Introducing Heather
aka Rotary Poet
Heather Hermant is a Toronto poet and performer who works across disciplines, including poetry, sound, video, installation, physical theatre and new media. Her work has taken her from Canada to Hungary to Bosnia to Mexico to Panama to China to the Internet. Heather often works in collaboration with artists and non-artists, from programmers to dancers to teachers. She was a finalist in CBC Radio's National Poetry Face-Off and the Canadian Spoken Wordlympics in 2004, and she performed at the launch of CBC Radio's groundbreaking spoken word series WordBeat. She has written for theatre, directing acclaimed British actress Susannah York reading her libretto for the 2003 Budapest International Spring Festival headlining dance theatre production STIGMA, which brought together ten dancers from five countries and four languages for a meditation on conflict at the outset of the war on Iraq. Heather's poetry appears in print and in audio in Short Fuse: A Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry (Eds. Swift and Norton, Rattapallax, New York, 2001), and in journals, on CD, in videopoem, chapbook and translation. Her videopoem between within, a site-specific collaboration with video artist Gergely Benyi and actress/dancer Eva Magyar, was screened at Pacific Cinematheque Vancouver's Visible Verse. In Budapest, Heather founded and curated the LiveBudaPPPest! Poetry&Performance Picnic, bringing cross-disciplinary poets from Australia, Hungary, Serbia, U.S, Canada, Barbados and UK together on a converted communist era cargo ship on the Danube. Heather is at work on ribcage: this wide passage, a solo video installation performance and site-specific intervention series, based on a cross-dressing/trasngressing historical figure from the 1700s. In Shanghai, China, in 2007, Heather co-curated with Melina Young Summer in Shanghai, a programme of Canadian independent queer video. There she co-produced Need a ride?, a locally made short now carried by VTape, for Shanghai's, and possibly China's, first Pride Week. Heather teaches Community Arts at York University and is an Ontario Arts Council Artist in Education, teaching Canadian History through performed poetry.
Throughout the years, Heather has been especially honoured to have been an apprentice to California-based storytelling elder Orunamamu.