rather than to the organisation. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 the poem is a literary work owned by the writer from the moment it is written down, so filming the performance does not give the school, library or youth group any ownership of the poem. The same Act gives performers rights over the recording of their own live performance, which means the poet's permission is needed as a performer as well as a writer. Both are simple to satisfy and both are routinely ignored. A one page release naming the poem, the event, the platform, the retention period and the route to withdraw covers it, and withdrawal has to be real: a clip that comes down within a week of being asked about is the difference between a workshop young people trust and one they do not.
Two practical footnotes. Recorded music played to an audience is a public performance and normally needs a licence, which most schools and venues already hold through PPL PRS, so check rather than assume before building an interval playlist. And a poem posted publicly counts as published, which can affect entry to some competitions later.
Costume, persona and the question of unmasking
Costume and persona are the two things a nervous young poet actually controls, and the idea that a performance unmasks the artist is only half true. Performing does reveal something, because poetry said aloud carries a voice, a body and a set of choices. It does not follow that a poet owes an audience their private life, and a workshop that rewards confession will get confession from young people who cannot yet judge how they will feel about it in five years.
Say plainly that a persona is legitimate, that changing names and details is legitimate, that a poem about a bus stop, a grandmother's kitchen in London or a language nobody at school speaks is worth as much as a poem about a diagnosis, and that any poem can be withdrawn the afternoon before with no explanation given. Costume follows the same logic: a coat that comes off at the turn of the poem is doing a job, and a costume that carries the evening instead of the words has replaced it. The route from Starting from a prompt through to How to write a poem exists to make an honest poem possible without making exposure the price of entry, and the showcase is where that promise is kept or broken in front of everybody.