We’re well underway with Shake the Dust, the biggest youth poetry slam the UK has ever seen! We have poets working in school and out of school settings in every region in England, helping young people create, learn and perform their words. That’s ninety artists delivering spoken word workshops for around a thousand young people!

Before they began their epic task, the Poet Coaches and their Shadows (artists who are developing their skills and just starting to work in education) undertook some training with Jacob Sam-La Rose, Shake the Dust’s artistic director and slam workshop expert. We thought we’d share some of the photos from these sessions on the blog!

Do check out the website for more info about the project and see all the photos on our Flickr channel! You can also like Shake the Dust on Facebook and follow the project on Twitter.

Our activities here at Apples and Snakes are winding down over Christmas, but before everyone leaves the office for the holiday season we wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Tonight’s Jawdance at Rich Mix, London is our last show of the many events we put on or supported in 2011 around England. We’ve also worked with hundreds of poets in one capacity or another this year, and are excited to be doing all this and more next year.

We already have an exciting programme of regular shows and one-off live events, workshops and artist development opportunities lined up for 2012, so be sure to have a look at the What’s On section on the main site. Looking forward to seeing you at one of these!

One big thing to mention is Shake the Dust, our nationwide youth poetry slam project. Lots of work has already happened (check out the site for more into), but next year sees the start of our work with young people, culminating in regional and national slam finals. It’s going to be phenomenal.

We’re back in the office on Monday 3 January, ready for a new year of spoken word and performance poetry. Have a wonderful Christmas, and here’s to a prosperous and poetry-filled 2012!!

From,
all at Apples and Snakes.

A guest post from Nathan Thompson.

I strode up and down the long bar looking for the gig. I could hear the sound of poetry but could see no associated poet, audience or panel of judges – just a sparsely populated bar. Where is everyone? I was late – over an hour late. All because I had been holed up at home writing tales of modern alienation for the past 3 days seeing no-one and had put my clock back on Sunday 23rd October as opposed to the standard 30th. As I don’t have a TV, I still hadn’t realized my disagreement with GMT. And GMT won, like it always does.

The gig was Oxslam 2 where the best performance poets from Swansea and Cardiff clash poetic swords to raise money for Oxfam. Oh, and it turned out that the venue was actually underneath the bar, in an atmospheric converted wine cellar called The Vault – one of Swansea’s premier live venues. Down there, the acoustics were excellent and I decided to forego the use of a microphone for my first poem. I was so desperate for the toilet my performance had a knee-shaking angsty edge. As soon I finished I dashed off the stage. Luckily, the judges thought this was part of the performance and praised my dramatic exit while I was praising the availability of decent toilet facilities.

The Cardiff team was captained by ITV’s Nicholas Whitehead and featured poetry from Emma Williams, Tom Miller and Adam Johannes. The Swansea team was captained by acclaimed short story writer Howard Ingham and featured poems from Sarah Coles, Phil Night and I. Tensions were running high as the scores came in. It was very close but Swansea began to edge ahead of their Glamorganite rivals.

The interval featured an amusing, if pointless, raffle where every single person who bought a ticket got a prize. It was the only raffle I’ve seen where the amount of prizes outnumbered the amount tickets purchased. It was like playing pass the parcel at your mate’s 7th birthday party. The one with the doting mother who made sure everyone got a prize and all the guests left dizzy with toy-lust and orangeade. This was down to the good people at Parthian Books who kindly showered the event in free prizes to give away.

Swansea eventually triumphed and took the trophy back to their regular haunt, ‘the best dive bar in town’, Mozart’s. It was a close run thing and all participants gave performances to a very high standard. Welsh poetry legend, Mab Jones reported on the show for Vault Radio where some of the performances are available online. The night was a celebration of what is a vibrant literary scene in a criminally overlooked and beautiful part of the world.

Nathan Thompson is a freelance writer and poet. He can be found online at www.nathanwrites.wordpress.com or you can follow him on Twitter @NathanWrites

A blog post about Shake the Dust, an exciting new nationwide poetry slam project managed by Apples and Snakes.

It’s been a busy few months here at Apples and Snakes as we’ve been gearing up for the launch of Shake the Dust. I’ll be linking to the Shake the Dust website often during this post as, along with the rest of the Marketing and Shake team, we’ve built the Shake the Dust website from scratch and are rather proud of it. Of what? Of the Shake the Dust website!

Shake the Dust is a massive and ambitious project that involves people from the spoken word world at every level . In each of the nine regions of England, five teams of eight young people will work with a Poet Coach and a Shadow Artist to write, learn and perform their words. Each team will go on to a regional slam final, where the highest scoring team will progress to the National Shake the Dust Weekend at the Southbank Centre in London.

Though the focus is on the young people taking part, there are also fantastic opportunities for artists, teachers / educators and the general public to see what it’s all about. There have been Open Artist Masterclasses run by Jacob Sam-La Rose and held in conjunction with our Venue Partners in each region. I was lucky enough to take part in the London Masterclass in September along with Lisa Hitchen who wrote up her experience – read about it below. The next Masterclass is on Tuesday 25 October at Nottingham Playhouse by the way! Next week also sees the start of Open INSET training sessions for teachers, educators and youth workers interested in working with and supporting young people to develop their creativity, self-expression and confidence through poetry and spoken word. You can find out about all upcoming events on the Shake the Dust Events page.

The next step for artists is recruitment for Poet Coaches and Shadow Artists, which has just started. Artists will work with young people aged 13 to 16 from February to June 2012, delivering creative and interactive poetry workshops, leading to group and individual performances at the regional slam finals in June 2012. Selected teams will then go on to the National Shake the Dust weekend in London in July 2012. Check out the Poets page for more information about this brilliant opportunity!

We’re delighted that Lisa Hitchen, one of the participants of the Open Masterclass in London has blogged about her experience. The rest of this post is reproduced with permission from a longer, original blog post, which can be found on Lisa’s website here. Lisa is a journalist and writer based in London and is at the beginning of her career in performance poetry. She wants to work in schools with pupils on writing skills and speaking out, using their own words and feelings. You can contact her on lfhitchen@gmail.com.

Having attended Jacob Sam La Rose’s poetry and young people masterclass, I get the feeling that many performance poets are in touch with their inner wisdom. I can’t pretend that I got to know anyone that well during one energy-charged day of learning how to run your own workshops so why do I think this? Because standing up and speaking out with your voice and words and trying to be real, authentic, true and new in the way you tell it is big stuff. It takes a kind of courage to do that. If you are going to sound genuine, you have got to have dug down.

So I met with two women that both left school at 14, disillusioned with poetry then but now back into spoken word. “My poetry has given me a voice”, one said. She wanted to use it to challenge and encourage children through a medium they enjoyed not through analysis of ancient poets in dusty textbooks. And then there were two male primary school teachers running hip hop sessions in their lunch hour, seasoned workshop teachers working in schools and students unions and other beginners like me.

We went through loads of diverse practical exercises. Too many to write here but useful to try and test them. Only through practice can you see how they work and how difficult they might be for students. What was great about Jacob was that he constantly ‘checked in’ on all of us as we tried out group exercises, as he would do in the classroom. This helped us to keep on focus and on time but it also showed that he was present and committed to the group and to the session.

Jacob also reminded us of the enormity of what we are doing when we work with kids in this way: “That is humbling and powerful work that we are doing right there” and: “This is one of the few places where students can express their true feelings and be applauded for it”.

He ended the session by asking us: “What is your USP? What is your niche, what can you offer and what work do you want to do?” For me I see a natural link behind using poetry in a therapeutic context in schools, in workshops and in the community. And not just for kids either. I have written loads of stuff on motherhood and its daunting and difficult as well as fantastical and enriching journey. I reckon there are parents out there that would love to workshop their journeys too. If you are one of them, let me know.

Thanks Lisa! So Shake the Dust really has started – with artist development and training for educators, and the promise of some phenomenal spoken word from the young people of England, this will be an incredibly special project. Stay up to date with all the opportunities and news on the website: www.shakethedust.co.uk.

A guest post from our Poet of the Month, Dreadlockalien.

I work for the Write Down Speak Up collective formed in Birmingham 2011, delivering A.Q.A. Exam support workshops in poetry. Alongside my work as an educational arts practitioner, I’m currently working on a solo performance piece entitled Poet without Residence, in development for a U.K. tour in 2014.

I’ve performed for the British Council in Chennai, India; Warsaw, Poland; Osaka, Japan and Capetown, South Africa. I’ve also judged the Forward Poetry Prize 2010, hosted BBC Radio 4 slam poetry and was Birmingham Poet Laureate 2005/6.

I’m particularly looking forward to Shake the Dust and bringing a strong West Midlands team to the national finals, and I’ll be performing for Apples and Snakes in Southampton on 24th October at 451 in Southampton.

You can find out more about Dreadlockalien on his Apples and Snakes profile or through his Facebook page.

A guest post from our Poet of the Month, Aoife Mannix.

For me, poetry lies somewhere between music and prose in that the sound of the words is as important as their meaning.  Hearing poems aloud is an excellent way for audiences to appreciate their rhythm and musicality.  There is something about the special atmosphere of a live setting, that direct connection with an audience, that I find really inspiring.

Aoife Mannix

I began writing poetry at the age of eleven when my family moved from Dublin to New York.  I think it was the culture shock of being in America that first pushed me into putting pen to paper!  It was only when I emigrated from Ireland to London when I was twenty-two that I discovered getting up in front of an audience.  I’d entered a competition and failed to read the small print which said that if you were a finalist, you had to come and perform your poem.  When I got a phone call congratulating me on the opportunity to stand up in front of a bunch of complete strangers to present my poem, I found the idea terrifying.  However I went along and to my great surprise won the competition!

Since then I’ve got up in front of audiences in all kinds of different places.  I’m writing this in Latvia where myself and fellow poet Jacob Sam La Rose have been invited by the British Council.  So far we’ve performed on the top of a roof terrace of an old Soviet factory that’s been converted into an arts centre and in a huge parking lot with translations of our poems projected in large above us.  Tonight we’re performing in a theatre in Riga. These are my favourite kinds of gigs where I get to travel and meet people from different cultures.  (Check out the video of Jacob and Aoife in Latvia below! – ed.)

I’ve published four collections of poetry and a novel.  I also run creative writing workshops in schools, libraries, universities etc.  I feel it’s a real privilege to be able to make a living doing something I really love.

You can find out more about Aoife on her Apples and Snakes profile or on her website – www.aoifemannix.com.