Festival preview: The London Word Festival, 7 March – 1 April 2010
London’s pioneering celebration of words, text and language returns for a third year, playing host to the most adventurous programme yet. Bringing to light the finest array of artists working with words.
Building on the success of 2009’s festival, with its sell-out commissioning programme that included live-Manga illustrated live-literature interpretive ‘Shakespeare in Shoreditch’ club event; Iain Sinclair’s site-specific perambulatory performance in St. Augustine’s Tower in Hackney; and the ‘The 14th Tale’, which transfers to The National Theatre this February, we return with a full selection of premieres, commissions and proudly participatory projects, brought to life in a selection of East London’s most interesting spaces.
With everything from music to stand-up, through shadow-puppetry, micro-lectures, screen-printing nuns and performance poetry, to crime-comic-jazz interpretations: this is the festival that looks way beyond the page.
Highlights include:
Josie Long and her good-deed amanuenses enjoy a knees up in a home-brew museum to toast self-improvement project One Hundred Days to Make Me a Better Person; hold tight to that cheap cigars of yours as film noir sensibilities go monochrome gangbusters with Led Bib, Toby Litt, Huzzah!! Noir and more on Toynbee Hall’s suitably art-deco stage in Avant! Noir. Tuck into a bespoke word print from the Henningham Family Press at their ersatz Chip Shop screen-printing workshop; Chris McCabe delivers a psychonavigational multimedia Docklands hymnal: Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, scored by Bartokian folk-drone composers Bleeding Heart Narrative and introduced by Iain Sinclair. Darren Hayman joins the Henningham Family Press, the Universettee, Murray Macauley and more for a hands-on mini-festival celebrating great British posters and Great British eccentricities in Keep Printing and Carry On; mish-mashed, moonshiney animation, shadow-play, puppets, poems and a hypothetical mannequin are a few tools employed by top yarn-spinners Matthew Robins and Terry Saunders who demonstrate the true Art of Storytelling. Tim Turnbull, Laura Dockrill & Luke Kennard head up a night of mischievous wit in a performance poetry best-of; Stuart Silver premieres his anecdotal world-view-shaking comic drama, You Look Like Ants. Join Robin Ince, Professor Brian Cox, Helen Keen and more to explore the cosmos in a space-craft shaped like a church full of comedians and musicians; Leafcutter John rewires Basil Bunting’s Modernist masterpiece Briggflatts; and join a creepy night of theatrical ghastliness in two ghostly performances ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ and ‘A Pint For The Ghost’. All topped off by industrial-design-meets-word-play as the Barbican Art Gallery plays host to poetic extremism and quizzical post-modernism from John Hegley and the Found in Translation poets.
Full programme
For the full programme and more information, visit www.londonwordfestival.com.
Tickets
Tickets for all shows are available from Wegottickets at: www.wegottickets.com/f/1423
Venues
Barbican Art Gallery
Barbican Centre | Silk Street | Barbican | EC2Y 8DS
www.barbican.org.uk
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
44-46 Pollard Row | Bethnal Green | Bethnal Green | E2 6NB
www.workersplaytime.net
The Courtyard Theatre
40 Pitfield Street | Hoxton | N1 6EU
www.thecourtyard.org.uk
Jamboree
Cable Street Studios | 566 Cable Street | Limehouse | E1W 3HB
www.myspace.com/jamboreemembersclub
The Pembury Ravern
90 Amhurst Road | Hackney Central | E8 1JH
www.individualpubs.co.uk/pembury/
St. Leonard’s Church
Shoreditch High St. | Shoreditch | E1 6JN
shoreditch.wordpress.com
Stoke Newington International Airport
Unit F | 1-15 Leswin Place | Stoke Newington | N16 7NJ
www.stkinternational.co.uk
Toynbee Theatre, Toynbee Studios Arts Bar & Café
28 Commercial Street | Aldgate | E1 6AB
www.artsadmin.co.uk
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