A note on: Airwaves Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland

A rare chance to perform at a major European music festival, I was invited to present a new work for the 2016 Airwaves festival in Reykjavik, for their Airwords programme. The lineup for the evening including friends Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir and Crispin Best, but also John Lydon of the sex pistols amongst others. The evening was eclectic, as the whole experience was, being bussed around with indie bands, the whole city swelling with drunk music goers and me hiding in my hotel writing and preparing my performance. I had time to meet friends old and new and was treated to great hospitality.

The work I eventually presented was really another collaboration with the amazing Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, whom I take to be one of a dozen or so European poets who are genuinely breaking new ground and influence my thought process every time I see them / work with them. I began with some slightly twisting / deliberately complex rhetoric with a few set ups, all aiming to establish a certain expectation and engagement from the audience, and then with Asta’s help, began to create inexplicable and fundamentally awkward performative shifts. 

My second trip to Iceland in 2016 and a completely original one, with huge thanks to Andri Snær Magnason, Asta and all my Icelandic friends who keep making their country a place of inspiration for my work.

A note on: The first European Poetry Night

Obviously a fair sized undertaking, with 24 poets from 19 countries, but a wonderful event to celebrate the first European Poetry Night. Very easy to work with Jon Slack and the folk at European Literature Festival, revamped for this year, and we managed to get around 150 people into Rich Mix on a balmy night. The great joy of balancing all this curatorial work, all the small details of travel, tech, order etc... is that I'm surrounded by friends from all over the world, from Billy Ramsell who drove me around Ireland, to Sasha Filyuta who introduced me to Berlin, from Alessandro Burbank who made me love the backstreets of Venice, to Efe Duyan who took me for a coffee in Istanbul before I'd published a book. And new friends made too, Niilaas Holmberg, who sang in Sami and Ulrike Ulrich, Swiss by way of Germany now in residence in London. It felt like a real collective effort, an example of community and collaboration at its best. Their performances were uniformly good and all complimented each other in their differences. http://www.theenemiesproject.com/epn

Working with Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is an amazing experience. She is masterful - so funny, so innovative, a great improviser, and so much fun to play with. Both of us seek out strong concepts and have a certain sense of humour and really we achieved something on this night. I couldn't believe the audience would believe as they did in our concept, and we really ran hard into making them believe once we sensed their absolute awkward excruciating silence. A beautiful thing. I did feel a tiny bit guilty that some friends bought it too, but the notion of truthfulness has been such a concern of mine this year, this collaboration felt like the apex of that. I hope to work with her again and again into the future.

A note on: Ovinir - Icelanders in London - January 30th

Hosting the Icelanders who had been so hospitable to me in Iceland, Ovinir visited Rich Mix on January 30th with four poets visiting, writing new collaborations with local poets, and three new collective performances, made up of younger poets, or those newer to the Enemies project, from courses I've run at Kingston Uni, Poetry School and Tate Modern, to round off a remarkable night. More than 120 people packed the venue to standing room only, and the works presented were of the highest quality. Wonderful to see the Icelanders get the audience and reception they deserved, and to see them, everyone involved so satisfied with what was an example of what the Enemies Project can do when all is aligned in our favour.

It was also the night of my favourite work of the project, from my own creative standpoint, my collaboration with Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir. A work full of raw energy, a desire to confront, to amuse, to inculcate awkwardness alongside humour. A product too, as often the best collaborations are, of a growing friendship, and an immediate kinship between Asta and I, one felt from the first moment we met, owed to the project. We create a kind of performance triptych, from the invasive performance, to the poem and song, to the metadialogue and humour valve. I've rarely been so satisfied with a live work, all owed to Asta's brilliance. www.stevenjfowler.com/iceland