ONLINE 1-Day Short Course: Introduction to Performing Your Poetry

With Jasmine Gardosi

Saturday 28 November, 10am – 4.30pm, live teaching via Zoom Online Meeting

[meeting invite to be sent after ticket confirmation]

Join our online classroom for a fun, lively, one-day workshop in a supportive and encouraging group of a maximum of fourteen participants.

Are you thinking of performing your poetry for the first time, or are you relatively new to sharing your work aloud? Perhaps you’re looking to try your work out before performing it at open mics, or maybe you’ve been sharing your work for a while and simply want to increase your confidence and perform with more intention?

The spoken word and performance poetry scene is a dynamic, exciting community and an effective way to share and get your work heard – both live and online. It can also be incredibly scary. But there is so much to explore in performance, and so many possibilities for our work. Better yet – no one poet has the same performance style. Through this course, you will learn how your own individual strengths will enable you to do justice to your poems off the page.

Throughout the day you’ll build an arsenal of techniques and key elements of performance such as posture, eye contact, volume, speed and expression. Together, we’ll use these to draw out the qualities in your poems to develop effective performances. You’ll also learn tips for memorisation, managing nerves and open mic event etiquette.

You’ll leave the session confident and excited in what you, as an individual poet, have to offer through performance, with an awareness of the tools at your disposal and the knowledge on how to go out into the performance world to use them.

Attendees are asked to bring 1-3 poems on which to practise their performance technique.

Biography:

Jasmine Gardosi is a multiple slam champion, Birmingham Poet Laureate finalist and recent winner of the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry. A previous BBC Arts Young Creative and Poet in Residence for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, she is a current Poet in Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Jasmine uses audience participation, beatboxing and manipulation of voice and body in order to explore LGBTQ+ issues, sex education and mental health. Her work has appeared across BBC Radio, at the Tate Modern, Glastonbury Festival, and on Button Poetry.

She is a Ledbury Poetry Festival Trustee and leads West Midlands Poets’ Place and other school and community workshops. Her debut pamphlet Hurtz is published by the award-winning Verve Poetry Press.

Please note: you must sign up for the full course even if you do not complete the course. No partial course ticket is available.

Online and in-person Short Courses are for over 18s. If you are a young writer, you can sign up for our Spark Young Writers Programme.