Calgary International Spoken Word Festival • April 11, 12
8 p.m. • The Club, Theatre Complex, The Banff Centre
Donation at the Door
Information: 403.762.6301
The Calgary International Spoken Word Festival returns to The Banff Centre this month for two evenings of pure poetry. On April 11 and 12 in The Club, an intimate, cabaret-style venue, the event will bring together poets and spoken word artists to scale the peaks of wild imagination.
Part of the month-long Festival in Calgary, the Banff events accompany a residency program for spoken word artists, the first to be developed in Canada. On April 11th, artists from the residency, both emerging and established, will be on stage with their work. Unpredictable, imaginative, personal, comedic, and rhythmic, spoken word crosses poetry with storytelling, sometimes adds music, and wraps everything up in an involving audience experience.
On April 12th, faculty from the Spoken Word program will take the stage at The Club. Artists will include Bob Holman from New York. Dubbed a member of the “poetry pantheon” by the New York Times, and “this generation’s Ezra Pound” by San Francisco Poetry Flash, recently collaborated with portrait artist Chuck Close on a collection of poems exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
From Montreal, poet-performer Ian Ferrier is the co-founder and executive producer of poetry and music label Wired on Words, and recently released a CD called What is this Place on Bongobeat Records. D. Kimm, also from Montreal, is the artistic director of performance and event group Les Filles electriques and organizer of Festival Voix d’Ameriques, Canada’s largest festival of spoken word and poetry in performance.
Calgary’s Sheri-D Wilson is a founder of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, and director of The Banff Centre’s Spoken Word program. She has published seven collections of poems, and produced two spoken word CDs and four award-winning video poems with BravoFACT! In 2007, she created the Spoken Word Arts Network to build connections within this growing artistic genre.