When George Watsky Came to Second Life™

by Josue Habana | October 1, 2009 | No comments

George Watsky is a 23 year old slam poet and environmental activist with a host of impressive accolades on his resume. He appeared in the Youth Speaks Grand Slam Poetry final several years running and performed his poetry to a record breaking crowd for a poetry event of 3000+. In 2006, he won that very competition, as well as bagging himself the Brave New Voices title too. In 2007, he made an appearance on HBO to perform on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and more recently appeared on the Fox Network to perform at the NCAAP Image Awards. In addition to that, he has performed his poetry on stage directly before a certain Bill Clinton took that very stage and has been flown to Australia just to perform a poem about global warming. And this is just the tip of the iceberg with a number of play writing honours to his name as well.

A fan of Watsky’s work since I saw him on HBO back in 2007, I have been keen to see him perform live for some time now. Living in the UK, this is not exactly as convenient for me as it would be if I was located on the other side of the Atlantic.

When my partner and I were discussing the possibilities for our venue, Hemingways, slam poetry was definitely something we wanted to feature heavily there. Poetry events in Second Life are not an unusual occurrence at all and many people thoroughly enjoy them. Second Life’s potential as a platform for the creative arts has never been in doubt for me. I felt I wanted to take this to another level as well and I made a decision to go about contacting real life artists and performers with a view to bringing them into world to perform. This, I thought, would probably not be as easy as I would like. For anyone who has never played Second Life, there is a good chance that, thanks to tabloid stories about Mothers neglecting children and people divorcing spouses over Second Life, they think of Second Life as ‘that weird game the hermits play.’ And my challenge in contacting people to come into Second Life to perform was, in one email, to convince them that Second Life is a valid performance platform.

High on my agenda was George Watsky. I send an unsolicited email through his website. I was not optimistic about hearing back. But two days later, George was back in touch asking for more information. I’ll cut two week’s worth of emails down to an article friendly summary and tell you that two weeks after my initial contact, he performed in world at Hemingways.

The event was incredible, not just by Second Life standards, but by any. A busy Hemingways saw George perform a number of poems including some favourites as requested by the audience. He also took part in a Q&A session afterwards and everyone in attendance agreed that he had proven himself to be a hit. Many of the girls in the crowd who were familiar with his work already sat on pillows in front of the stage and proclaimed themselves George’s ‘literary groupies,’ as we were all thoroughly glued to his performance. I have never seen an event in Second Life in which the audience engaged so much with the performer.

For the aspiring poets in the audience, this was an inspiring event to attend. George himself commented that, although he was prepared for the fact that there would be no vocal response, he thoroughly enjoyed the fact that, unlike at a real life gig, people can type out a response to a specific line as he is reading. This type of interaction cannot be replicated anywhere else. Nor can the international potential. Goerge performed from Boston to a group from Europe, all over the US and Canada from the comfort of his room in Boston.

Two days later and Hemingways played host to Skylar Smythe’s prose workshop, with Second Life writers taking to the stage to read their work. Where else but Second Life can anyone perform on a stage that was, but 48 hours previously, occupied by someone of George Watsky’s calibre?

Machinima from the event can be found here: http://avatarwrites.com/hemingways/2009/09/george-watsky-in-second-life/