Performance
The events below were part of the 2009 Festival. We will hold more unique performances during the 2010 Ledbury Poetry Festival.
Wildly eclectic and inventive, all these performances are unique to Ledbury and will offer something for everyone, from star gazing with Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Christine Watkins to jazz and poetry with Zena Edwards and Mercury Prize nominated band Polar Bear.
2009 Comments:
"Ledbury Poetry Festival offers ten days each summer when the air is thick with declaration and rumination, whispers and shouts of joy"
Joan Bakewell
Festival Commission!
2. Polar Bear and Zena Edwards
In this exciting new commission Jazz band Polar Bear and poet Zena Edwards collaborate and perform together for the first time. Zena Edwards is a powerful and rhythmic poet and performer. She recently toured a new show, Security.
Mercury Prize nominated and critically acclaimed, Polar Bear take their cue from jazz, add elements of punk, rock and the creative soundscapes of dance and electronica. Bandleader and drummer Sebastian Rochford is joined by Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart on tenor saxes, Tom Herbert on bass and Leafcutter John on electronics. BYO (Bring your own drinks, we provide corkscrews and glasses). Sponsored by The Elmley Trust
The first night of the Festival rocks to a close with Penny Rimbaud performing How, a reworking of Allen Ginsberg’s beat poem Howl, accompanied by Louise Elliott on saxophone. Penny Rimbaud is a poet, drummer, writer, former member of the performance art group EXIT and co-founder of the anarchist punk band Crass, with Steve Ignorant in 1977. He also set up the anarchist/pacifist Dial House community in 1967 with Gee Vaucher and Phil Russell and helped to instigate the free festival movement. His works include Reality Asylum, Rocky Eyed and Oh America and he says “our response to things wasn’t a musician or a lyrical response, it was a political response.” BYO (Bring your own drinks, we provide corkscrews and glasses).
13. Weyland
Peter Oswald performs the Norse myth of Weyland accompanied by trumpeter Martin Holland. Weyland the smith was crippled by the insane King Nud and imprisoned, but the Smith is able to turn the King’s madness to his own advantage in a story describing the struggle between art and authority. Peter Oswald is a well-known verse playwright. He was writer in residence at Shakespeare’s Globe and his play Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards (based on a Japanese puppet play) was performed at the Cottesloe (National Theatre). BYO (Bring your own drinks, we provide corkscrews and glasses.)
Get ready for the heady sound of performance poetry as fifteen diverse versifiers leap from page to stage in a fast and furious contest to find this year’s brightest bard. Leading UK slampresarios Marcus Moore and Sara-Jane Arbury compère thee to a slammer’s way as random judges rate the quality of writing, the strength of performance and the warmth of the applaudience. Who will fly into the final or feel too poet-rified to continue? There are points at stake so make it a date and let the good rhymes roll!
For further info or to enter the slam, contact Marcus on 01285 640470 or email info@spiel.wanadoo.co.uk
This is a rare opportunity to see one of the finest films by Poland’s greatest director, most famous for his War Trilogy. This film, written in the 60s but banned for a decade, presages the burgeoning Solidarity Movement. It follows a young filmmaker Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) as she chronicles the fall from grace of Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), a “model worker” in the 50s – the eponymous Man Of Marble. Reminiscent of Citizen Kane, Wajda’s masterful film is a political epic, both compassionate and bitterly funny.
30. Life is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe
Pamela Robertson-Pearce presents her film, Life is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, which makes for compelling viewing and will accompany the first British edition of Samuel Menashe’s New and Selected Poems. Filmed in the apartment where he has lived for the past half century, Menashe speaks direct to camera – almost as if he’s talking to posterity – and the poems are mixed in with the talk.
35. Once this was a poet by Brenda Read-Brown
Presented by Tewkesbury Arts and Drama Society
A man and a woman meet, fall in love, and get married; one of them dies. Not an unusual story, you might think. But what makes Once this was a poet different is that the man and the woman are both performance poets, and the tale is told largely through their poems – witty, thought-provoking and sad.
A gathering of folk musicians and poets. Come and join in or simply listen and enjoy.
Festival Commission!
48. How Not to Be Afraid of the Dark
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Christine Watkins.
A unique and exciting combination of poetry, theatre and a talk by renowned astrophysicist, Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell CBE, premieres at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Writer and performer Christine Watkins looks at the night sky through the timid gaze of a character who finds herself up at nights against her will and is beginning to suspect that several famous women astronomers have taken up residence in her garden shed. This quirky and humorous monologue then moves into a reading and talk by Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell exploring how poets through history have responded to questions of astronomy and its ever progressing series of theories and discoveries. Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the current President of the Institute of Physics who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish, for which he won a Nobel Prize. Christine Watkins writes for live performance and multi-disciplinary events including Mosquito Night recently performed at The Courtyard, Hereford. Her portfolio of commissions includes pieces for a range of theatre companies, the British Film Institute, Welsh National Opera, BBC radio and S4C.
Sponsored by the Royal Astronomical Society.
Students from John Masefield High School and Ledbury Youth First have worked with The Anomalies and spoken word artists, including Lofty and Shane Solanki, to create original poems and raps, which they perform here for the first time. They will also perform at The Big Chill Festival, Eastnor Castle.
53. The Piano Room: Room of the Half Dream
Julie Boden, Poet in Residence at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, sometimes retreats into the silent, private space of the piano room; a room hidden beyond the public face of Symphony Hall, where concert grand pianos offer up their secrets. On 22nd April 2006, the eve of his leaving for Mongolia, the composer Steve Tromans spent a magical night alone there. He returns to the UK to launch Room of the Half Dream at this Festival. Poet and pianist perform individual responses, explore ways of creating new collaborative pieces and discuss the mystery and inspiration of this special space.
Aidan John Moffat’s poetry album I Can Hear Your Heart contains instructions that it should be listened to very loud, on headphones, but you get to hear it live. It is a gripping combination of words, music and soundscaping and is vivid, funny, uncomfortable, hard-hitting and strange. All of which is to be expected from this supreme lyricist and former member, with Malcom Middleton, of Arab Strap. Aidan Moffat will also perform songs from his latest album called How to Get to Heaven from Scotland.
BYO (Bring your own drinks, we provide corkscrews and glasses.)
Performance 2009 highlights...
Zena Edwards "is revered not only for the easy power of her words but also for her opulent delivery, for the complex manipulation of her voice. Her work is deep and sensuous, rhythmic and startling." (Joelle Taylor)
"Polar Bear blast out of the past, full of straight, cool school skills, and detonate the past, bursting with edgy, forward-looking lust" (Paul Morley, Observer Music Monthly)
Leading UK slampresarios Marcus Moore and Sara- Jane Aubury.
Aidan Moffat performs from I Can Hear Your Heart and How to Get to heaven From Scotland. "Countless hapless romantics have made a career out of heartache. But none have done so with the same caustic wit as former Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat - a man so disgruntled with love it's a wonder he's spent so long trying to find it." (NME)