Live Poetry Jukebox
My Heart, My Heart
About
My Heart, My Heart
Live Poetry Jukebox
My Heart, My Heart: Live Poetry Jukebox is an interactive performance installation that presents an exciting new concept of engaging people with poetry through visual art and performance. It works like a music jukebox (only with poetry!) and consists of a ‘library’ of jars, containing miniature artworks, each expressing a feeling or idea connected to a poem. Audiences are invited to look at the jars, choose one they feel particularly drawn to and listen to a live performance of their poem.
The jars are displayed on illuminated shelves. These are usually set up in our beautiful sky-and-cloud tent, but can also be adapted to small, intimate indoor spaces, such as lifts, beach huts, broom cupboards, or any other small spaces or hidden corners.
The poems are about human experience, about the things we all live through - expressed in the writer’s words and the artist’s and performer’s interpretation of these words. They include poems from the late 19th century to the present day, with a stronger focus on the 20th and 21st century.
Audiences engage with the installation one-to-one or in small groups of two to four - the whole experience takes about five minutes. The installation offers moments of beauty, calm, contemplation, respite, reflection, reassurance and fun.
The installation is suitable for children (5+) and offers wheelchair access, captions and audio description.
It all started with Adie wanting to create a Jukebox, only with poetry.....
She started gathering poems and got together with Trui, who came on board as designer. Early versions (in the lift of Cambridge Junction) simply used a written menu of authors’ names and poem title. (Yes, and Adie did get stuck in the lift!) Then Trui wanted to introduce a visual element into the process of choice and came up with the idea of the jars, which were inspired by 18th-century Cabinets of Curiosities. They trialled the idea at DARE festival at Shoreditch Town Hall and, encouraged by audience feedback, decided to develop it further to create My Heart, My Heart: Live Poetry Jukebox.
“A wonderful experience! Touched me deeply!"
Audience feedback (Cambridge Junction, 2018)
CREATIVE TEAM
Created by Adie Mueller & Trui Malten
Performance Adie Mueller
Design Trui Malten
Artist Mentoring Peader Kirk & Caroline Wright
Project Management Maeve O’Neill (Rua Arts)
Funded with support from Arts Council England National Lottery Grants
Supported by The Place, Bedford, Cambridge Junction, Apples and Snakes
The Artists
is an actress and theatre maker interested in exploring the relationship between text and performance and the performer and the audience. Adie trained in the Suzuki Actors’ Training method with Ozfrank and in Viewpoints with Anne Bogart and the SITI company. She created Sandman, a contemporary adaptation of ETA Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sandman’ for a solo performer, which she toured from 2015 to 2018. Adie works as part-time lecturer in Theatre at Middlesex University under her ‘real’ name Antje Diedrich.
is an international set and lighting designer living in Cambridge, UK. She designed the lights for more than 140 productions of newly devised plays, classics, opera, musicals and dance. Her designs aim to offer her collaborators an optimised playground to explore and present the work. Recent credits include: Lighting design for Peter Grimes (Palau de les Arts, Valencia); Beauty and the Beast, with the New International Encounter (dir. Alex Byrne, New Victory Theatre, NYC and the Cube, Corby); operas L'Elisir d’Amore, Savitri and Vanessa (dir. Judith Lebiez, Cambridge); Breath Control by Caroline Wright ( dir. Emma Bernard).