Strange
it may be but Norwich is a poetry monsterland. The amount of good poets it has
produced, through uea, and its cushy environs, of my generation, is really
impressive / unnerving. A fine place for the last show (?) The town was Norfolk
festivalled – quaint, yokelfest, saw morris dancing. The arts / writers centre
is such a beautiful venue and lovely people throughout its tunnels, had some
lovely exchanges with those people, and ate their food. Everyone on the tour
seemed very balanced, calm, happy with what we’d done, still growing into those
ideas, still critical, but neither nostalgic or overwrought. No worn out
sentiment about the benemothian undertaking of EVP, which has been great and
for me personally a success for all the challenges it posed were new, and I
sucked in loads from those conflicts. Good to know...,
consistently, adapting each night – learning all the time from my tour peers,
the venues, the space, the techs, the producers, the work, the memorising, the
acting, maybe even the audience (though still in general I believe what I
always did – balls at them) Probably the end of this character too, a last dada
hurrah for the retch acorah shaman bear host spine birdkiller.
A poet who changed the face of twentieth century poetry, Tadeusz Różewicz is a giant of Polish literature and undoubtedly one of the most important poets the country has ever produced. Still writing in his 91st year, his lifetime engagement with groundbreaking poetry, fiction and plays has spanned, and often encapsulated, the seismic tumult of the past century in his home nation. His poetic is the rarest of things, an anti-art that resides still within the realm of the explicable, and the ethical, striding between the utterly personal and the political – often brutal in its beauty and intensity, it is an aesthetic that is wholly his own, unique and unwavering. His first poems were published in 1938, before he served in the Polish underground home army in WWII. His brother, Janusz, also a poet, was executed by the Gestapo. This desolate chapter in our collective European history produced few artists and writers able to even begin to make sense of such destruction, but the eruption of poetry and dramaturgy that followed the war experiences of Tadeusz Różewicz has set him aside as one of the most respected innovators and stylists in modern European history. In the decades since the war he has continued to produce extraordinary literature, winning the Nike prize, the Griffin prize and the European literature prize, and now, on the eve of a brand new translation, into English, of his work ‘Mother Departs‘ by Stork Press, we are proud to elevate the Maintenant series with the inclusion of Tadeusz Różewicz, our 97th poet.
mad maxville, the place the students used to call mount doom in durham. actually an enjoyable day, a train over Yorkshire from Manchester to start, to Thornaby. Then it was explained to me what MadeinChelsea was, sonic interruption, a t=rex swipe into buildings, half the shops shut, like depression shut, tattoos on the back of a man's head in caffe nero. The Arc is a beautiful theatre, like a roman outpost for art. Wandering Stockton for hours and hours. I'd been before but why? I did many circles. Lots of charity shops. Bought a blue crocodile, a pig and a whoopie cushion. Listening to arvo part, a mistake, too many ideas for novels. The show itself was good, nerveless again, swishing, seemed to be easier now. Even the closer wasn't too hurtful and draining, but enough. A couple talked in the front row, I cane pointed them, adlibbed the most since Brighton. Premier fucking inn again, but a privilege even that. Second to last. Such fast passing, sad, learned too much.
As the centenary of Cabaret Voltaire looms ever closer, poet SJ Fowler has been adopting Dadaist methodologies as a way of questioning our own preconceived notions. Drawing on Dada’s own sense of terror and menace, Fowler’s “Electric Dada” asks the audience to consider what it might actually mean to make contact with the dead. Or, rather, what it might mean for the dead to contact us. Far from hearing the comforting voices of our dearly departed, Fowler conjures up a profoundly more painful and unsettling affair. “Death has a language”, he sinisterly declares onstage, then, without waiting for an invitation, continues: “I will give you that sound.”
steven-fowler-the-enemies-project-2 
Bethnal green road back + forth twice. Another day beginning before it really began. This is the show that means the most to me. It happened, certainly, and a breaking point, where I no longer have a clue how it is. Others are positive, so it is all positive. I committed to it. I felt the (in)famous frost where I was used to some rictus chuckle from elsewhere audiences, there was less. a lesson here, but it was pressure, so familiar the ground, and the expectation. quite big actually. a night waiting on stairs, feeling tremors and then letting loose, realising niceness was needed to really spear. i did spear. people in lifts, im told, saying they wanted to run, that it made them feel ill, afraid. I fell back on what I can do, to eat up that drop. I had plenty of use for the disdain early accrued. All tied together in the end, I think, more than before, it fused, my works across the night, all the work really. We hoped it would when it should and it did, I suppose, if I can be any judge of that, which I can't. The less I know of this stuff the better, for I cannot know. When it does not die in childhood we can seal it off, return to the next. But still, some weight and I ended up with pub threats and massive eviscerating expellation of the gullet. The pints of cold coffy, lukewarm strawbshake and oliveoilberrysmoothie did not see the light of day. Other things did. Slept in my own bed.
Saint Georges Hall is a ridiculous place to look out from, into an audience. My mum tells me her dad used to take her there every saturday morning, this must have been in the mid 50s. More time in a city my family is rooted in but I never returned to until doing things with art / performance. The view from the green room is immense. A day of dressing room with Outfit, http://www.everynightidressupasyou.
Groups of men in tight t-shirts, and I say men, those in their 40s, stared at me aggressively because I was wearing light blue trousers. The Baltic is a wonderful gallery. To play at the Sage is an achievement for me http://thesagegateshead.org/ We passed Durham on the train up, where I went to study, and haven't been back since. Three years of my life between Durham, Newcastle, Middlesborough, Stockton, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Chester-le-street. The train journey becomes the centre of what I aim to take in, the company of others, the experiential focus which allows me to put my own experience first, to appreciate the opportunity at all possible moments, to utilise the unique and challenging nature of the performance and its demands, and the company of those demands, to put the audience second, in order to benefit them. Met http://www.hetainpatel.com/ for the first time, a deeply generous and warm presence. 
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