In practically any art, there’s arguably no element more important than a strong, compelling voice.
Sometimes, that’s about finding your own unique forms of creativity and expression. Sometimes it’s about identifying the most intriguing and important stories around you and working to spotlight them. And sometimes it can even be about learning to use your literal voice for entertainment.
In the case of award-winning OKC performance artist, creative director, and acclaimed voiceover actress Nicole Poole, it’s actually all three.
As the founder and director of Oklahoma’s SPARK! Creative Lab - a multi-disciplinary, definition-defying performance art collective of dancers, musicians, storytellers, and more – Poole has established herself as one of the state’s most engaging and encouragingly uninhibited artistic minds.
But she says that’s a part of herself that she only discovered once she began to embrace those creative instincts.
Nicole Poole: I’ve always been a bit shy. It doesn't seem like it, but I am. This is a very well honed mask for the public, and I was able to disappear into characters and feel the energy of the audience and ride that wave. And it was the best feeling ever.
And suddenly, I'm in a place where the more I'm vulnerable the more people respond. And that was such a gift.
Brett Fieldcamp: That’s the gift that helped to launch Poole’s career in live theater, visual arts, audio books and voiceover, refined first through a childhood love of art and stories and then through a chance entrance into OU’s drama program.
But after college, her insatiable new love for performance and storytelling – and her desire for more direct and unfettered forms of creative expression – eventually called her to New York City.
Nicole Poole: I moved, and I learned to make my way there, and I started doing voiceovers and commercials.
And in the meantime, I was doing downtown experimental theater and I got involved with soundpainting and the Walter Thompson Orchestra.
Brett Fieldcamp: Developed by musical experimentalist Walter Thompson, Soundpainting is a kind of universal artistic sign language that allows for the real-time, improvisational composing of music, theatre, dance, and performance of all types in the moment.
Poole became enamored with the artform and its ability to create powerful and impulsively vulnerable art and performance from pure spontaneity, and she began dedicating her life to spreading and demonstrating the compositional language and advocating for it around the world.
Nicole Poole: That’s how I started, and now, 25 years later, I have been touring Europe and performing with orchestras all over the place in soundpainting and directing and talking to people about how to add more theatricality and multi-disciplinary work to their musical ensembles.
So it's become my creative home.
Brett Fieldcamp: But eventually, family obligations led Poole to bring her creative home back to her physical home of Oklahoma, and with pandemic era uncertainties and growing political anxieties continuing to build, she decided to employ that spontaneity and all-encompassing artistic energy to hopefully bring people back together and to begin rebuilding a performance art community in Oklahoma City.
Nicole Poole: The only thing I knew was that somehow, maybe the art that I made could help people feel a sense of community and social cohesion in a increasingly fractured society.
The other thing I knew was that performing artists in particular were really suffering, so I paid people out of my own pocket to come together and learn soundpainting. And I thought “okay, well, can we perform outdoors in public spaces that are easily accessible?”
So we opened at the Paramount parking lot, and then we went on to Scissortail Park for the kids at Pivot, and we had red jumpsuits on, and people were like “I have no idea what this is, but I gotta be involved.”
Brett Fieldcamp: SPARK’s projects have been derived most heavily through simply listening to real-life stories of friends and members and developing the emotions and ineffable experiences within them, such as “Yield,” which examines the endless ways that we connect to the Oklahoman land, or “Ditty Bops: The Art of Listening,” a groundbreaking multi-disciplinary exploration of a military veteran’s true story built from the rhythms of Morse Code.
For Poole, it all comes back to finding her voice and to lifting up the voices of others.
Whether narrating an audiobook or composing a complex, experimental live performance on the fly, her priority remains the story.
Nicole Poole: Artists are our storytellers. Listening to people is pretty cool. Listening to veterans is super cool.
We need community right now, and if we can model a community that's taking care of itself and invite people in, why wouldn't we?
I create because I have to. I have to. If I want to remain on this earth, I gotta create.
Brett Fieldcamp: Next month, SPARK! is set to represent Oklahoma City before the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington DC, before bringing a newly expanded run of “Ditty Bops” to the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in OKC.
For more, visit sparklahoma.org and @sparklahoma on Instagram, and for more of Poole’s artworks, projects, and performances, visit nicolepoole.com.
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