BRADFORD: Word Life

Friday, 15th April, 2011, 7.30pm, £6.50/£5/Students pay what you can

Theatre In The Mill

Bradford

Tickets: 01274 233200
theatre@bradford.ac.uk

Word Life - featuring Denis Jones, Polar Bear, Joe Hakim, Andy Cook and open mic. Hosted by Joe Kriss.

Denis Jones played for Word Life this time last year, and was so good we had to invite him back. Over the last four years he has developed a show-stopping live performance based around the core of his exceptional and unique guitar-playing style and rich, soulful voice. Utilising a loop station and all manner of samplers and effects, Denis creates vast, complex orchestrations of beat-box rhythms, multi-layered vocals and other-wordly sounds which veer from subtle heart-wrenching folk and blues to heavy bass-driven electronica. Denis has collaborated with many high profile artists from all over Europe, including a track with Dusseldorf artist Kemo which was included on Marcus Intelex's Fabric Live 35 compilation. He has also worked with John Ellis and Luke Flowers (Cinematic Orchestra), Jon Thorne (Lamb) and Henry Da Massa (Micah P Hinson). He released his new album called 'Red + Yellow =' in October 2010..

Polar Bear aka Steve Camden is one of the most accomplished performance poets in the UK. His poem 'Jessica' has clocked up over 50,000 views on youtube, and is widely considered to be one of the best individual examples of spoken word in the UK.  Polar Bear has toured the country, appearing at some of the most acclaimed festivals and arts venues including Latitude, Glastonbury, The Jazz Café, Southbank Centre, and has toured three one man shows, exploring the relationship of spoken word between narrative, cinema and music.

Joe Hakim is a writer, poet and spoken word performer from Hull. He was the winner of Poetry Idol 10, a spoken word competition held at Shortfuse in Islington. Since then he has been performing around the UK on a regular basis with residences at Contact in Manchester, Birmingham REP, the Battersea Arts Centre, the Shunt Vault, the Crossing Borders project in Mytholmroyd and Hyperlexic presents: Poetry Boxing. He performed his debut show 'Poetry is Dead' at the Camden Fringe Festival 2008 along with co-writer and performer Mike Watts. His short story 'Difficult People' was the runner up in BBC Radio 3 The Verb's Chekov Short Story competition in January 2010. He first book 'No Light/Might Escape' has just been published by Night publishing.

Andy Cook is a spoken word artist from Sheffield. He is to audiences what card tricks are to kids. He studies English with Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.