Poetry

18. On voices

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We talk to two spoken word performers, Lian Low and Eleanor Jackson, about writing for the page and for performance, and how they support other writers – especially through Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine, Peril.

Listen here

https://audioboom.com/posts/6357572-on-voice-eleanor-jackson-and-lian-low

Our guestsEleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer and radio broadcaster. She is chair of the board of Peril Magazine and its former editor in chief, and is also a board member of the Stella Prize, Australia’s largest writing prize for women.

Her poetry is published in Overland Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Peril Magazine, Scum Magazine and the Cordite Poetry Review, FBI’s “All the Best“, RRR’s “Aural Text”, 3CR’s “Spoken Word”, ABC Radio National’s “Night Air” and the online poetry channel, “IndieFeed: Performance Poetry”.

Her radio play, Agent Ion, was featured as a part of Radiotonic for ABC Radio National, and her short fiction, The Transfer, appeared in Review of Australian Fiction.

In 2014-2015, she was Artist in Residence at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane.

Here’s Eleanor performing  ‘Shave and a Haircut’, one of the pieces she mentions in our conversation.

Lian Low is a writer, editor and spoken word artist.Lian Low

She is a former chair of the board, and editor-in-chief, of Peril.

Lian worked on the performance text for the sold-out Do you speak Chinese? which was part of the Dance Massive program, held at the Malthouse Theatre in 2015.  

Her work has been published in When Our Children Come Out: How to Support Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Young People, Growing Up Asian in Australia, ArtsHub, Kill Your Darlings, Chart Collective and various queer street press.

In 2013 and 2014 she was a festival artist at the Melaka Art and Performance Festival in Malaysia, one of the world’s largest site-specific art and performance festivals held on a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

Watch some of Lian’s community performance work as part of Melaka here.

In 2014, she was a selected playwright for Lotus: Asian Australian Playwriting Melbourne program and for the Kultour Artists Gathering in Melbourne.

PS: Accidental interview background music was provided by a nearby choir practice, loud enough to penetrate our soundproof studio. Think of it as community engagement.

13. On sounds

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 We talk to two powerful poets and performers who work across and beyond a range of narrative and performative forms and traditions.

 

Unladylike caught up with Natalia Molebatsi and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers on a recent visit to South Africa.

 

Listen here

https://audioboom.com/posts/5511544-on-sounds-natalia-molebatsi-and-phillippa-yaa-de-villers

 

Our guests

 natalia
Natalia Molebatsi is a writer and poet who has appeared throughout Africa, Europe and
the USA. Her performances and recordings, often with her band The Soul Making, combine poetry with with jazz, funk and hip hop.
Her first collection  was Sardo Dance (Ge’ko Publishing, 2012), and her work appears in anthologies such as Letter to South Africa: Poets Calling the State to Order, Happiness the Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, New Coin, and the Anthology of World Poetry, and in academic journals. Nathalia edited We Are: A Poetry Anthology published by Penguin, and has run creative writing workshops all over the world.
Her performances available on CD include Come as you are: Poems for Four Strings (also on Spotify) and Natalia Molebatsi & The Soul Making.
You can read and hear some of Natalia’s poetry on Badilisha Poetry Exchange or watch her in performance on YouTube.

 

Phillippa Yaa de Villiers is a writer and performance artist. She has written for television and the stage, and in 2014  was the Commonwealth Poet, performing at Westminster Abbey in the presence of 2000 representatives of the Commonwealth and the Royal Family.
Her collections of poetry are Taller than Buildings (Centre for the Book, 2006) and The Everyday Wife (Modjadji Books, 2010). She edited No Serenity Here, an anthology of African poetry,  and her writing has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her plays include Where the Children Live, and the autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which toured  in South Africa and abroad.
Like much of her work, Original Skin centres on Phillippa’s negotiation of  her identity. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, and brought up by her adoptive parents, a white family in apartheid South Africa. She didn’t discover she was adopted until she was 20 years old. Since then she has lived and studied in France and England, returning to South Africa to teach creative writing.

 
Image of Phillippa

 

You can read and hear some of Phillippa’s work on Badilisha Poetry Exchange or the Poetry Archive. There’s an extract from her performance of Original Skin on YouTube.

 

Be warned: Bad music alert
The fusion of sound and words in these interviews is unintentional – we recorded one interview in a pub, so please forgive the background noise (including the worst song ever written). It does improve as it goes on. We promise to never record near cutlery again.

 

Our thanks to Professor Deirdre Byrne of the University of South Africa’s Institute for Gender Studies for arranging the interviews,  asking a question or two of Phillippa, and taking Kelly to see giraffes.