My Place Or Yours – Project Overview

Apples & Snakes is the leading organisation for performance poetry in England. It stretches boundaries through a pioneering, high quality, accessible and inclusive approach.

My Place or Yours is the latest Apples & Snakes project. It pioneers a new form of writer residency in which audiences and practitioners can watch and comment as the poets undertake their six week residencies.  The poets will share work in progress through an online blog, with written, visual and audio elements and also share critical discussions around the evolution of their work as the residency progresses.  Each poet has been commissioned to write twenty minutes of new work on the theme ‘My Place or Yours’.  The new work will be performed as part of a showcase performance at the conclusion of the project and/or during the course of the project.  The residencies are happening in a range of places – including an allotment, working with young people in a city, rural homeless people etc.

Apples & Snakes aims to be accessible to all its audiences through live and on-line events in their locality and as part of a national and international matrix of activity.   This project curates activity that audiences engage with creatively as part of the process as well as the presentation.  This forms a process of devolution that gives power to those who may not currently have it and acts as an engagement between the twenty-first century art form and a twenty-first century audience.  The audience are able to experience the work live, or virtually – in a range of places  (in their local poetry venue or with a poet on their street/allotment and/or online, from their living room/bedroom/mobile phone etc etc etc)