Hammer & Tongue Slam featuring Ian Keteku, with Tristram Fane Saunders

Order tickets via Eventbrite: http://htc_april13-efbevent.eventbrite.co.uk
Time again for the next round of the Cambridge Hammer & Tongue 2012-2013 season… Spoken word artistry and competitive mayhem. What more could you want?

This is your chance to become part of the spoken word slam brilliance that has graced this here fair city for over a year, in the warm and wonderful surroundings of fabulous venue The Fountain. Sign up as one of the eight to compete for a place in the Regional Final next September, or just dive in and soak up the atmosphere and talent on display. And some great beer.

Tickets are a silly £5 full price/ £3.50 concessions/ £2 for slammers in advance and a frankly ludicrous £6.50/ £5/ £3 on the door. Doors are at 7:30pm; kick-off at 8pm. There’s also a bar upstairs… 😀

Ian Keteku’s autobiography begins at the tender age of 6 when he was first introduced to poetry and creative writing. The piece he scrawled on loose-leaf was about a recent family trip to the zoo. Since then, Keteku has been chronicling his world travels, writing about everything from his laptop to social justice and uses his words to free humanity from its own mental cages.

The most recent chapter in this autobiography took place in Paris, France where Ian Keteku was crowned the 2010 World Poetry Slam Champion.

This artist also known as Emcee E uses his voice to speak for the voiceless and inspire messages of peace, action and critical thought. He has performed his poetry and music all over the world and continues to plant seeds of poetic justice globally. Ian is also part of the critically acclaimed spoken word troupe The Recipe.

He has shared the stage with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Ursula Rucker, members of the Wu Tang Clan, K-OS, critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams and others. In addition, he had the opportunity to perform for the Governor General of Canada (Michaëlle Jean), on three occasions.

Find out more at http://www.ianketeku.com/

And he’ll be supported by Tristram Fane Saunders – at nineteen years old, Tristram has already been turning in some excellent reviews for his performances at the Edinburgh Fringe, and has appeared on the bill alongside such poetry royalty as John Cooper Clarke and Simon Armitage. Based in Cambridge during term time, where he studies English and is editor of The Cambridge Student newspaper, Tris is a busy boy, whether it’s acting, or music journalism, or cross country running or playing jazz punk on the piano, or writing poems covering themes including but not limited to love, food, death, God, tea and miserable Scottish indie-pop. http://tristramfanesaunders.blogspot.co.uk/

Hosted by Fay Roberts.

“Hammer & Tongue have reinvented the medium for the hip hop generation” (The Guardian)

“The best live poetry is to be found at The Hammer & Tongue slams” (The Sunday Times)

Contact us on Facebook, or on cambridge@hammerandtongue.com or 07908 488009.

http://www.hammerandtongue.co.uk/

Fancy Slamming?

The rules for H&T slams are as follows:

Slammers are chosen at random from the sign-up list to perform – spoken word only, no music, no props. Each competitor has 3 minutes from the time they start talking on the mic. After 30 seconds’ grace period, they start losing points (1 point for every 10 seconds!). At the end, they’re given points out of 10 by 5 judges chosen from the audience, while the top and bottom scores are removed to ensure fairness. The slammer gets a score out of 30, and the competition moves on.

The winner of that evening’s competition goes through to the Regional Final (the Cambridge one tends to be held in September), and the winner (and runner-up) of the Regional Final goes through to the National Final. The winner of the National Final gets crowned H&T National Slam Champion and can then go on to compete in things like the Radio 4 slam championships, the international slam championships, etc.

Aspirant competitors can sign up either by rocking up as doors open on the night (typically 7:30pm for an 8pm start) or by booking slam tickets in advance online (£2 from Eventbrite – the relevant link is above). You can “express an interest” by emailing your name in advance, but that only gets you on the reserve list until you pay on the door (£3).

There are no limitations on style of poetry – a typical slam will see sonnets, blank verse, hip-hop, rhyming iambic pentametric couplets and more all cross the stage – and we’ve seen winners who’ve read their poems out from the written version (paper, kindle, phone, beermat) so, while there are advantages to learning your pieces off by heart, it’s not a requirement!

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