Regie Cabico in Local IQ

Coming up next week at ARTS Lab (Friday, 9/12 at 10 PM), we're really excited about featured performer Regie Cabico.

The Local IQ has more:
Arthur Miller, Stephen King, Amy Tan and…Regie Cabico?
BY HAKIM BELLAMY

Who is Regie Cabico other than a featured performer at STIR, the poetry festival that is descending upon the Duke City on September 12-14? Well, in the span of a half-hour interview with Local iQ, Cabico touched on items as serious as the award he received for conducting poetry workshops at Bellevue Hospital to items as humorous as his sketch comedy productions with creative partner, Aileen Cho. (See The Gene Pool, Queer Shoulder to the Wheel, U-Hauls, Bridesmaids & Backwards Mountain and Crouching Cabico, Hidden Cho.)

The three-time National Poetry Slam finalist has also received the New York Innovative Theater Award for Best Performance Art Production (2006) and will be staging his one man show in Albuquerque on September 12 at 10p in the UNM Arts Technology Lab, as part of STIR: A Festival of Words. As the interview began, I was curious as to when an aristocratic literary publication like Poets & Writers began recognizing great achievements in performance art?

"I was shocked because I don’t have a book and, like, Arthur Miller, Stephen King and Amy Tan got this award," Cabico said. "The award is about serving writers and it’s for writers who have helped other writers. So my work ... working at Bellevue Hospital is what they were honoring, and I feel that a lot of spoken word poets (and) slam poets are community-oriented. I mean you have to be community oriented if you’re doing slam because you love the word. I’m sure not everyone feels this way but to me it is a democratic community, the art of slam.

"So for me, I like to teach it because there are very few poets who could teach performance as well as writing," Cabico continued. "I can do both and I understand both. Giving that gift — to teach ... at Bellevue — was historical and groundbreaking because psychiatrists don’t know about slam, they know painting. But painting is not as dangerous … It was just nice to be this slam poet, among other things, but also just being very young and not being Amy Tan, probably the opposite of Amy Tan, so it was great."
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For more information, visit Harwood Art Center online. See the entire STIR schedule, get a festival pass and see some of the other poets from across the United States and Canada, including New Mexico’s own Joy Harjo.

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