Big Chill

For those of you who are hard of thinking or have only just tuned in, the spoken word performance at last week’s Big Chill festival was the culmination of months of effort for all the writers concerned, for their mentors and for director Thierry Lawson. Rukus, Byron Vincent, Emma McGordon and my own dear mentee Charlie Jordan got up on stage to deliver their collaborative piece, based on residencies across the UK.

Charlie and Dreadlockalien

I met up with them all on the Saturday morning and loitered backstage to help them chew their fingernails. In fact they were supremely calm. Being a mentor at this stage is a bit like being a midwife – you can make helpful noises but ultimately, your support is almost irrelevant. Byron, Rukus, Emma and Charlie just had to get up on stage and do their thing.

Last minute rehearsals

And so they did; with poise, with confidence, with panache and in Charlie’s case, with a borrowed West Brom shirt. The mixture of urbane Charlie and urban urchin was very endearing. They all looked comfortable, credible and committed. They faced a festival-going audience, many of whom had only happened by, or had been sucked in by MC Dreadlockalien’s ‘whoop and holler on command’ strategy: and the poets held that audience’s attention for 45 minutes and more.

The staging was simple but powerful. Tactics like Rukus ‘heckling’ Byron and then coming forward to take the mike, or the four poets moving together in Charlie’s piece We Are Albion, worked well, and each poet had given a lot of thought to their My Place or Yours residency. Well done all. Most of them can now put their feet up for a while – but Charlie’s residency continues for a few weeks more and I’m looking forward to continued draft-swapping and critiquing.

So well done to them and thanks to Apples and Snakes for giving us all the opportunity to enjoy this project. Mind you, I’m a bit disappointed not to have received more congratulations myself. After all, I did sort out all that sunshine as promised, at great personal expense. And was anyone grateful? Well….. we’ll overlook it this time…