Chill Pill returns to Soho Theatre after our UK and Ireland festival tour! We have one of the most prominent and important names in Spoken Word, Nigerian-born weaver of words, Inua Ellams.
Having repeatedly sold out The National Theatre with his one man shows, his first book 'Thirteen Negro Tales' is a top selling poetry collection and he's the curator of The Midnight Run. He is also a graphic designer (who happens to have created our pill in an ice cube logo).
Nuala Honan
Be prepared to be charmed by the grace of Australian-born, Nuala Honan. She's a singer-song writer and toured as Folly with poet Sally Jenkinson. You know Chill Pill bring the most poetic of musicians! Nuala will satisfy all you wonderful word appreciators! she has appeared on BBC Introducing and music festivals all over the country! You'll love her!
and of course, us, the Chill Pill Poets will be in full swing! (Mista Gee, Raymond Antrobus, Deanna Rodger, Simon Mole and Adam Kammerling)
Last month I was one of the artists that helped lead Inua Ellam's Midnight Run, below is some of what we got up to in our walk around Hackney. Alex Mills and a regular collaborator of mine, Alex Patten (from Autistic Pieces) features.
Yep, here's some London based poets checking out Inua Ellam's new show 'Black T Shirt Collection' at The National Theatre. If you liked 13th Tale & Untitled (Inua's first two shows) you'll get with this. GO SEE IT!
Hey Hey HEY! Welcome to the 3nd MNrun Newsletter. I hope you are well. It looks like the weather will hold out, so on possibly the last weekend of summer, the MNrun will be on! {phaze05.com/themidnightrun} 3 News Items // WHERE TO MEET // WHAT TO BRING // THE ARTISTS // WHERE TO MEET // 3rd - 4th Sept
FIRSTLY, IF YOU INTEND TO COME TO THE RUN, PLEASE SEND ME AN EMAIL, IMMEDIATELY, I NEED TO KNOW NUMBERS. THANKS. Now, after much hushed wondering, we have a location. Please gather at the main entrance of The Tate Britain (Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG) at 5.45pm this Saturday, because at 6pm sharp, we will move! // Closest Stations: Pimlico & Vauxhall // Buses: 2, 36, 85, 436, 77 - & lots more. WHAT TO BRING //
1) *A healthy sense of fun. 2) A pen and a notebook.
3) One ripe Banana. 4) Roughly £20 pounds for food etc.
5) Please wear comfortable shoes; we will be walking lots.
6) Please come dressed for the weather. // THE ARTISTS //
To each Midnight Run, 5 artists are invited. Their task is to entertain within the MNrun, and also to capture instance of the run in their individual art forms. Here they are:
PHOTOGRAPHER: Raymond Antrobus is a spoken word artist, poet, writer and a photographer. He is an accomplished young one, has performed alongside authors and poets such as Margret Atwood, Michael Horovitz, Lemm Sissay and Polarbear. Raymond’s photography has featured in The Big Issue, The Evening Standard and showcased online by the world famous Southbank Centre.
POETRY & SPOKEN WORD: Bridget Minnamore & Rubix. Rubix is a collective of 15 young London-based spoken word artists who began life as the Roundhouse Poetry Collective. After taking their first show ‘The Greatest Poet That Ever Lived’ to the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2010, Rubix became an associate company with the Roundhouse. Following a scratch performance of their second show ‘House Party’ at the Roundhouse studios, Rubix are currently developing the material for a wider audience. They have performed at the BAC, Bang Said the Gun, Whitechapel Gallery, Rich Mix, Poejazzi, Shoreditch Festival, Shunt, Big Chill and Camp Bestival.
GUERILLA GARDENER: Andre Haining spends most of his day organising events and designing websites for large corporate clients. He also runs his not-for-profit organisation EFORESTS (www.eforests.co.uk) which helps create community woodlands around the UK and runs urban food-growing projects in London. A keen amateur gardener, he started guerrilla gardening in 2006 after seeing Richard Reynolds (guerrillagardening.org) on the TV one day. Since then he has worked with Richard and other guerrilla gardeners, at numerous locations around London, turning grubby patches of neglected land into beautiful urban spaces. He also helped build the Recycled Garden (recycledgarden.net) at the Hampton Court Flower Show in 2008
MUSIC: Tj Owusu, A Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist brought up on a healthy diet of eclecticism. He plays the weissenborn, a Hawaiian instrument designed by a German luthier. Picking up the instrument in his early teens, he was captured by the weissenborn's vocal warmth and ability to paint audible pictures. His object is to create a soup for all musical buds through instrumentation.
FILM: Estabrak is a MA graduate of film and media production from a visual arts background. She began as part of ‘Imagine Art’, a world wide arts project hosted by Guardian Unlimited and has produced stunning short films and installations showcased at the TATE Britain and The Showroom Cinema, Sheffield. Her work has had press coverage in Italy's 'Amica', Middle Easts 'Bidoun' and UK's 'Diva' magazines to name a few. She hopes to travel the world challenging the nature of perception through visual story telling.
That’s it!! Remember to sleep like a whale on Friday night. Roll outta bed late in afternoon on Saturday, for when the eve comes, we MNRun!
Fellow member of Poem Inbetween People - Inua Ellams whom is also one of the many fantastic poets featuring on my new i-tunes podcast with William Stopha - Headjob.
“I held my 13 Negro tales And made a backbone Swapped it for my own Stood to the wind and dared earth To spin me off its shoulders Not knowing I had soldered my pen to its core And ink planted a metaphor” – 13 Negro Tales by Inua Ellams
Nigerian born Inua Ellams is one of the most exciting poets in the UK right now. Still very young, he’s already published a book of his poetry, sold out the National Theatre with his one man show, toured all over the country and was even one of the first poets to win a Fringe First award.
His words, his passion, his achievements and his humbleness has deeply inspired me as a writer and performer.
Me and Inua are part of the same poetry collective (PiP) and we were speaking recently about whether the artists involved in our art form should call themselves poets, Spoken Word artists, writers, performers, performance poets, live literature artists or show boaty wind bags?
Q. Inua, are you a show boaty wind bag?
In my younger days, I wrote and performed things, which if I saw on stage now (with a better grasp of what this game is about) I’d consider to be hot air. Yup, I was the wind baggiest of them all. But now, I consider myself a poet and a performer. I don’t write poems for stages, and don’t see a stage as the end-goal of a poem. For me, the performance of a poem is secondary to the act of writing and creating. The label we choose to attach to what we do should come from a sort of honest, critical S.W.O.T analysis. Only then are they meaningful.
Q. How can you tell when a poem wants the stage or a poem just wants the page?
The difference between a stage poem and a page poem are as thin as line breaks. That is to say, a poem on a page fools around with visual tricks, with layout, with shapes, with word spacing etc and a poem on stage is purely audio. If with a voice you cannot recreate the tricks of a page poem, then it has no business being on stage, and would make for a poor reading / performance of the poem. – That does the poem a disservice. // Anything else should work decently on a stage, if the poem is read with enough command, intention and control.
Q. A mate of mine once said “one of the biggest influences of a writer is their environment.” How does your Nigerian heritage combine with the experience of growing up in London and how does that translate into poetry?
Nigeria itself has had little to no influence on my writing. I only discovered the power of language in Dublin at 16, 5 years after I had left Nigeria and 3 years before I would consider myself a writer. But it has created a strong sense of responsibility. Naija, holds the belief that stories, poems have to carry a message otherwise they are pointless, might as well be a large dot in the centre of a page / a black hole centre stage.
The Nigeria that exists as a shared headspace within my family has however; my father is a great story-teller, my mother is moralist. My father is quite daring and charming, my mother very respectful. These traits of theirs are tinged with their strong Nigerian backgrounds. Subsequently, I am coloured with it and it dictates what I write about, why I write about it and how I do.
Q. You write a lot. I’m jealous. Apparently writers block is a necessary part of writing quality work. Do you agree?
I don’t think I write a lot. The last poem I finished, that I am happy with, that I have shared on a stage and has been published in Journals took a whole year to write. // I do think a writer’s block is necessary though, if you liken it to climbing the steps to a waterslide, the actual slide is the pay off, the fun bits, in order to get to it, to enjoy it, you gotta climb up. Q. Your book and your one man show ‘The 14th Tale’ was funded by The Arts Council. Do the recent cuts in arts funding worry you as an artist?
YES and NO. // YES because it means that work such as mine will be difficult to create without support. NO because art will always find a way. // YES because undoubtedly a smaller amount of art works will be produced. NO because when things are created, when free time and effort are spent on it, it’s gotta be good, will be brilliant, has to be worth its while. // YES because some good artists will give this up to find 9 – 5s. NO because it is poetry, we are not exactly rolling in it anyway. // YES because we will have to think smaller and go back to the basics. NO Because we will have to think smaller and go back to the basics //
Q. You’ve achieved a lot this year. What new tricks have you learned?
“This above else: to thine own self be true.” As Ol’ Bill put it in Hamlet. There will be critics and counter critics, poet and rival poets, room to be jealous, and rooms full of jealousy. The important thing is to stick to your guns, do what makes you happy, run your own race.
Q. Lastly Inua, your book is brilliant, I’ve read it front to back many times. Plus your one-man show blew my mind, even my girlfriend really liked it and she thinks “poetry is naff!” Can I have your autograph before you get too famous for these kinds of interviews?
haha. You can get an unlimited supply of graph anytime, but it’ll cost you a gourd of Nigerian palm wine, Ghanian red red, Senegalese Jollof Rice, 3 kola nuts, a stick of pure white chalk, and the Tail of a Blue bird. - deal?
