Been a while since I posted on here, so here’s some stuff I’ve been up to or am about to be up to…
Gigs
I didn’t have many gigs last month, too busy doing projects in schools and prisons hence lack of newsletter, but one thing I did do which I should’ve shouted about at the time was host a benefit for Moradokmai Youth Theatre from Thailand at Contact Theatre. Moradokmai are a wonderful company I met a few years ago at a theatre festival in Nepal, a living, breathing, self-sufficient community of young artists who live together, work together and do all their teaching and learning through theatre. Earlier this year they lost nearly everything they have in the floods that devastated the area of Thailand in which they live. If you’d like to know more about them and how to donate to the cause, please watch this short video:
Moradokmai are one of the companies involved in this year’s Contacting the World, Contacts flagship biennial international youth theatre project. If you’d like to donate to this amazing project as well, or just learn a bit more about it, please have a look at their donation site.
So, on to the future. Tomorrow I go to Munich for a mini-slam tour in and around that fine beery city. I’ll be playing Schrannen-Slam, Dachau on the 12th, ARGEKultur, Salzburg on the 13th, The Roxy, Ulm on the 14th, and Substanz and the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich on the 15th and 16th respectively.
Back home I’ll be at Bristol Poetry Festival’s show with Rob Gee and Chris Redmond at The Arnolfini on the 19th, and coming home to Manchester for two gigs at the end of the month – The brand new Bang Said The Gun! (Manchester) at The Old Nag’s Head on the 26th and a Poetry Marathon event in aid of Freedom From Torture on 2nd May at The International Anthony Burgess Centre.
All details, as usual, available on my gigs calendar.
Solo Shows
Everything We Need
Final preparations are being made before rehearsals start in June for my upcoming show, Everything We Need, at the Royal Exchange Studio, 28th – 30th June. The creative team are working hard on all aspects of design, and I’m making final tweaks to the script. Trailer and artwork soon come..
Anthropoetry
In other exciting news, I have had my next new show accepted on PBH’s Free Fringe at Edinburgh this year. The show is called Anthropoetry and will be at Fingers Piano Bar from the 4th to the 17th August. It’s a collection of new poems with music and sound design from my fellow Geddes Loom (and most other stuff) conspirator, Dan Steele. Not quite up online on the fringe or PBH site yet, but here’s the blurb:
How do we express our spleen? Whose business do we stick our noses into? When did we start wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and why are we up to our elbows in heels and bums?
BBC R4 Slam Champion Ben Mellor takes you on a stand-up poetry and music fuelled tour around the body, attempting to get the measure of modern life through anatomical analogy. With sounds, beats, beeps and whistles by Dan Steele.
yep, still trading off that Radio 4 thing…
Other Projects
Geddes Loom and Pen-ultimate both have new musical/theatrical projects in the pipeline, but they’re a little too embryonic to go into at any length, and this newsletter is long enough already. Rest assured, when they’re a bit more developed, you’ll know about them. They will be perineum-splittingly big.
However, Geddes Loom will be playing a special one-off set at The Royal Exchange’s Special FX on June 15th at 6pm. Come down, it’s FREE!