WHY WE DO IT
Scottish spoken word is high-energy, exciting, entertaining and innovative.
We love the way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it feels. We love its diversity, its range, its no-nonsense, down-to-earth attitude. It's one of the most accessible performance arts out there and for that, too, we love it.
However...
It's not perfect. Its popularity is newfound and being a performance poet is all fun and games until, well, it isn't. The transition from performing at open mics in dingy bars to making a living of your art is rough at best, like walking an uphill tightrope while people are throwing rocks at you and someone keeps shouting in your ear that you're never gonna make it (usually yourself). More importantly, the accessibility that makes spoken word so fantastic and diverse doesn't carry all the way through. Living as an artist still comes with great financial risk and is to a large degree dependent on where you're from and who you know.
We want to change this.
We want to make spoken word accessible from point A to point Z, for both artists and audiences. This means providing up-and-coming spoken word artists with the means to develop their craft, and building networks throughout the UK and beyond to promote artists from all over. It also means building on the art form we currently have and creating work that suits all different kinds of environments, from theatres to classrooms, basement bars to festival stages. For this, we champion spoken word theatre; longform, narrative pieces that tell a story in an innovative way. While we love the live aspect of spoken word, we want to work on documentation of spoken word and increase its reach by making it available to diverse audiences.
One of our pillars is collaboration. Whether this is creative collaborative or developmental collaboration, we believe that working together is key to creating both better and healthier art. We want all work we create to be financially and personally sustainable, and build a tradition of accessibility for spoken word. We're doing this for the artists who need a hand, for the audience who don't even know they love poetry yet, for the future. But most of all, we do this because
We just really love poetry.
