SAMPLED Festival 2013 by Ella Walker

The critical list: SAMPLED special Round-up ɀ JUNCTION favourites Athlete are returning to the city for their Vehicles & Animals 10th Anniversary Tour. The mellow foursome burst on to the indie scene a decade ago, trawling the depths of melancholy and jauntiness in equal measure (remember El Salvador?), with three acclaimed albums, two of which went platinum. With the band all exploring life as individual artists, there might not be another album, but you can catch the boys all together at Cambridge Junction on Wednesday, May 8 at 7pm. Tickets cost £18.50 from (01223) 511511.

Spoken word

Hollie McNish

ɀ CAMBRIDGE has been free from disco music for too long – well, that’s what Nusha Bar has decided. The club is bringing back the Boogie, a retro night famed for its mix of 70s and 80s funk, soul, rock, pop and cheese music previously hosted at the Junction. DjPELE will be picking the tunes, and yes, fancy dress will once again be encouraged. Get your groove on at Nusha Bar, Clifton Way, Cambridge on Saturday, May 4 from 9pm. Advance tickets cost £3 from (01223) 247777.

ᔡ Hollie McNish: A British Tea Break, SAMPLED Festival, Cambridge Junction, Boardroom, Sunday, May 5 at 3.05pm. Tickets £25 weekend pass / £15 day pass from (01223) 511511 / www.junction.co.uk

ɀ A NEW art space is opening

on Norfolk Street. The Drawing Cube – launched by Changing Spaces – is hosting its ﬁrst exhibition, Stories Begging to be Told featuring work by Becky Palmer, Karin Eklund, Trudi Esberger, Kathrin Lang, Meria Palin and Joanne Young. The artists are all Cambridge School of Art graduates from the MA in Children’s Book Illustration and the BA in Illustration, and use everything from pen and paper, to collage and digital work. See their creations from Friday, May 3 until June 9. Entry is free.

ɀ INDULGE in some wine and shopping (a perfect combination, no?), at Cambridge fashion boutique Boudoir Femme. The store is hosting a ‘Frocks and Fizz’ event alongside the experts at Cambridge Wine Merchants. Sip two types of Brut while perusing the shelves for a designer bargain and take advantage of a 15 per cent on-the-night promotion. Pop along to Boudoir Femme on King Street, Cambridge on Wednesday, May 8 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £10 and include nibbles and two glasses of ﬁzz.

THINK a lot of people write poems sort of secretly,” says Hollie McNish, mum, poet and serious Glastonbury fan – but not everyone is brave enough to read them out in public like she does. “When I was about 23 my boyfriend just refused to listen to any more of my poems until I read them out to someone else,” she laughed, explaining how she got into spoken word. “He said ‘Hollie, these are about women and they’re just not relevant to me,’ and sort of forced me by not giving me an outlet.” She started by working up the courage to join a poetry night at CB1 café on Mill Road in Cambridge, “but everything scared me, even the fact they had books on the wall.” Four years later, she now does live poetry gigs, runs workshops and is about to appear at Cambridge Junction’s SAMPLED Festival with the early stages of a new show that’s actually quite theatre-y for her. But the nerves never really disappear. “It’s a real honour to be able to read [my poems] and people actually want to hear them, but it is pretty scary. I feel sick quite often in my life,” she admitted. “I feel like I’m back at under-15 netball tournaments; that’s the only nerves I remember being like that!” Hollie’s poems tend to focus on women’s issues and immigration, and her SAMPLED piece is no exception. Called A British Tea Break, it’s a bit of an ‘immigration tea party’, the idea for which was triggered by large chunks of her Scottish family saying she couldn’t call herself English. The plan is to eventually serve a British afternoon tea set to poems based on where the ingredients come from – from the tea leaves to the ﬂour in the cakes. “Picking apart how our British traditions are completely not just British,” Hollie explains. “But I’m trying to not make it one-sided, I think that’s the problem. “ I’m quite left wing about immigration. You go to loads of poetry gigs where people just stand up and give their left-wing viewpoint and all the left-wing theatre audiences are like ‘oh yeah, that’s really good’. But actually my family are Daily Mail, Daily Express readers and quite anti a lot of stuff. I don’t want to demonise people.” A huge part of

Performance Art

Hunt and Darton ᔡ Hunt and Darton: Bore, Cambridge Junction, J2, Sunday, May 5 at 12noon. Tickets £25 weekend pass / £15 day pass from (01223) 511511

HUNT and Darton (aka Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton), are really quite cool. When I ring they are dashing about their pop-up café-cum-performance-space in Clapton in Hackney, making coffee (you can hear the beans being ground), and pouring homemade lemonade. I ask how they’d describe what they do to someone who had never seen or heard of them before, and they duly start chucking adjectives at me: “raw and conversational”, “colourful and tropical”. Holly mused: “Absurd is a good word,” and Jenny added “We deﬁnitely like a bit of humour and we use a lot of spoken word and

movement.” But, to be honest, you probably should have heard of them. The eclectic duo (usually found wearing leggings), are Junction and Cambridge regulars, and descended on the city last spring with their arts café, complete with lots of pineapples. They will be back to perform BORE, their unﬁnished submission for Cambridge Junction’s SAMPLED Festival, which is, as you’d guess, all about boredom. Well, kind of. “We thought we’d never get bored as creative people,” Holly explained. “So we tried to get bored and then we kind of present that investigation.”

Basically, they’ve turned procrastination into an art form? “Yeah, we didn’t think we’d get bored, so we tried to get bored, and then we got bored, and then we got excited. The show is an exploration of that.” To capitalise on excitement being the opposite of boredom, the pair have injected a lot of audience interaction into the show, and thought it would be a brilliant idea to don leopard print head-to-toe and amp up the visual aspect of the piece. “We decided to provide stimuli in the form of our outﬁts and our moves, to excite anyone in the audience who is bored,” said Jenny. It sounds like a lot of fun.