Jawdance is in full swing this October, featuring a line up of Thembe Mvula, Russeni and Khadijah Ibrahiim. Kat Francois will be hosting and as ever the evening will feature an open mic opportunity. Join us for London’s biggest evening of Spoken Word with some fantastic performances from faces you may or may not know.
Open mic names are chosen by names drawn from a hat at random. Everyone is welcome to add their name to the hat. Jawdance is a supportive environment and welcomes first-timers and those who are well-seasoned.
Host
Kat Francois
The first person to win a televised poetry slam in the UK, a year later she won the World Slam Championships.
As a playwright, Kat has written and performed two internationally staged solo plays, and two comedy shows.
Raising Lazarus, Kat’s play dealing with the experiences of Caribbean soldiers in World War One, continues to tour globally to critical acclaim, and formed part of the WW1 centenary and featured at Imperial War Museum.
Kat has worked with young people for many years, as a youth worker, PHSE Facilitator, also teaching dance, drama, creative writing, poetry and performance skills and school slams. She is an established playwright and director of youth theatre, devising and directing plays for theatres including Theatre Royal Stratford East, Roundhouse Camden, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith.
View her website.
Line-UP
tHEMBE MVULA
Thembe Mvula is the author of We That Wither Beneath, her debut prize shortlisted poetry pamphlet. As a multidisciplinary artist, Thembe works across the written word, performance and film.
Thembe has headlined nationally and internationally as a performance poet, including at the Tate Modern, Oslo Afro Arts festival and has featured at Latitude and Cheltenham literature festivals. Her TEDx talk on The Power of Poetry and Vulnerability has been translated into Mandarin and Cantonese.
She recently collaborated on a short film about reappropriating history, constructing identity and stories of migration to the UK. In dialogue with the works of Carrie Mae Weems, the film was screened at the Barbican Centre in the summer of 2023.
Visit Thembe’s website
Russeni
Russenï is an explosive actor & poet with unique performance abilities. An acclaimed spoken word artist, he has featured widely, including events at the Olympic Park, Southbank and as opening act for The Last Poets at the Love Box Festival.
As an actor, Russeni has worked extensively with London Bubble Theatre where he developed a passion for creating topical, interactive theatre based on real life experiences.
Khadijah Ibrahiim
Khadijah Ibrahiim was born in Leeds of Jamaican parentage. Educated at the University of Leeds, she is a literary activist, theatre maker and published writer, who combines’ inter-disciplinary art forms to re-imagine poetry as performance theatre.
Hailed as one of Yorkshire’s most prolific poets by the BBC, her work appears in university journals and poetry anthologies. Her collection Another Crossing; was published by Peepal Tree Press 2014. Khadijah has performed and produced art programs in the USA, Caribbean, Africa and Asia. In 2010 she was writer in residence for El Gouna writes, Egypt, the same year she travelled to South Africa as part of the British council Verbalized sustained theatre program. In 2017 and 2019 she was short listed for the Jerwood Compton poetry Fellowship. In 2018 she was shortlisted for the Sue Rider ‘Yorkshire Woman of the Year for her contribution to the arts.
She is the Artistic director of Leeds Young Authors, and executive producer of the award winning documentary ‘We Are Poets’. In 2017 she was creative associate for the production Ode To Leeds at the Leeds Playhouse. Khadijah is an associate artist with the Geraldine Connor foundation ‘GCF’ and co-coordinator for inscribe readers and writers development program for Peepal Tree Press.