Aoife Mannix and Janie Armour
Phrased & Confused is taking to the road again, this time headed for Leicester’s Summer Sundae Weekender, where we’ll be setting up home in the Phrased & Confused festival tent between 8th and 10th August.
Over three hopefully sunny days, we’ll be serving up hefty dollops of wordy gorgeousness – as songs, poems, readings, conversations and whatever else you want to call it. Our mission? To showcase some of the UK’s finest songwriters and poets and to introduce SSW audiences to some new artists who they’ll hopefully go on to treasure and tell the world about… Oh, and to try out our ideas for poetry bingo.
We’re also pretty chuffed to have been able to commission four artists to write new pieces especially for us (thank you Arts Council England for all your support!). Jean Binta Breeze, one of the world’s foremost female poets, tells tales of encounters – some real and some imagined – with reggae greats such as Bob Marley, Desmond Dekker and Toots and the Maytals, in Tongue Your Funky Rhythms in My Ear. Mark Grist and MC Mixy will be premiering their Dead Poets show, a series of character-based sketches which plays with the stereotypes that surround poetry and MCing and takes in Mixy’s first in-school encounters with the great poets and rules of poetry and Mark’s musings on a love poem from Sir Walter to Amy Winehouse. Another duo, this time poet Aoife Mannix and musician Janie Armour will be performing Different Words for Snow, which fuses live voice and accordion with pre-recorded text, piano, mandolin and percussion and other samples, and makes a few nods to shared heroes such as Patti Smith, John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Tom Waits. And finally, poet Andy Craven-Griffiths, whose piece sees him rhyming and – get this – drumming, to tell a modern day everyman story of a young man’s unrequited love for a seemingly perfect woman.
See www.myspace.com/aoifemannixandjaniearmour for more information