spoken word

I’ll be here all week (and next)

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Last night was the opening night of Not Much To Tell You at The Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts. It was a wonderful start to the season with a really great crowd and a good feeling in the room. I’m looking forward to doing it all again tonight, and then Friday, and then Saturday, and then Wednesday-to-Saturday next week! Tickets are still available from metroarts.com.au, or you can buy at the door tonight.

Here is a picture of my super hi-tech set:

http://instagram.com/p/sMlvHkLUuL/?modal=true

I also had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sally Browne for yesterday’s Courier Mail:

‘Scuse me while I go laminate my copy. #sorrynotsorry

Not Much To Tell You is a part of the program for the most poetic weekend in Brisbane’s calendar – the Queensland Poetry Festival! QPF has its opening night tomorrow at the Judith Wright Centre, to usher in the greatest poetry festival in the southern hemisphere! LET’S HEAR IT FOR POETRY.

I’ll be giving my top picks for QPF on Metro Arts’ Instagram, so keep an eye out for that. Or you could just pick up a QPF program and throw a dart at literally any part of it, and I guarantee it will be good.

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Something to tell you

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I’m happy to say that I’ll be presenting a two-week season of Not Much To Tell You at Brisbane’s Metro Arts!

It is wonderful to be presenting the performance at the very home where it was nurtured and developed. I was selected for Metro Arts’ Creative Development program during their July-December block last year, and they were warmly supportive and critically helpful in developing my first solo show. Not Much To Tell You had its first season in Perth earlier this year, co-presented by Fringe World and The Blue Room Theatre. Since then, some people have been asking “Are we ever going to see it in Brisbane?” Yep! This one’s for you, Brisbabes.

This show was developed with financial support from the awesome people who contributed to my Pozible campaign last year. I want to thank you all again: Ashley, Mark Cottman-Fields, Rae White, Amy Fletcher, David Vincent Smith, Kate Zahnleiter, Sam Vaughn, Larry Cox, Alexis Malinkowski, Sandy Torode, Tom Hogan, and many more anonymous supporters.

It was nice of Metro Arts to have me back even though this is what I do when they leave me alone in their performance space:

Not Much To Tell You opens on 27 August and runs through the Queensland Poetry Festival, until 6 September. Tickets go on sale soon – more info at the Metro Arts website.

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Snaps from the Kaleidoscope Tightrope

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I’ve just come from a bloody awesome night of poetry, music and spoken word, and like a total nerd I decided to immediately blog about it. I was lucky enough to be one of the artists performing at the thing – called the Kaleidoscope Tightrope (which is fiendishly hard to spell) – but I also took a few snaps during the rest of the show. Here they are.

Props to Scott Sneddon aka Darkwing Dubs aka Scotty aka What actually is your name now? for organising such a fun and varied night of performance. Highlights included Matt Hsu jamming on his trumpet from atop a table, Lucy Fox and Laura Trenery showing us their mad tatts, and James Halloran singing a vaudeville opera.

Thanks to Metro Arts for the venue and Brisbane Festival for being awesome. If you haven’t been to any Brisbane Festival events yet, it’s on until the 28th September. Get involved! Metro Arts will be hosting another poetry night next Wednesday, as part of their Basement Late Night series, curated by another differently excellent local poet. Seriously there is so much to do in this city. I can’t keep up.

Sleep time. Good night.

PS. I’ve only just started using a DSLR (embarrassingly, seeing I work at a camera shop), and this was my first foray into low-light shooting. So, if any photographers out there have any tips/comments on how I went, my comment section is open!

Newsletter! September is for storytelling

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I have started a newsletter! I will be emailing it out about once a month. It’s a nice, tidy summary of creative projects and events I’m involved in, which other people may enjoy also. This idea sprang from the Big Hearted Business morning tea I attended a couple of weeks ago, where Clare Bowditch gave her best advice for being a creative type. (It was an amazing day; Clare asked us all to write down our career goals, then sang to us while we were writing. It has spoiled me – now I can’t write lists without an ARIA-winning singer/songwriter playing live for me.)

Anyway, quite often people approach me at events and ask me when the next storytelling night is, or how they can find out about live poetry in Brisbane. I feel like I have so many answers to those questions that I need to find a more expedient way of letting people know. Thus, newsletter!

Here is the link to view the September edition: http://eepurl.com/D2P2D
You can find out about storytelling workshops, basement poetry, and some festival shows where I’ll be sayin’ words. There’s also a subscribe button on the top left-hand corner of the newsletter, if you’d like to receive the emails.

PS. Hope to see y’all at Yarn: Man vs Wild on Wednesday! Yarn: Man vs Wild

 

Mid-week is the new weekend – tell your friends

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Hey internet peeps,

So, my posts have been a bit sporadic lately. I think that’s mainly because I had set myself the task of posting every weekend, and weekends have become my busiest time of the week. (Such is the life on a non-nine-to-fiver! Your “weekend” is whenever you get a couple days off.) SO, I will try to post mid-week from now on, and keep this blog dynamic. Dynamic. That’s a good word. It’s my favourite term to invoke when someone corrects my grammar. “LANGUAGE IS DYNAMIC!!” I wasn’t wrong – I just wasn’t your kind of right. Wink.

My weekends are happily busy with the best kind of things – projects! Gigs! People! Working, meeting, and talking. I co-host a radio show every Sunday lunchtime (Megaherzzz on 4ZZZ), so I spend a bit of Saturday preparing interview questions and discussion topics and practising my “radio voice”. (Insider fact: It’s my normal voice. There’s a reason I didn’t get into NIDA.) There are also usually a few music/arts gigs to attend, which are mega-fun.   poetsdressedas_poster

I am going to be in one of these gigs this weekend – a really cool event put together by ubiquitous Brisbane poet, Darkwing Dubs. (Darkwing actually just won the Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup yesterday, so if you see that guy around, BUY HIM A DRINK.) He is curating a two-part series of performances that centre around gender in art and society. The first part in the series is called ‘Poets Dressed As … Women!‘ and all of the performers are – you guessed it – women! I be one of those such lady women. Also performing are Lucy Fox, Merlynn Tong, and Sydney’s Candy Royalle. I’m excited for this event as it promises to be entertaining and thought-provoking. I’ve been writing new material, and planning some tricks to put up my sleeve (or to tuck into my bra, if I’m wearing a sleeveless top).

The male part (teehee) of the series will be held the weekend after, and I look forward to that event also! It features a couple of poets I haven’t seen before, and a couple I’m keen to see again – Simon Kindt, Robin “Archie” Archbold, Martin Ingle, and self-confessed poetic lunatic Randall Stephens. I did a couple of poetry gigs with Randall years ago in Perth and Fremantle, and I tell you this guy is high energy. Should be another entertaining evening.

LONG LIVE POETRY!

Voiceworks #87 Launch: WA knows how to play

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Last night we launched Voiceworks #87 PLAY in Western Australia, and holy moly it was awesome.

Comedian Libby Klysz was our host for the launch, a perfect host for the PLAY issue as she joked around with the audience, played up performers’ introductions, and promised everyone “games … with prizes!”

First cab off the rank was sweet singer-songwriter Caroline J Dale, whose quirky lyrics and gorgeous voice never fail to win over an audience.

Next we had a poem by emerging artist Alex Wolman, who led us on a dark journey through relationships and suicide. Sj Finch came in with the lighter side; the dotdotdash editor and Voiceworks contributor performed a clever and entertaining piece that had the crowd chuckling.

Everyone was pretty engrossed by the performances, but in between-times they had a chance to wander around: looking at the Perth Zine Collective‘s amazing array of hand-made zines; buying copies of the latest Voiceworks issues; and admiring artwork by Western Australian artists Sam Pash and Mel Pearce, whose works have been respectively published in Voiceworks ‘V’ and ‘Play’.

Zinester and Voiceworks contributor Anna Dunnill opened the second bracket of performances with a reading of an intelligently written piece. She was followed up by hip hop poet David Vincent Smith (dvs) who slammed us with a barrage of clever wordplay. Holy shit that guy can poem. dvs was supported by his friend DJ Silence, who mixed sound effects and hip hop beats behind dvs’s poems, adding yet another dimension to the words.

Last, but certainly not least, we were blessed with a performance by the beautiful ‘Ofa Benness. Best known around Perth for fronting her band Odette Mercy & The Soul Atomics, last night ‘Ofa had ditched the band and played a solo set. Performing a mix of singing and spoken word, between songs she chatted with the audience, relating the theme ‘Play’ back to her life and her music. Then ‘Ofa brought the whole venue to a standstill with her breathtaking vocals and wryly beautiful lyrics. I totally have a girl-crush on her.

We wrapped up the night with a pretty raucous game of Heads and Tails, and two happy and highly competitive audience members went home with book prizes kindly donated by Express Media.

Many, many thanks to Mojo’s Bar for being such a welcoming venue, to Libby Klysz for being an entertaining host, and to all the performers for kicking ass. I can’t wait for the next launch.

 

I’ve uploaded another video from my Voicebox gig back in July. It’s a short hip hop-style poem I wrote called ‘Think About What You’re Saying’, decrying the misuse of language. At the beginning of the vid, I’m having a little chat with the audience. They were great that night; I even had a couple of hecklers. I was telling the crowd that I’ve been writing poetry for 20 years, and some wag called out “How old are you?” Whoever that was, thank you for participating in the banter. I very much enjoyed it.

 

 

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