Matthew Byrne | Writer, Founder, Digital Marketer

The First Stop

MEGACITY’s first port of call was Chengdu — home of pandas, land of abundance. Four events across November and December 2019 explored what it means to live in a city of 14 million people: the connections and isolations, the energy in the alleys beneath the glass-and-concrete surface.

Friday 22nd November — Unlock Your Voice and Voices Unlocked

The series opened with two free events at Tongzilin International Community Center. Unlock Your Voice was a poetry performance workshop for ten participants, facilitated by Yu Wenwen — winner of Spittoon Chengdu Poetry Slam 1.0 — and Annie Leonard, with other Spittoon veterans providing mentoring on writing and performance. The workshop was bilingual, welcoming poetry in English or Chinese.

Voices Unlocked followed immediately after — an open mic exclusively for poets who had never taken the Spittoon stage before. Sign-ups on the night. No experience required.

Saturday 23rd November — Under the Skin of the City

Deep Alley hosted two events on the Saturday. In the afternoon, Intertwining Threads was a free multimedia exhibition and live improvisation performance drawing on Chengdu’s history as Jincheng — the city of silk brocade. Poets, painters, musicians on electronic and traditional instruments, performance artists, graffiti artists, rappers, and dancers created work in response to the megacity theme and to each other.

In the evening, an Untitled Music Video screening and panel discussion brought together contemporary and traditional Chinese poetry, electronic beats, traditional instruments, and scenes of the city — a response to the question of whether Chengdu had become the impersonal urban world of dystopian fiction, or whether connection was still possible beneath the surface.

Monday 25th November — Love, Death and Robots and Poetry.exe

Harry’s Wizard Café hosted two showcases on the Monday. Love, Death and Robots brought eight prose writers — veterans of Spittoon reading nights — to explore the megacity theme across a variety of genres. Poetry.exe followed with twelve poets presenting original verses inspired by the same theme. Both events included a free zine collecting the writers’ original works.

Friday 13th December — Intercity Poetry Slam

The final Chengdu MEGACITY event was the Intercity Poetry Slam at 13 Lounge — connecting live via livestream with Spittoon’s founding city Beijing. Slam poets from both cities competed head to head, with the top three performers chosen by audience vote. The winner’s poetry would be featured on the Spittoon platform.

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Originally published November 2019 on the Spittoon WeChat channel.

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