Encyclopedia Insannica

The Encyclopedia Show closed out its second season the way any typical reading series would: a three-hour show featuring a juggler, performing animals, two different videos and a game of “Whose Mime Is It Anyway?” in which a mime acted out scenes from mime-punned movies (like Eternal Sunmime of the Spotless Mime). Typical, right? Performing animals? No?

Sprung from the heads of Chicago poets Robbie Q. Telfer and Shanny Jean Maney, in just two short years the Encyclopedia Show has become the city’s most talked-about reading series, largely by only sort of being a reading series. The premise: Each month, Telfer and Maney pick a topic (say, Wyoming), and then gather a number of writers to craft five-minute pieces about some aspect of the topic. Those pieces (be they stories, comedy sketches or poems) are then performed on the first Wednesday of each month. But on top of that, you have Telfer and Maney serving as the encyclopedia’s editor characters, a band usually plays, several members of the Chicago performance poetry scene play recurring characters, and members of the highly fictional Institute of Human Knowledge and Hygiene harass participants for mixing up their facts.

Telfer, a veteran of the city’s poetry slam shows, says he wanted to create a different show, outside the realm of competition.

“It’s exhausting to perform in a competition and be heckled by the audience and judged by other poets to maybe win $10,” says Telfer. “It’s a really finite goal. The slam is just this tiny speck in what you can do in spoken word, but for some reason it’s dominated the genre in terms of what you can do.”

What you can do, it turns out, is a lot. By integrating elements of sketch comedy—numerous recurring characters and comic bits—and a never-say-no curatorial philosophy (the first show had a bearcat on stage while a poem was read offstage), the Encyclopedia Show has become the most artful sideshow in the city.

But another element makes the show maybe even more unique: Telfer and Maney ensure that at least two of each evening’s performers come from Chicago schools. The oldest performer has been in his seventies, while the youngest was 15.

“In the performing world, there’s definitely a sense of ageism,” says Telfer. “People seem to think you’re only interesting if you’re in your thirties. And we want to ensure the future of the community. It does so much for a young artist’s confidence and sense of belonging to perform in a show next to [former National Poetry Slam champ] Roger Bonair-Agard.”

Telfer and Maney hold rehearsals before each show, so writers can receive coaching on their pieces. The formula is certainly working: The show is now happening regularly in four cities, and it’s been performed as one-offs in others. And Telfer and Maney have now slid under the umbrella of slam creator Marc Smith’s Chicago SlamWorks, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing performance poetry. Soon, a series of chapbooks publishing the best encyclopedia entries from the various shows will be on hand.

Telfer plans to continue to expand the Chicago show, with new characters in the works for next season.

“Our brains and what we want to do is always bigger than what time allows,” he says. “This has the potential to become our jobs in ten years, but for now we can’t do more shows. So until we get a big grant, we’re just going to have to test people’s patience once a month.”

The Encyclopedia Show happens the first Wednesday of every month at the Vittum Theatre.

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