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.

* ONLINE Check out our Family section at cambridge-news.co.uk/whatson – where you’ll also ﬁnd loads more ideas for family fun in our events calendar

SAMPLED round-up SAMPLED is the chance for audiences to feedback their thoughts at the end of a performance. “I want people to tell me if it’s too one-sided or if it’s too ranty. I guess, I worry that I go onstage and rant at people and I really don’t want to do that,”she said. “I don’t want to attack people, I don’t think it works. Even if I think someone is a complete racist or their ideas about immigration are really wrong, I just don’t think it helps to punch a BNP member in the face.” When the flame-haired 30-year-old isn’t angering trolls (“I get a lot of online hate for the immigration stuff… it can be a bit nerve-wracking”), she runs creative poetry slams and workshops in schools. “It’s really nice to make [the kids] enjoy poetry a bit more, I think it can be a little bit dry at school,” she said. “I never tell them what to write about, I never tell them they have to write in couplets or anything, and they always write amazing stuff. Especially younger kids, they’re really honest. “Quite often you’ll go into schools and you’ll have kids telling you horrendous stuff that they wouldn’t ever tell anyone but they’ll write it down on a piece of paper.” Funny and candid, Hollie definitely makes poetry inspiring, which explains why The Economist asked her to write and film a series of poems for their new foundation teaching kids more about world politics. It also explains why she’s being funded by the arts council to write a script on parenthood that she hopes will be made into a radio piece. Called The Things We Don’t Talk About: “It’s about all the embarrassing stuff, so like sex after birth, how you feel about your boobs, and all this stuff you don’t get told that I wish I had,” she says. ” So why should people come and see her SAMPLED show? “I did a similar event (a scratch festival at Battersea Arts) and thought why would anyone want to go and see something that isn’t finished? And why would I want to show something that I think has got another year? But actually, after doing it and getting 30 feedback forms, it was really, really helpful,” she said. “Even if it is unfinished, it doesn’t mean it’s rubbish to come and listen to. Sometimes, it’s even better than the finished version.”

PERFORMED Pitches is the Unrealised branch of SAMPLED Fest. As part of the Junction’s commitment to developing and supporting new talent, artists will be able to pitch an idea – just ideas, these can’t be fully, or even partly formed projects that are already in the works – for a chance to have the full future version commissioned by the venue. The focus is on the pitch and how creative it can be. You can sign up to see the artists ﬂop and ﬂy, while trying to work out how the pitch could be realised. The pitching process will take place across the weekend at various times.

Performed Pitches

ɀ A DEMON (Ollie Smith) and a cat (Olwen Davies) struggle for control in live artist Ollie’s dark and slinky Cat In Hell (Unfinished) production, pictured right. Getting caught up in knots, whiskers and handcuffs, the performance crazy duo delve into nightmarish magic acts (one of them is quite likely to disappear), confetti, cabaret and circus skits, all soundtracked to a sleazy radio show. Intrigued? So are we. Catch it at Cambridge Junction on Sunday, May 5 at 1.10pm. ɀ “IN this show I am going to be asking you to rate me based solely on my looks. In the process of judging I will be asking you to totally disregard the following: How entertaining I am, how touched you are by my words, how interesting and clever the show is. That is what this show is about,” explains Louise Orwin. Her (unfinished) piece, Am I Pretty/Ugly?, explores our warped, lonely world in which teenage girls post videos of themselves on YouTube and ask people to rate their looks. Find out more on Saturday, May 4 at 1.15pm. ɀ THE Unleashed portion of the festival is for works that are never really finished – they change and evolve with each new performance. Hairpiece is a GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN production and, quite bizarrely, focuses on five wigs (various cuts and colours, of course) having a chat. Looping around topics of existence, entitlement and class, the wigs are trapped in a neverending wordplay game. Find out whether their conversation goes anywhere on Saturday, May 4 at 6pm. Unleashed tickets cost £8 from (01223) 511511. ɀ YOU should know straight away, the premise for this unleashed piece is quite out there. It starts in heaven where a dead man has been mistaken for Steve Jobs, and then it spirals, via police helicopter (bear with us), back down to a confused, homeless fox, and then to a city below. There’s a séance, and interrogation, and before you know it the audience will be rioting (we believe this is meant to happen). Led by Greg McLaren, discover Symphony for Audience and Performer on Saturday, May 4 at 7.30pm. Unleashed tickets cost £8 from (01223) 511511. ɀ FINALLY, a show in which not only are you allowed to keep your phone on, it’s actually encouraged. Chris Thorpe (theatre-maker) and Hannah Jane Walker (poet) have teamed up to create I Wish I Was Lonely (Unfinished), an investigative show taking a frank look at what it means to get stuck into communication, or go hermit-like and avoid it. It’s interactive and packed full of poetry and stories, and the pair have already won themselves a Fringe-First award their 2011 piece, The Oh F*ck Moment. If you don’t like interaction, it might be an idea to give it a miss, but if you do, go along on Saturday, May 4 at 12.30pm.

ᔡ All at Cambridge Junction, tickets cost £25 for a weekend pass and £15 for the day from (01223) 511511.