All Shoved Together

First Draft‘s first new and improved cabaret event

Monday 17 August at The Castle Hotel

7.30pm – FREE

If you were at our last event, you’ll have heard that we’re making a bit of a change to the way we run our regular cabaret nights at First Draft. Instead of a ‘theme’ for each event, we’re going to try out providing a prompt, which will come from a creative person of our choosing, and be given to all performers who sign up to respond to in whatever way they see fit.

The first prompt comes from brand new First Draft team member, Harry Jelley.

Line up of performers

Ros Ballinger – poetry

Ronnie Leek – poetry/fiction

Megan Holland – fiction

Jimbo Agogo – poetry

Gareth Cutter – spoken word

Mark Powell – spoken word

****

Adam Blaize – comedy

Lydia Hounat – poetry

Sam Rossi-Harries – dramatic monologue

Ailish Breen & Abi Hynes – music & storytelling

Trisha Starbrook – fiction

Hosted by Harry Jelley

Coming? Let us know on Facebook

Harry’s prompt: All Shoved Together

A house is a house until you look closer and see bricks and look inside and see bathroom, bedroom, living room, tiles, grouting. Sometimes it’s more useful to think of things as a simple bigger thing, like don’t drive into that house. Sometimes its more useful to use a more specific word. If a housemate asks you where the hoover is and you say “in the house” you’ve not got much further.

Like writing Harry Jelley, 32 Palatine Road, Manchester, Lancashire, UK, Europe, The Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe, This Universe — when is precision useful? When is it restrictive? When is excess exciting or funny?

All Shoved Together

There are
tape cassettes
mobile phones
red bowls/blue bowls
wine glasses with classic cars etched on them
carved wooden boxes
metal vesta boxes

all on the table

all shoved together
all to be sold.

abstract as the incoherent thoughts
tightened together
in the electrical/organic/soulful?
minds
that shoot wild —
gift wrapped
by outside eyes into a name.

Like. Say.
Norway. Or. Say.
The Post Office.
Or. Say.
Dogs.

All usefully sized
purposefully projected
softly supported in a crucible word.

Here I’ll call it Car Boot.
Then the drill bits and ice cream
underwear and garden forks

broken watches and open sky.
It all makes sense
when you place it into a spoken mould/
thought brace/imagined skin.