Paul Blezard on today’s bloggers meeting.

As the excitement builds and the weeks of fevered, expectant anticipation come to an end with the start of the festival on Thursday, the final meeting for bloggers took place at the South Bank this lunch time and a whole new word was coined.

Susie Feay, that doyenne of literature, the former Literary Editor of the Independent on Sunday no less, was responsible. We were each asked to introduce ourselves to the assembled group and having outlined her career SF went on to say that she is also a “Chairer” at the festival. “A Chairer?” various voices queried. I thought about it and realised that I rather liked it, so chipped in a quick defence along the lines of “Work… Worker. Chair… Chairer.”

So you’ve heard (or indeed read) it here first. The correct term for a person that chairs events at a literary festival is a Chairer and Susie Feay invented it.

Benjamin Zephaniah speaks to Young Curators via Skype

During their time at the Southbank Centre, our young curators get to meet different artists and professionals who advise and guide them towards putting on their show. The team have regular meetings with marketing, production, including sessions with Rachel Holmes. And a few weeks ago, they had an extra special encounter, a skype call with Benjamin Zephaniah! It was quite a big thing for them, as Benjamin is one of the poets they would have studied during GCSE English. The event that the young curators are working is a pre-show for Benjamin Zephaniah’s event in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on July 10th. It’s an interesting listen with Benjamin responding to questions such as:

Who, dead or alive, would you have in your dream audience?
What makes a good show?
Did you always have the confidence to write in the voice that you do?
What can we expect from your show on July 10th?

The Captain’s Blog: Notes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Published below is the Captain’s Blog: extracts from the day to day course of the good ship The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Today’s entries are taken from the Co-producers’ emails in March 2009 – stay in touch to follow how the project has developed since then.

Tue 10/03/2009 07.21 From Andrew Steggall, Director – “That sound is going to be vital – sending voices and words echoing around the South Bank – causing images and words to resonate all the way to the Young Vic maybe! And not by being “realised” physically but by being allowed to echo in the ears of the audience, pricking their own, active imaginations.
That the central event could be a wedding – two long tables for a hundred guests – photographers waiting for the bride and groom – posters up inviting the public to the wedding – maybe it is even advertised as a wedding! Except that it is interrupted by the Mariner who then leads the hopefully curious and intrigued public away from the wedding and into the world of the imagination…”

Tue 10/03/2009 11.03 From Alexandra Brierley, Co-producer – “the creative team have now decided that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner project this summer will not be needing to close any roads.”

Tue 10/03/2009 11.42 From Alexandra Brierley, Co-producer – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Introduction: “Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate.” – T. Burnet, Archaeol. Phil. P.68 (1692) Translation: “I can easily believe, that there are more invisible than visible Beings in the universe.”

Wed 11/03/2009 13.53 From Andrew Steggall, Director – “He may be silent a mime on long legs with white hair and wings.”

Thu 12/03/2009 12.33 From Alexandra Brierley, Co-producer – “a vocal animateur to teach the choral aspects of the music”

Mon 16/03/2009 12.07 From Alexandra Brierley, Co-producer – “we do hope that the children taking part in the R&D will be familiar with the story and the broad themes of the poem.”

Tues 17/03/0/2009 17.40 From Lucy Bradley, Assistant Director – “Thanks again for thinking of me for this project. It sounds great- I have been obsessed by the lines Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink since I discovered the Ancient Mariner as a child so would love to be involved in engaging more children in the piece.”

Tue 24/03/2009 11.34 From Brendan Kelly, Bellowhead – “the way we could do this is to request that every child learns and recites one line or two or even a single word from the original poem. This will spur an imagination fed by the poem and encourage reading as well as giving our sessions a spring board for imaginative ideas…The text as a whole is long winded and possibly not the easiest for a young reader. Is there a simplified version of the text which could be sent to schools which may encompass the tale in a page or two? which could be discussed in school making the story more accessible.”

Tue 24/03/2009 19.33 From Shan Maclennan, Creative Director, Learning & Participation – “sometimes just watching children as they listen or as they imagine can produce the most amazing imagery which in its ‘non-performance’ is very revealing.”

Thu 26/03/2009 21.52 From Andrew Steggall, Director – “Pete introduced us to Albanian Polyphony as a musical language which we thought was excellent and useful; we listened to a little bit of Les Choristes as an example of another type of choral, ethereal singing that the children could do; we agreed it would be good to explore the assonance and plosive, onomatopoeic quality of the words in, for example, the storm section.”

Fri 27/03/2009 20.43 From Lemn Sissay, Artist in Residence, Southbank Centre – “We should be on an Ancient mariner media alert.”

New Young Curator (LLF) Where To? – Jamal Msebele :)

Hello everybody. I am Jamal Msebele (aka Eklipse), a poet and lyricist. I am currently incorporated in the LLF Young Curators Project and working on the Where To? event on the 10th of July. On the project, I am working with Alex Rowse (an aspiring journalist currently studying English Literature), Rosie Knight (a work shop facilitator and poet) and Jayga Rayn (an aspiring political commentator and promoter). Based around the theme of “escape”, the show is to remove boundaries and preconceptions about the stretch of literature and the range in which it can be delivered.

On the LLF Young Curators Recruitment Day we were handed the task of giving our opinions of literature. As both an MC and poet, I often am torn between the two as they both hold strong stereotypes. The video below is my response to that.

If you want to see more of me, check my website http://www.jamalmsebele.co.uk or my MySpace http://www.myspace.com/ekliptic

Literate Opinions

This is a short video, which I recorded as a response to to a task I was given on the recruitment day.

We were asked to write or perform a piece about our views or opinions on literature.

This is my piece about peoples perceptions of spoken word being boring. Which of course it isn’t!

Young curator Alex Rowse, on the Where To? show

Being part of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival is a really exciting opportunity to learn how one of the most diverse literature series in England is run. After a recruitment session back in May, I was asked to become a young curator along with Rosie, Jayga and Jamal to be mentored by Yemisi Blake, an artist in residence at the Southbank. We’ve been given a 2-hour slot in Queen Elizabeth Hall on the 10th of July in which to produce a show with emerging and established artists on the theme of escape.

With artists exploring what they escape from, where they escape to and how they escape, we’re at the stage where we’ve booked a range of spoken word poets, musicians, storytellers and live illustrators. The ‘house band’, Woe, will be performing some of their own songs whilst providing backing to some of our poets, and hopefully some collaborations between artists who know each other already will come about organically in the run up to the show. You can check out some of the artists we have already booked online:

the amazing poet/storyteller Jasmine Corray www.myspace.com/jasmineanncooray

reggae soul from Aruba Red who will be doing an acoustic set www.myspace.com/arubared

spoken word artist Kaiz La Kazie www.myspace.com/kaizlakazie

As an English Literature student most of the poetry I’m aware of is, in comparison to spoken word, extremely traditional so I’ve gained loads of knowledge of the performance poetry scene just from being around people like Rosie Knight and Yemisi who are very involved in it. I was lucky enough to get tickets to Poejazzi at the Udderbelly and was blown away. It was hosted by Scroobius Pip, with Sound of Rum, Afrobear, Poeticat and others, and it definitely overturned any assumptions I had that the spoken word might be boring/pretentious or whatever. It was one of the most intense, amazing shows I’ve ever seen and if ours was half as good I’d be ecstatic.

Check us out on facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/event.php?eid=112183939187&ref=ts

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Director’s Diary

Exciting day! Spent two hours with Janet Whiteside who is playing the Albatross. We looked at how the Albatross’ presence in the production could enhance the central message of the poem about the environment and our relationship to it. The Mariner, when he has finished telling his story says:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns…

I have always had this idea that the Mariner might go for several months with a relatively normal life: sleeping, eating, talking to friends, carrying with him, calmly, the memory of the experiences he had at sea. But then one day at an uncertain hour, perhaps at the check-out at Tesco’s, he would suddenly sense that he was being watched. He would look behind him and scan the faces of strangers. It would be like someone had called his name. He would look left and right down the row of check-outs and there, standing with her shopping at another till, would be a familiar figure – an old lady perhaps, in a coat and soft hat, with a thoughtful face and penetrating eyes. Maybe no one else could see her except the Mariner. Maybe, to others, she just seemed just like an ordinary old lady should. But to the Mariner she meant something else. She would smile and maybe nod her head. He would feel his heart burn slightly and he would know that soon that time would come when he would have to tell his story. Because that old lady in the coat and soft hat, with the thoughtful face and penetrating eyes is really the old soul of the albatross. She is a warning and a reminder of the beautiful bird that he had killed. She is part of the earth and of the strange world of invisible natures that inhabit the universe. She is the ghost of the Albatross.

The next day, sitting on the bus, perhaps coming back from the docklands where he now works, he would feel the burn more strongly and know , without needing to turn around, that she is sitting on the seat behind him in her soft hat and with her umbrella across her lap. The time has come he would think. My tale must be told… From that point on he would be searching for the one to whom he could speak.

This is the imagined little back story I have for the Albatross and one that Janet and I explored this morning. She brings a dignity and benevolence to the role which is why we asked her to take part and it was great today to share these ideas with her in more detail and to hear her positive response. She will be dressed in pale clothes like the feathers of an Albatross and we worked out how, during the course of the performance, she might travel amongst the audience, distributing white feathers to the children and marking their faces with white paint. As if she were leaving her message with them too. As the Mariner speaks and the children and audience listen the central idea of the poem is communicated and so the feathers, small tokens or reminders of that idea, are spread amongst them.

Janet made the very good and worthwhile point that as well as the specific themes in the poem of the environment and our relationship to nature, perhaps it could also be read as a call upon us to be kind – to nature sure, but also to each other. The Environment  – of forests and air and icecaps and seas needs our kindness but so too does the environment around us – our society, our friends and more importantly perhaps the people we don’t know, the innumerable strangers that make up the environment we live in. I thought this was a wonderful point and a valuable idea to take from the poem. One that I think she will convey implicitly.

Then she, Lucy, the brilliant assistant director and I went to meet Toby and the puppet that he and a colleague had been making. On the floor on Spirit Level at the RFH in large pieces lay DEATH. Limby and hollow with a hat and spectacles he had yet to be animated by the children at Heathbrook Primary School but he certainly looked quite capable of coolly severing the strings above the heads of the mariners aboard the Mariner’s ship. Can’t wait to get him on his feet.

Jayga Rayn on curating a show for the London Lit Fest.

Jayga Rayn is one of four young curators working towards a show for the London Literature Festival on July 10th. Where To, which kicks of at 5:30pm in the Front Room, will host a mixture of emerging and established poets, musicians and illustrators all responding to the theme of escape.

Coming soon… 2009 London Literature Festival bloggers

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Join in the online debate around the 2009 London Literature Festival, Southbank Centre, 2-16 July and share your views on a programme of internationally renowned literature, music, poetry and path-breaking debate.

Young people retell The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Alongside the young people who are performing in The Wedding, or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on Saturday 4 July, pupils from Heathbrook Primary School have been creating podcasts about the poem and the performance. This is part one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, retold by Alex in her own words. Stay tuned this week for the rest of the poem retold, interviews with the creative team, and more.

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