Skip to main content

You Are Here: Poetry As Theatre

Colette Bryce, Daljit Nagra and Jo Shapcott, write emotional, complex, funny and engaging poems. Publishers, readers and prize judges alike love them. You Are Here is a new poetry show which brings the poets together on stage for a beautifully designed performance which asks Who are you? Where are you and where are you going? Poems pose the questions and whisper the answers.

You Are Here is produced by Jaybird, the live literature production, promotion and management enterprise run by Julia Bird. (Julia also works part time for the Poetry School and recently published her own first collection of poetry).

She says ‘I have worked as a poetry promoter for years, but I also have a love of theatrical sparkle and spectacle. When I produce live literature shows like You Are Here (and Tilting the Mirror with Jean Sprackland and Greta Stoddart previously) I am trying to find a way to introduce the pleasures and provocations of contemporary poetry to a theatre or arts centre audience. This I do by adding the expectations that a theatre audience might have (a show with direction, a set, lighting and music that takes place in a theatre rather than a literature festival tent) to the most interesting and gorgeous poetry I can find. The You Are Here rehearsal period has just finished - we dodged the snow, luckily. The poets and the director have worked fantastically hard to create an hour long show which is full of music, meditation, humour and beauty ... all you could want from poetry, really!’

The show is on tour, the first night in Norwich is on 20th January; the last night in London is on 26th April. Performances also take place in Bath, Cambridge, Chipping Norton, Hull, Lancaster, Liverpool, Newcastle, Stockton and Torrington. Dates & details are at http://www.blogger.com/.
Follow the show's progress on Facebook and Twitter ...
Facebook group: You Are Here - a poetry show http://www.blogger.com/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise