London Word Festival 2010

7 March – 1 April 2010

With everything from music to stand-up, through shadow-puppetry, micro-lectures, screen-printing nuns and performance poetry, to crime-comic- jazz interpretations: this is the festival that looks way beyond the page.



THE CHIP SHOP

Sun 7 Mar

THE CHIP SHOP

Henningham Family Press

Toynbee Studio Arts & Cafe Bar | FREE | 12pm-5pm

Built from chip-board and replicating a full-size chippy, The Chip Shop is a fully functioning temporary screen printing workshop, serving up words printed on wooden board. It is conceived, built and manned by the Henningham Family Press.
Through evocative caricature, the installation draws parallels between two diverse processes: an old print method is reanimated, a familiar [...]

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ONE HUNDRED DAYS TO MAKE ME A BETTER PERSON with JOSIE LONG

Wed 10 Mar

ONE HUNDRED DAYS TO MAKE ME A BETTER PERSON with JOSIE LONG

The Pictish Trail & Adem
Isy Suttie, Sara Pascoe
Museum of One Hundred Days,
One Hundred Days short film by Alex Horne
Adem (DJ)

Work Dalston | £10 adv / £12 door | 7pm

ONE thing. Done ONCE Each Day. For ONE Hundred Days.
This is the gloriously simple premise behind Josie Long’s hundred day mission to make everyone a little friendlier, stronger, fitter, wiser or just plain jollier. Since 1st December 2009, indefatigable, affirmative action-hero Josie has been leading a group of comedians, writers and musicians on a brand [...]

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ROBIN INCE’S SCHOOL FOR GIFTED CHILDREN: ‘SPACE’ SPECIAL

Thu 11 Mar

ROBIN INCE’S SCHOOL FOR GIFTED CHILDREN: ‘SPACE’ SPECIAL

+ Brian Cox, Toby Hadoke, Josie Long, Helen Keen, Martin Austwick, Richard Sandling
& special guests

St Leonard's Church | £8 adv / £10 door | 7pm

In a big-bang edition of the high-achieving variety show, Robin gathers boffins and buffoons for an evening overflowing with affectionate joy towards life beyond the stars and all things scientific and massive. Joining Robin is Large Hadron Collider key-holder, co-host of BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage and erstwhile D:Ream keyboardist professor Brian Cox. [...]

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AVANT! NOIR

Fri 12 Mar

AVANT! NOIR

Music from Led Bib & Get The Blessing
Dark fiction from Toby Litt,
Cathi Unsworth, Courttia Newland
& Ray Banks
Visuals from Huzzah!! Noir

Toynbee Theatre | £10 / £12 door | 7pm

A night of criminal fiction, comic art and music of a darker hue. Enter a world where murder smells like honeysuckle and lunch is drunk from a bottle.  In Toynbee Theatre’s art deco, velvet auditorium, four authors present a selection of bleeding-edge crime stories, intercut with animated chapters of online, collaborative comic strip Huzzah!! Noir. [...]

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THE CHIP SHOP

Sun 14 Mar

THE CHIP SHOP

Henningham Family Press

Red Art Cafe-Bar | FREE | 12pm-5pm

Built from chip-board and replicating a full-size chippy, The Chip Shop is a fully functioning temporary screen printing workshop, serving up words printed on wooden board. It is conceived, built and manned by the Henningham Family Press.
Through evocative caricature, the installation draws parallels between two diverse processes: an old print method is reanimated, a familiar [...]

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STUART SILVER: YOU LOOK LIKE ANTS

Mon 15 Mar

STUART SILVER: YOU LOOK LIKE ANTS

+ Nathan Penlington: Uri & Me

The Courtyard Theatre | £9 adv, £11 door | 8pm

Taking equal inspiration from the epic, peeping-god photography of Andreas Gursky and the freehand outsider-art of David Shrigley, Stuart Silver presents his new ‘big picture show’ You Look Like Ants. Join Stuart and his rabbit on a round-about journey to K2, the world’s second highest peak.  Because a hairdresser told him to go there to [...]

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SHAD THAMES, BROKEN WHARF

Thu 18 Mar

SHAD THAMES, BROKEN WHARF

by Chris McCabe
music by Bleeding Heart Narrative
film by Jack Wake-Walker
+ Iain Sinclair

Jamboree, Cable Street Studios | £8 adv / £10 door | 8pm

The history of the Docklands is that of a city building upwards, from the monstrous bunkers of the docks themselves to the glass pillars at Canary Wharf. Whenever the means of profit-making have changed, Docklands has always been prescient and protean in its survival instincts. The success, and failure, of the current financial centre echo [...]

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KEEP PRINTING AND CARRY ON

Sat 20 Mar

KEEP PRINTING AND CARRY ON

Darren Hayman, Jo Neary & Murray Macauley
with the Henningham Family Press
+ The Chip Shop, Universettee Lectures, Sister Corita The Screenprinting Nun short film screening,
The Great Cake Escape & more tbc

Stoke Newington International Airport | £8 | 6pm

Printmaking, music, film and art combine in your friendly local airport turned ‘prints hamlet’ to celebrate minor British institutions of all shapes and sizes. This get-your-hands-dirty interactive showground plays host to performance, play, refreshment, a little learning and lots of creative fun. An after-hours model-village opening for the grown-ups.
Like Dogville but happy.
The Henningham Family Press collaborate [...]

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SCRABBLE SUNDAY

Sun 21 Mar

SCRABBLE SUNDAY

The Pembury Tavern | FREE | 4pm-10pm

Our friends from Scrabble Sunday host a Word Festival special. An afternoon of laid-back word-battle in East London’s best boardgaming pub. We bring the boards (lovely vintage, spinny twirly, junior and even giant are amongst our array), you bring the vocab. Play as you like: score, or don’t score; come on your own and let [...]

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OH, WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD

Tue 23 Mar

OH, WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD

+ A Pint for the Ghost by Helen Mort

Jamboree, Cable Street Studios | £8 adv / £10 door | 8pm

Over a century after they were first published, the ghost stories of M.R. James retain their power to terrify and amuse. Following his critically acclaimed one-man show A Pleasing Terror, Robert Lloyd Parry brings James’ classic spine-chillers back to life. Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad – a tale of nocturnal horror [...]

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TIM TURNBULL

Wed 24 Mar

TIM TURNBULL

+ Laura Dockrill
+ Luke Kennard
+ Instructions for Heartbreak
by Francesca Millican-Slater

Bethnal Green Working Men's Club | £6.50 adv / £8 door | 7pm

The cream of contemporary live poetry join forces for a night of surreal storytelling and darkly witty wordplay.
A century on from the rise of modernism, grimly hilarious Tim Turnbull offers a satirical survey of our new cultural landscape in a performance set featuring poems from his groundbreaking 2009 collection Caligula on Ice and Other Poems [...]

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LEAFCUTTER JOHN: BRIGGFLATTS REWIRED

Sun 28 Mar

LEAFCUTTER JOHN: BRIGGFLATTS REWIRED

+ Peter Finch
+ MacGillivray
+ Hannah Silva

Stoke Newington International Airport | £6.50 adv / £8 door | 7pm

“Brag, sweet tenor bull…”
Intrepidly inventive folk, jazz and electronic musical inventor Leafcutter John decodes epic Modernist poem Briggflatts for the digital century in a brand new commission.
Briggflatts Rewired takes Basil Bunting’s extraordinary and intensely musical poem as the starting point for a new, electronically-enhanced composition. In an event that explores the interplay between sound, voice [...]

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THE ART OF STORYTELLING

Wed 31 Mar

THE ART OF STORYTELLING

Terry Saunders' ‘Six and a Half Loves’
+ Matthew Robins
+ The Chip Shop Poem by Ian McMillan with the Henningham Family Press
+ The Tree of Lost Things
+ more tbc

St Leonard's Church | £8 adv, £10 door | 8pm

They say the art of the story is in the telling. But a little help from friends never went amiss. A coterie of skilled and award-winning yarn-spinners augment their narratives with puppets, cartoons, gift-tags from the audience and a live printing press.
Critically acclaimed comedian, storyteller and hopeless romantic Terry Saunders premieres his brand new Six [...]

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PLAY ON WORDS

Thu 1 Apr

PLAY ON WORDS

John Hegley
+ Found in Translation
+ Barbican Young Poets

Barbican Art Gallery | FREE | 7pm

We help celebrate another side of legendary London architect and visionary artist Ron Arad. For the industrial design maverick, inventor of the SMS displaying Swarovski Crystal chandelier, is also a word fanatic. In this special event in conjunction with Barbican Art Gallery’s retrospective, eccentric comic wordsmith John Hegley performs a selection of poems inspired by [...]

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Illustration by Oliver King

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Previous Festivals
LWF 2009
LWF 2008