Live Canon are an ensemble performing poetry in the English Language (and occasionally bursting into song). They are a group of professional actors and theatre makers, led by artistic director, Helen Eastman, who founded the ensemble in 2008. Helen felt that there were many opportunities to hear contemporary poetry live, and have an aural experience of it, but very few opportunities to hear the' back catalogue', as it were. Live Canon aim to rectiy that and perform poetry from across generations and centuries, live.
Live Canon performances aren't readings. Live Canon actors learn all the poetry and perform it from memory. Their performances make poetry accesible and visceral. Performances are often interspersed with live music, featuring newly commissioned a capella settings of many classic poems. We hope that it's a thoroughly enjoyable, unpretentious way to celebrate the richness of poetry written in the English language over the last five hundred years. Live Canon shows are a mixture of old classics you may know and love, and less well known gems we hope may suprise you. We are continously adding new poetry to our repertoire, and creating new programmes.
We perform all over the place, from Oxford Playhouse to Exeter Northcott, Richmond Park to the V&A and make bespoke shows for events, galleries and museums. If you join our mail list (and sign up to our twitter feed) we'll keep you in touch with all our performances and poetry news.
Recently we've also started recording, collaborating with the V&A on their first app for iphone, and about to embark on creating an MP3 poetry walk of Oxford. They are a number of audio CDs in the pipeline.
We run a biennial poetry competition, with a £1000 first prize, and perform and publish all the shortlisted poetry.
This year we've also developed two shows for children, The Poetry Party (for indoors) and Poetry Planet (for outside)... so keep an eye out for those at theatres and festivals near you....
Please keep in touch with us, and we hope to see you at one of our upcoming performances. |