30th Anniversary | applesandsnakesblog.org

Season’s Greetings from Apples and Snakes!

Dear Apples and Snakes friends – just a quick message with season’s greetings, and to wish you a very happy new year!

2012 has been a big year for Apples and Snakes, with our huge youth participation programme Shake the Dust happening across England throughout the summer. We’ve also celebrated our 30th Anniversary, with 30 Events in 30 Days, nine brand new poetry commissions and artists blogging about Apples and Snakes’ history – have a look at what we got up to here.

Next year promises to …

30th Anniversary wrap up!

All through November we’ve been celebrating Apples and Snakes’ 30th anniversary. Here’s what we’ve been up to!

We staged 30 Events in 30 Days across England: starting with a bit of a party at Free Word Centre for the people we work with – have a look at photos from the event below! Throughout November we put on artist workshops, live gigs and education events, all culminating in our big John Cooper Clarke show last weekend in partnership with The Albany, who are also celebrating their 30th! Even …

Spoken Word 2042! The 30th Anniversary Commission

Not only are we remembering our thirty years of pushing the power of poetry to the public, we are also wondering about the future of spoken word (the next thirty years) and what it holds. To inspire our thoughts with their poetical prose, we commissioned nine poets from around the regions who each performed at our 30th Anniversary launch party at the Freeword Centre!

The theme for this special commission: Spoken Word 2042…. We want to look forward, to explore what the future holds, and imagine what might be …

Carl Sealeaf: A review on Spoken Word

Spoken Word has been a community for a long time now – an extended family where everybody knows each other and at least once a year there’s a big party where everyone gets together to talk, reminisce and share poetry in the upstairs room of a pub whose name is more iconic in poetry than Charles Dickens’ was in Victorian literature. We practically glow with positivity and welcome newcomers with such encouragement and support that they can’t help falling in love with us. I know I did.

I can …

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost
For want of a rider the message was lost
For want of a message the battle was lost
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail…

One tiny spark starts everything off. One Apple and Snake caused a new working life. 2,000 years plus of a new religion. More than one spark–what happens …

Kenny Baraka: Making Moves in Spoken Word

I left Brooklyn in search of a new banner under which to march.

Almost ten years later I am proud to count myself among the many Apples & Snakes frontline soldiers; brazen, courageous technicians of the word and its extrapolations. And like all the great armies of Good, Apples gave me the opportunity to be all I could imagine. And more. Not only was I expected to hone my skills and showcase my abilities, my talents but much more importantly the charge of evolve our craft through teaching it to …

Zolan Quobble: 30 Years On

Apples and Snakes dispenses words looking for a shared social experience. Their medium is not paper, it’s the body of the performer. A performance poem is aloud. It’s composed for an event. Ideally it is an event. Apples and Snakes services a real fundamental impulse. Strip any culture down to its basic expression and you uncover minds marshalling vocabulary, emotion and imaginative resonances to inspire with truth. Sometimes you’re given it straight, sometimes in a cocktail of flavours with sound, music, storytelling, comedy or theatre. It’s shamanic cabaret.

What could …

Apples and Snakes Board member Kerry Featherstone on spoken word

It only takes a couple of bites. You can be tempted by a ‘Snakebasket’, or hear something in your school. And then it starts!

Seeing Polarbear at The Albany, the open-mic in Soho, slams making the walls wobble. Watching clips from Shake the Dust; kids strutting and confident in newfound poetics; voices raised in celebration over Olympic Park. Clicking through the website A-Z of writers and performers for A&S; reading the names of new shows and gigs. Who are these people?

And then sitting in an audience to …

Nick Field: Championing Change with Apples

I can honestly say that Apples and Snakes changed everything for me. When I first started performing my work, four years ago or so, I’d mainly written for theatre so other people had always performed my words. I wanted to shake things up a bit and so I wrote pieces I could perform myself and took them to open mics, including Apples and Snakes. I started to get a lot of offers to perform, which was great, but I also wanted to fuse my theatre experience with spoken word, and …

Rosemary Harris: From Sydney to London

Exciting Writing. That was where I first heard of Apples and Snakes. The title of the Arvon course reached me in Edinburgh where I was living (having moved from Sydney), and in 1999 I schlepped to Lumb Bank in Yorkshire to see just what was so exciting about it. I met Steve Tasane, Patience Agbabi, Lemn Sissay, among others – all most definitely exciting writers and all set to change my life. I was blown away by their energy, their passion, their commitment to language …