Christodoulos Makris was born in Nicosia in 1971. He studied in Manchester and also lived in London before relocating to Dublin in 2001. He is regarded as “one of Ireland’s leading contemporary explorers of experimental poetics” (The RTÉ Poetry Programme). He has published three books of poetry, most recently this is no longer entertainment (Manchester: Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019), as well as several pamphlets, artists’ books and other poetry objects. His second book The Architecture of Chance (Dublin: Wurm Press, 2015) was a poetry book of the year for RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine. One of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Rising Generation’ poets, he has presented his work widely across media and borders, and received awards and commissions from several institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), StAnza Festival (Scotland), European Poetry Festival, Culture Ireland, and Maynooth University. He is the poetry editor at gorse journal and associated imprint Gorse Editions. “In work that is at times radically experimental, and always alert to the capacity of language to remake the world, Christodoulos Makris seeks ways to break open the lyric space of the poem to alter the ways in which language operates in the public realm” (Lucy Collins, Irish University Review).

Guest Participants

Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is a Lagos-born, Galway-raised and Dublin-based writer, spoken-word artist, editor and arts facilitator. She recently graduated from UCD with an Honours BA in English and Philosophy and is currently completing a Masters in Cultural Policy and Arts Management in UCD. Her work is published in both online and print journals – notably Poetry International, Poetry Ireland Review 129, RTÉ Poetry Programme, Smithereens Press, The Bohemyth, The Irish Times, and the forthcoming anthologies ‘The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories’ (Head of Zeus 2020, edited by Sinéad Gleeson) and ‘Writing Home: The New Irish Poets’ (Dedalus Press 2019, co-edited by Pat Boran & Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi). See more details here

Kit Fryatt was born in 1978, grew up in Singapore, Turkey and England, and moved to Ireland in 1999. He is a lecturer in English at DCU, and his most recent book is Bodyservant (Shearsman, 2018).

“Fryatt is playful, with word-games, variations in line and length and dynamic outbreaks of rhyme giving the poems a kind of performance feel–but they also have a very strong page presence, their complexity in fact demanding movement through them at the pace and with the instant rewind of the eye. The reader is never allowed to get too settled, too comfortable–some fresh piece of invention, some unforeseen swerve, takes us into uneasy places.” –Stride.

“Experimenting with personas, translations, updates of medieval lyrics, visual accompaniments, dramatic interpretations, and other devices, Fryatt’s performances seldom provide a single frame of reference. His multifarious interests and activities as poet, performer, writer, critic, academic, editor, publisher, and much else allow his range that bestows his work a complex cultural meshwork. Entertainment comes shrouded in mystery and ambivalence, in uncertainties and depreciations, and an intellectual intensity that forms the backbone of his practice.” Jacket2https. See more details here.

James King has developed his career as performance artist and sound poet, while maintaining his interest in creative activities with vulnerable groups in the community. Since retiring from his post as Lecturer in Community Drama at the UU in 2004. His live art practice has been largely through involvement with the performance art collective, Bbeyond Belfast. (Which has led to solo performances and group exchanges in Norway, Germany, Belgium and Spain). In monthly open improvisation events – whether in street, beach, or gallery- Bbeyond’s emphasis is upon freedom to BE – in relation to the audience, the environment, and others in the group.

Two years ago James and colleagues established BBDB, Bbeyond Derry Branch! They meet weekly and put into practice Bbeyond’s methodology, usually in the same area of Society Street. James also continues his weekly street art improvisations with Eamonn O Donnell, his colleague of thirty years. In his performances James uses vocal and other improvised sounds in response to external stimuli and his own internal promptings. He creates visual images with body, found objects and other materials.

His most recent group performance project is the Monday Lab, an experimental performance group spawned by BBDB and AnCulturlann. Their public works include — April 2019 at CCA Derry, participating in Filip Markiewicz ‘ Celebration Factory. In March that year James and Peter O’Doherty as La Bratts performed in the Online Festival of Performance Art. In June they performed an eight hour duration as guests of Art Arcadia. The essence of these performances is focused spontaneity in the exploration vocal distillations. Currently James is participating in two series of Performance poetry organised by Frank Rafferty : 1) Silver Tongued Deviance at the Void gallery and 2) Speakeasy at the Gasworks Centre. Publications: ” Furrowed Lives,” poems illustrated by David Hegarty; “Moving Pitches“, Yes Publications, 2008.

Vicky Langan is a Cork-based artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly sound, performance, and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-­miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art. Using simple raw materials such as domestic objects, hair and magnetic tape, she layers physical gestures and scraps of sound to create intensely personal imaginary landscapes. Mundane domesticity is explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious.

Her decade-long filmmaking partnership with filmmaker and critic Maximilian Le Cain has resulted in sixteen moving image works to date, with screenings and retrospectives of their work having been shown throughout the world. She is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award 2019/20, as well as bursary awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Cork City Council and Music Network. See more details here

Rouzbeh Rashidi (born in Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker. He has been making films since 2000, at which time he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran. He has always worked entirely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape the stereotypes of conventional storytelling. Instead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. He generally eschews scriptwriting, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. His work is deeply engaged with film history. Rashidi moved to Ireland in 2004 and currently lives and works in Dublin. See more details here

Padraig Regan lives in Belfast where he is currently studying for an MA at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University. He is the author of two pamphlets, Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017) and Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016). See more details here