At the end of each day, we close the festival with a unique showcase, curated especially for the festival and performed only once.
Friday night’s showcase is directed by Yahmani Blackman. Here, we explore how Word on the Street is experienced beyond the context of the city. The focus is on poets who, in their work, share a deep connection to their natural surroundings, local communities, and all that lives (or has lived) within them.
For this programme, Poetry International collaborates with Red Dirt Poetry Festival, a poetry festival set in the natural landscape of the Australian desert. The festival is represented by Australian poet Melanie Mununggurr, who will be performing in the Netherlands for the first time.
Melanie Mununggurr (AUS, 1985) is a Djapu poet and spoken word performer from Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land, and winner of the Australian Poetry Slam National. Mununggurr belongs to the Yolŋu, an Aboriginal people with a long-standing tradition of storytelling. In her work, she weaves together English and Dhuwal (Yolŋu Matha), often returning to themes of Yolŋu identity and family.
Mununggurr performs alongside Raúl Cisneros and Marjolijn van Heemstra, two poets, each rooted in a very different environment and continent, yet both deeply connected to community, flora, and fauna in their own way.
Raúl Cisneros (PER) grew up in the farming community of Pariamarca in Ayacucho, Peru. He is the first poet at Poetry International Festival to write in Andean Quechua. In addition to being a poet, Cisneros is an actor, storyteller, and musician, and works on community theatre and arts education projects in Quechua and Amazonian communities.
Marjolijn van Heemstra (NLD) is a poet, writer, and theatre maker with a cosmic perspective and both feet firmly in the mud. In her work on space, time, and sustainability, she invites us to look differently at ourselves and the world we share with other forms of life.
