News from the Western front...

Dawn Gorman runs Bradford-on-Avon's successful and friendly Words & Ears poetry cafe with a visiting guest poet each month, but on Monday it was her turn to feature at the UK launch Mend and Hone.  US publishers toadlily press selected four entrants from their annual competition for this anthology, and Dawn is the first English poet to feature in what one reviewer has called "an astonishing chord of poetic voices." Dawn sees her pieces as 'journeys through an emotional landscape' and spoke of the importance of finding 'sacred space' as well as her New York launch party at the Poet's House in Soho Manhattan, which certainly sounded a long and possibly emotional journey from the coach-house at the Swan Inn. Ten more poets then stepped up to the virtual mic to share a range of readings on topics from apple trees to Temple Meads, including an amazing personal response to a cancer diagnosis from Andy Fawthrop ~ do take a look at his blog and scroll down to "Green".

Exeter's unique clowning-theatre group Navet Bete is touring with Once Upon a Time In the West, the current chaotic & hilarious show devised by this highly original, hi-energy team.  Using gymnastic physicality and extreme facial acting, with plot twists as unexpected and deadly as Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, the lads deliver everything you could want from a Wild West parody and more: a hero’s journey, gunfights, baddies, corruption, jeopardy,  marshmallows, a banjo-playing cactus… Unbounded by their quartet status, they take on multiple roles in absurd ensemble scenes, while successfully maintaining a just-about coherent storyline for their younger viewers ("He's not a very good Mayor" a small girl announced audibly and accurately as one cowboy dangled another upside-down by his heels) ~ indeed, audience participation provided some of the comic highlights and the actors are often at their funniest adlibbing and upstaging each other. There's a bit too much pooping for my taste but I guess if you pulled away any individual thread the extraordinary energy might unravel entirely, so best to just enjoy it all, and a full house at The Egg in Bath on Saturday vociferously did just that. Next up, A Christmas Carol at the Barbican throughout December ~ I'm already contemplating a winter trip to Plymouth...

Flimsiest of links for my final footnote this week: as a visual masterclass in establishing genre and raising expectations, the opening sequence of Ambassadors is neat, effective, and very funny.