One of my favourite posts of last month was in recounting our lovely evening at the Cross Keys, Llanfyllin for the open mic night, where we'd enjoyed sharing our own musical and poetic offerings, as well as soaking up all the other talent. A month rolls round fast these days and we were there again last night for more live arts; It was every bit as good and didn't disappoint!
 | I read a few poems, one for the coming summer solstice, a rather more political one in (dis)respect of the coming election, and a piece from my collection Heart Space. Nik wowed the room again with an abridged arrangement of a late night raag (well, 9pm feels quite late sometimes) and we shared our latest meander into merging sitar with a Pali chant, wishing all beings be well and happy. We've popped a recording of a version of that online here, so you can check it out at your leisure! |
| That two of my friends from the community at Taraloka also made the impressive effort to drive an hour from Bettisfield to join us was big part of the joy of last night for me and it was totally lovely to hear Natalia's songs and Clair's poems. Natalia is a trained singer with a professional operatic background, though she was occupying a more folky territory last night with guitar in hand. I was delighted when she played my favourite of her repertoire (so far) a ballad she wrote after a dream about the relationship between a human girl and a mythical race of wild, one eyed horses! | |
Clair has a very different style of performance but held the room none the less rapt with her softly spoken poems of such delicate observational detail that we were all inspired to fall in love with the beauty of the leopard slug in a midnight kitchen and transported to curl up gently into the ruby depths of a hollow raspberry.
Of course, there was the usual mix of other, equally impressive talent and we were also treated to acapella harmonies, ukulele, banjo and spoken word. We even had an interactive sea shanty sing song at one point that had the whole room going! We're getting closer and closer to properly launching the whole Earth Heart project (think glamping meets community arts as a quick summary) and I couldn't help but gaze round the room of so many accomplished local performers and imaginatively gather them all in a cosy yurt for even more sessions of sharing and collaboration. More about all that soon though; the future holds so much potential but last night was another beautiful evening of skill, joy, connection, friendship and expression very much in the bag. It doesn't get much better than that!
RSS Feed
