Jessica Care Moore may have the shortest time slot on the entire Movement schedule, but she isn’t taking her time at the festival lightly.
The Detroit poet — Detroit’s Poet Laureate, as a matter of fact — is slotted for five minutes at the festival on Saturday and five minutes on Monday, the opening and closing days of this weekend’s techno music celebration at Hart Plaza.
Sara Landy, Carl Cox, Dom Dolla are headlining the three-day fest, which marks the event’s 20th anniversary. (The Memorial Day techno fest had existed in several different incarnations from its 2000 launch through 2005.)
Moore — who will also be a part of Sunday’s Detroit Diaspora Day Fest at the Norwood in Midtown — isn’t hitting the Movement stage alone. She’s bringing dancers, visuals and collaborators to make the most of her time and to leave an impression on the crowd, as she acts as a lead-in for Carl Craig on both nights.
“If I’m gonna do it, if I’m gonna have this five minutes to bring on Carl Craig, I’m gonna destroy,” Moore says. “It’s going to be the most extraordinary five minutes ever!”
Moore’s performances at the festival are a long time coming, and are rooted in her lifelong appreciation of dance music.
She’s currently working on “The House That Poems Built,” an album of poetry rooted in dance music, featuring collaborations with Nick Speed, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale and more. The set is due out this summer.
“I have been in love with techno and house music my entire life,” says Moore, 54, who used to go to parties to see Underground Resistance when she was 17 years old, she says.
A friendship formed with UR’s Mike Banks helped frame her time in Detroit and grounded her, she says, and she’s proud to have seen the music created in Detroit transcend global culture.
Moore has attended the electronic music festival many times over the years, but this weekend will mark her first performances at Movement.
They came about in part after she took the stage at last year’s Detroit Jazz Festival alongside Jeff Mills, and she sent a clip of the performance to Movement’s programmers. It was her not-so-subtle way of putting a bug in their ear about giving her a crack at the stage.
They bit, and now she’s ready.
When her name was included in the festival lineup, “people thought I was DJing,” she says. “I’m like, ‘hell no. I’m not doing a DJ set.’ But that’s because when people think of poetry, they don’t always think of it with music. Which is unfortunate, because poets and music have been doing the thing for a long time.”
But if it catches people off guard, all the better, she says.
“As a poet, I’m always looking for the places where they don’t expect me,” Moore says.
On Saturday, More will be performing with Hotwaxx, and on Monday she’ll be performing alongside Speed; she and Speed have a collaboration, “Not For Sale,” which will be available, for sale, in limited quantities on 7″ vinyl at the fest.
Monday’s performance will involve a poem that will pay homage to the city’s techno greats, which Moore says she’ll sit down and pen over the weekend.
Is she nervous? Nah. Moore says this is a “sweet spot” for her, and she’s excited to share her work with the people and the city that gave birth to techno music.
“I haven’t been this excited about doing some poetry for some time,” says Moore. “I’ll show them what’s possible and do what I do, and then get off the stage.”
agraham@detroitnews.com
Movement
featuring Sara Landy, Carl Cox, Dom Dolla, Richie Hawtin, Maceo Plex, Danny Brown and more
Saturday-Monday
Hart Plaza, Detroit
Tickets $398.43 for 3-day GA pass, $227.45 for daily GA, $299.99 for daily VIP
movementfestival.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Jessica Care Moore to make the most of her time at Movement
Reporting by Adam Graham, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
