Devin Murphy is a performance poet and theatre artist living and working in Los Angeles. He is currently exploring how prosody, or the way communication is informed by tone, rhythm, and stress, creates the ephemeral art of live performance.

Performance + Prosody is about patterns in performance that form a conversation between the audience, the performer, and the material. Meant to be observed in real time, live performance hinges on the delivery, where timing is everything. Whether it comes to poetry, storytelling, comedy, or music there exist patterns of information that create the structure and arc of the piece, such as context, expectations, and punchline. Informing these patterns is the prosody, the showing and sharing of intangibles such as pauses and stress, that triggers empathy and connection in the space. It is hard to film live performance and have it resonate equally upon further review because of this ephemeral connection, this driving reciprocity.

Focusing on the beats and breaths that live between the words, Performance + Prosody explores the evolving nature of live performance, weaving different artistic media into an experience framed by delivery.

For Journey Through the Senses, Devin will be exploring the relationship between performance and prosody through a variety of media including poetry, music, digital video, storytelling, and theatre. Consider Performance + Prosody a Kaprow-style Happening that focuses as equally on the methods through which information is conveyed as it does the information itself.