On 26th Jan, I’ll be headling at SUPA FINE – a night of Spoken Word and Music accompanied by Jon Speedy from JSB, the soulful, dynamic, conscious poet Oness Sankara and the beautiful vocals of Bianca Rose. If you don’t know these ladies, it time to get to know, they’re some of London’s best female artists in their field. Click names for vibrant more info…

The venue The Hideaway (in North London) has high quality Italian food too, so you can book a table and enjoy the soul food of Poetry and great Italian grub

It’s £5 on the door but there’s a £3 concessions guest list, so drop me an email and I’ll put you down if you fancy it. This will also put you on the mailing lists for all my performances and creative projects as well as links to poetry and music downloads, links to blogs sites I’ve created and more….

Furthermore, due to popular demand, I have collated some of my poetry with music pieces and will be selling cds of ‘Raising Game: Conversations Vol. 1′ on the night for £5 if you put you’ve name on the guest list, its £7 otherwise. This is a selection of my favourite spoken word and music collaborations over time – describe it? How about soulful jazz broken beat hip hip global poetic… You can also go to Bandcamp, check it out and download the extended EP of 9 quality tracks for £7 or download individual tracks for your selective listening pleasure. But if you do come on the night , you get you hard copy for a fiver, plus the password for more free downloads! Yay!

That’s all for now and don’t forget, send a message to zenaedwards@yahoo.com for the £3 concession guest with “SUPAFINE SESSION” in the subject box for up-to-date action and other goodies in the poetical world of Z.

Peace.

Details
Venue: The Hideaway, 114, Junction Road, London N19
between Tufnell Park and Archway tube stations.
by tube – take the Northern Line (High Barnet branch) to Tufnell Park or Archway – 5 min walk from both
by bus – Junction Road is served by bus routes 134 & 390 (both 24hrs) # 134 between North Finchley & Tottenham Court Road # 390 between Archway & Notting Hill Gate
Peace
©2012 Zena Edwards: Verse In Dialog | Verse In Dialog London SE25

This is a selection of my favourite spoken word and music collaborations over time . I’m proud of them all and thought it was time to have them compiled so I  look back on them as a  personal legacy  as I move into 2012. I’m have some brilliant collaborations in the pipeline so I’m  very excited. The title “Raising Game” is to remind myself that I although this is a selection I am proud of, I expect much more from my creativity in the near future. I feel I have more to offer. Enjoy!

To get your copy of “Raising Game EP Xtra”, you can go to Bandcamp have a listen and download 9 quality tracks for £7 or download individual tracks for your selective listening pleasure. Your feedback is most welcome  so please email at conversationsvid@gmail.com  to leave feedback  and to get on the mailing lists for all my performances and creative projects as well as other links to poetry and music  blogs that really float my boat.

Interview: Performance poet Zena Edwards in Amsterdam

With a fusion of poetry, the spoken word and rhythm, Zena Edwards’ new performance piece ‘Security’ straddles the gap between generations as she takes storytelling into the twenty-first century. Amsterdam, Podium Mozaiek, 20 February (English language).

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Theatre project reduces multi-cultural tensions

How would you describe your own performances?

Image Credit: Rob Sloetry

‘As a performance poet, I focus on both crafts individually and then fuse them.  The craft of performance and the craft of poetry.  I feel poetry has all the drama, pace and power right there in the text and it is there to be discovered and brought to life through performance.  Over the years I have developed a performance style that pays homage to the musicality and emotion in the language.  I try to keep my style conversational as this type of language is dynamic, rhythmic, with so many shades, colours and tones.  So I work hard to find these.  I enjoy singing so I include this too.

For the solo show though, it is another experience.  There are four characters, each with their own rhythms and voices, body language.  When I perform them it’s like a child’s adventure playground for me because I play in each of their worlds, changing quickly between them.

Are you a modern storyteller?

‘I think so.  Storytellers take many shapes and need to be recognised as such.  But first we must redefine what we think story telling is.  It’s not just for children or sitting around a campfire.  Storytellers are in clubs, in church, in theatres, on the streets rapping, young storytellers in school playgrounds, in the local corner shop talking about the community. They are members of our own family.  Also, film, live art, and photography, sculptors and painters are all examples of storytelling as they document our time in history.  And what an amazing time we are in now.  We must learn to recognise who these people are and acknowledge them as the valuable members of the community that they are’.

Current events play an important role in your performances.  Why do you deliberately choose this way of working? ‘That is also the role of the storyteller and the Griot – to be the chronicler of the time. I write work that references certain issues of the day to make a universal and timeless point.  For example, In my one-woman show, I have written about a self-exiled middleaged Palestinian man making friends with a 16-year-old Caribbean girl from the inner city of London.  This would seem like an impossible or unlikely friendship but both have lost a brother to war – his in the Palestine Israeli conflict, hers in street gang warfare.  Somewhere in all the rush and bustle of living in London they meet and connect.  It is a comment on the troubled times the whole planet is experiencing and still people can find a place of unity and connection through human compassion’.

The text is the central element in your performances.  How did you write the texts for ‘Security’?  Could you describe the writing process?

‘Writing Security was quite and eerie experience for me because as a poet I have control of the flow of a poem.  I know what I want to say and will sit and listen to the poem while it comes to me. But it was still me and my voice. With Security, I felt my characters took on a life of their own and were determined to be written the way they wanted to be written, the way they wanted to interact with one another.  I have never experienced being inhabited by other people like this before.  I had to do a lot of surrendering to them.  As the writer, I had to back off.  The only thing I had control over was the shape of the narrative. Even then, I had to ask their permission (laughs).

But  the whole process was organic. It took two years of rewriting and reshaping before I got the final draft.

Your shows seem to be accessible to a wide range of people (young and old).  Is that correct? And, if that is correct, why do you feel that is important?

‘I wrote the show because I felt there was a need to be filled.  There is such a lack of communication between the generations now.  I wrote the piece because young people and the older generation need something they can do and enjoy together.  In the history of storytelling everybody in a commune would come together and listen to a story. Even today in the most ancient indigenous societies such as the Khoisan in the Namibia can find the most aged members of the community to babe in arms in these poetic storytelling sessions because the folklore within these stories is part of the glue, the fabric that holds

these communities together. I have attempted to do this with “Security” -  use poetic language of ‘everyday’ as the driving force behind the dramtatic storytelling to firmly plant it back to community.

The theatre can be elitist, expensive, can separates class. It’s like there’s an appointed body of omnipotent powers that induce a division, based mainly in opinion and that can be dangerous. However, these powers are also gatekeepers determining what is put  and pushed on in mainstream theatre and, in consequence, contributes to the divide between the generations, cultures, races and gender (along with rampant technology, the media hype and government law) when it comes to making and promoting art.

But poetry/spoken word is a bridge between because of its accessibility and its inherent impartiality. Every one can  and should own it.  I also believe it is up to active members of the community and those in direct contact with the community, artists included, to evoke change and give theatre and dramatic storytelling back to the people where incredible stories of humanity come from’.

Security: Podium Mozaiek, Amsterdam — Saturday, 20 February at 21:00.

This comical and moving tale of unexpected friendship confronts the issues of security and identity through a fusion of performance poetry, theatre, movement and song. Set within the beating heart of London, the chaotic stories of five characters in crisis are exposed through the eye of a camera. What happens when one generation collides with another and cultural expectations clash?

CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO GO TO “SHOOT THE MESSENGER” WEBSITE AND MEDIA PLAYER OF ZENA REVIEWING RECENT NEWSPAPERS OF THE WEEK

In collaboration with Rolemop Arts the show had a clever promotion technique ‘Kimberleys Big Night Out’ - a fake hen night made into an installation and performance held at the Brighton venue ‘The Basement.’

I had a little extract, mostly improvised with jokes in mind but I explore the idea of trying to find confidence in the manipulation of hair is a complication to finding confidence and self esteem from with in.

Then the disaffection and lack of belonging came into play as the race narrative was batted about the media arena knotted in with the fetisization of “feral youth” rhetoric. My irritation with was blurring my creative process. There was so much conflicting information and opinion flying across the country, I was as confused as the bees whose homing instincts are now confused by the wireless network microwaves crowding the atmosphere. I could not navigate my way to the page.

So it was on my when I was commissioned by Film Africa 2011 to write a piece in response to Menelik Shabazz‘s  HANDSWORTH SONGS (watch on YouTube), I managed to have a place to start. This commission became a beacon, a lighthouse in the murky rhetoric, recrimination and pontificating that blocked my view to the responsive poetry I knew I wanted to write.

HANDSWORTH SONGS made it so obvious. The film is an insightful and poetic response to the UK “riots” of 1981 in Handsworth, Birmingham, with thought provoking raw footage where the ‘discontent’ in society manifested itself as “bringing the issue to the street”, as did the new generation in response to the ‘austerity measures’ of the new government on 2009, 10, 11. And that’s me, speculating as when the discontent was reaching boiling point.

I had to write about one man’s dreams of settlement, the turbulent effects of migration, trust and mistrust and uncomfortable violent change that illustrates a country broiling in historical denial and resistant awakening.

I highly recommend a watch of the film.

Even Dogs Have a Place in the World

We were coughing in the dust
from the fall out of your war, anyway
like some kind of anti-fairy dust,
your uncertain future settled as unemployment
and division on our Caribbean mountain,
some had worn british uniforms before,
Some said we had no business in a white mans war
Them’s the ones who kept score
when You called us to you
Posters in bold font

We quietly study our passport by candle light
And inform lovers in sonorous appeasing whispers
and parents with puffed up chests what our
Desire wanted us to do

And we came like flotillas of reprieve
The hulls fashioned from our skin, viscid with the grit of determination
“Forward, to rebuild the Motherland!”
Can’t always look this gift horse in the mouth
My ticket was earned

We came to the mother country, proving
Your civilizing had not gone to waste
And you set me the task of patching up holes torn
By the shrapnel of global upheaval, the history of the planet shifting
In its nest of isms and dastardly dictatorships

And we all lean leeward
into the winds of change
and after 3 weeks on the water
I sight my future on the dark blue back of the sea
I recognize the shape of an island when
I see one

We send for our children
who ride the tide of our dreams
like bundles of pre-packed self reliance
Wrapped in the flags of our islands
rubber stamped with a british seal

And for a few shillings and maybe a can of corned beef
I hand over my future to your care, gurgling fresh
His smiles, bright bites of potential

I hand my children over to your care
comforted that you will configure their grey matter
to the education curriculum of the academic minds
that made this country great, supplement their learning
of good citizenship, enforce the belief that hard work
is the rule of thumb

It doesn’t take long before I learn
- at role call, at the bus depot, on the factory floor, in the nurses quarters -
that I am to swallow the cold morning chill
with icy pregnant silences, venomous vapour laden
with racial slurs and recriminations
they find their way my ears, like riled homing pigeons
“The country is going to the dogs.”

It doesn’t take long, 10 years on
When the jobs become slim
And the streets are emaciated, fat with resentment
It doesn’t take long before the dis-ease
finds it racist tongue flicking out of its head
as the teddy boys try to stomp on the soft suede
of my Notting Hill blues, flicking glares like knives
bike chains and crow bars beating the drum of my skin
And the sparks fly as the gears of deprivation grind

The flame is lit
our pride finds a deeper fire
as fists fuse with lick of the flame
defending our right to be seen as human, along with the Irishman
even dogs have a place in the world.
But Us – lowly gladiators in a decadent  empires arena
Divide and conquer.

It doesn’t take long, 20 years on
When a wave of police officers come to our doors
Our child’s potential broken between them
I had to see the beating first hand to understand,
To feel why the road is littered with bottle, brick
And burnt out carcass of cars
and I had to hear the creaking bones
of my sad eyed dreams standing, mortified
between the front line and the riot shields
them same bones that “breathed life into this land”

and while the dred beat roiled the hurricane
calypso sprang like a haunting jangle of discordant chimes
in the wily winds of change
as the steelpan sang a flattened 5th – the devils note
a blue note, a black note, the one that spoke
to my dissatisfaction, discontent and disillusionment

The scuttling press camera’s flashed like deranged fireflies
grotesque in their greed for a headline
“Rioting Mob on Rampage”, “The Bloody Battle Ground”, “Riot of death”
and the photo of the  ivory baby in the ugly pram
pushed by a fair home-grown maid
taunts the hate out of the ashes, not the tolerance.

It doesn’t take long, just 20 years on when
Our great grand child snaps open a newspaper
between thumb blurs on his mobile phone
and reads the headline,
for the first week of a limping August Summer
“the Rule of the Mob”, “ The Battle for London”, “London’s Burning”
in bold font

You don’t know what its like out there Granddad.

The first time I got stopped by the police
There was 5 of them
And they covered up their numbers
Its not the first thing you look for.

There was 3 of us
He was ic3. Black male.

Daz white shirts, buckles and big shoes

Grey hoodie, back pack and trainers

They came out of no where

We asked him where he had been
What was he doing in the area

I was coming back from Auntie Jeanettes
I just picked up the money for the shopping
For my Cerise’s wedding

He was carrying money beyond
what a 12 year old should have
If he was 12

On road the code is “stand your ground”
Or if it the situation is getting peak,
you know, tense, treat them like a wild animal –
maintain eye contact and back away slowly

These youths run errands for dealers
All the time, you see. I mean, they’re feral

I told them all they wanted know
No matter what I said, they weren’ ‘aving it
It was the look in one of themz eyes

I’ve been doing this job for 6 years
Their eyes always tell you when they’re lying

they cuffed me, search me,
took me to the station, kept me for 4 hours
No charges nothing

We detain because there are specific procedures
successfully bringing levels of violent and criminal behaviour down
And we target certain areas pertaining to this illegal activity

It was when they told me to take
my trousers down…
It’s just to shame you, innit, that’s why
Its cos that’s what they do. Ain’t more complicated than that…

That’s what they do…

Now
We see how his fallen crest,
his coquettishness youth, drags
weighted with the tediousness of the re-run
And I think about the times we handed them
over to you, thinking you were taking care

What do you see when you look upon our children?
Not me or the ghosts of my dreams
that walk at his shoulders
And we look into all their eyes to connect
the world of our leaving and arriving
to the time or their rootedness
That does not belong

And not even after the death of mothers
and other sons in your hands
Can I defend you, Mother Country?
What can I do? Except hand them
this flame, the one that kept me alive

Make it burn out the eyes of their dispossession
Singe the throats of a desperate and needy system.
Let it be a beacon that guides
when all the other candles have gone out.

.Written by Zena Edwards©

One thing that I have found annoying me a little is the Image of the guy in the grey tracksuit and  black scarf walking with a mini inferno crackling behind him. I’m not even going to add it to this post. It’s almost a fetishizing and branding…

Two articles caught my attention this week. The Guardian / London School of Economics / Joseph Rowntree Foundation – Reading The Riots Report and the  Neil ‘O Brien of The Telegraph – How the Guardian destroyed the left’s excuses for the riots

I’m still going through the Guardian/LSE report.  Here’s my  that I eft in the comments page of The Telegraphs critique of the Guardian report.

“This is a less a case of misreading the riots but more of balancing representation. For the last three months there has been plenty to-ing and fro-ing between “it was pure criminality” and “its poverty and disaffection”. Both land on the same landing strip. The lack of a deeper analysis behind the psychology and the enormity of emotion (or emotionlessness) driving some of the actions that took place over those few days.

Franz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth and theories behind the Psychology of Oppression raise issues around the ‘effect’ after the ’cause’ of sustained pressure and how the release from that pressure will manifest itself, sometimes not even against the original perpetrator of the oppression. The antipathy toward the police can begin at a very young age when children as young as 9 up into adulthood experience some kind of negative and repeated interaction with the police. Sustained and inherited frustration  inherited from family and peers, will seep out if the particular vibrancy of fervent youth is repressed. That’s just logical. Usually they implode, turn on each other. Over those six days the EXploded and played out the disaffection that is consistently simmering just under the surface.

WHY are these youths so ‘disaffected’ – which simply means not affected (emotionally and  empathetically) by the things “normal” people would be affected by – criminal activity, violence etc… It will happen again unless that human frustration is dealt with. And pretty much anyone would do the same thing under the same circumstances as this behavior is nurtured by them.

Also, if we want to start turning things on their heads we could say that those that are involved in robbery, burgulary and theft are just sustaining an  already existing “alternative economy” to satisfy the the psychological white noise of advertising, consumumerism and materialism while the access to the “legal” economy alienates them – ie no jobs, no access to apprenticeships, cutting EMA, raising University fees etc. A contraversial statement but its an alternative narrative to the entrenched mainstream stories drip fed to the public 24/7.

In terms of balancing representation, The Guardian/LSE publication of this report presents a scratching a little bit more of the surface than the deflecting and shouting down of the “rioters” voice that usually goes on or the fetishizing of the poor so people can appease a need to feel justified in left or right wing pontification on class.”

]]> http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/the-uk-riot-maze/feed/ 0 goodnewzee Riots-Police-officers-in--003 http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/britain-on-trial-a-public-debate/ http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/britain-on-trial-a-public-debate/#comments Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:14:54 +0000 Zena http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/?p=879 Continue reading →]]> The August ‘Youth’ Riots/insurrections was the tilling of a dry and cracked soil. I shall be attending and facilitating creative writing and performance responses at Britain on Trial this weekend. Young Voices Speak out against the way they’ve been MIS-represented in a dynamic event with film, spoken word discussion and debate in a judicial court stylie. COURT IS NOW IN SESSION!

As the re-trial for justice for Stephen Lawrence (Guardian article) begins, we ask “where are we now” through a day of workshops and an evening performance to expose Britain’s injustices.
Concerned about how young people are being treated? Get the feeling that justice is becoming more and more hard to find? That institutional racism is alive and kicking the next generation? Deaths in police custody. Increased surveillance. Fortress Britain. Cuts in education. Protests, ‘riots’ and looting…

Young people from Leeds Young Authors and Shake! alongside community activists, academics, and artists ask what does the present and future hold?

Participate in the discussion. Take part in creative workshops to find another way. Celebrate the struggle against injustice with two landmark films.
Admission is FREE but email platformshake@gmail.com for a place

]]> http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/britain-on-trial-a-public-debate/feed/ 0 goodnewzee BoT-hands-border http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/new-poetry-blog/ http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/new-poetry-blog/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 02:26:34 +0000 Zena http://goodnewzee.wordpress.com/?p=848 Continue reading →]]> I finally have one. “Ok why another blog?”, you might say.

Well, this blog is dedicated to the BIG projects and productions, the ones that take me all over the world, challenge my working artist head, that push my career as an artist forward. These blog posts trace the trajectory of the working poet that is “Zena Edwards”.

Zena Edwards BlogSpot is the intimate Zee.  Purely poetry, some photography, some  muse sketchings and a book review every now and then. There may be a duplication or two but check the archive and the labels for more of my work. Thanks for your support.

Go to Zena Edwards BlogSpot for my latest offerings