Africa Utopia at the Southbank

Toni Stuart and Remi Graves

Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre

For the fifth year, a weekend festival of African arts called African Utopia will be held at the Southbank Centre, London. Happening in mid-July, the programme will include music, film, fashion, theatre, talks and debate from Egypt to Ghana, the Caribbean to Cape Town.

Africa Utopia at the Southbank

Toni Stuart and Remi Graves

From Cape Town comes an intriguing improvised, immersive performance through music and poetry in which the audience and artists are blindfolded. Performed by South African poet Toni Stuart and her English counterpart, Remi Graves, it is called What The Trees Know.

“I chose the trees in Cape Town,’ Toni, a full-time poet, told me, “because they’ve been around for generations. What is it that they have lived through and seen is the theme. How they co-exist with each other, how they grow and support each other, roots, heritage, lost stories. We use an interplay of music and physicality with these stories and poetry.

‘We chose the birch tree, which sheds its skin every year, and the ‘`Magic Tree`’ in Kirstenbosch, which was split down the middle in the 1980s by lightning and regenerated with a huge canopy twice its size. What do we learn from that?”

Continues Remi, a poet and drummer with Ghanaian and Jamaican ancestry: “We use trees as a metaphor for life and have music for different trees. We hope the experience makes people feel like they’ve been on a journey with us and learnt something. I drum and Toni, with her Cape Coloured and Khoisan heritage, writes the stories.

“Using blindfolds to enhance senses, we hope to involve and invite people into our stories and to explore their own backgrounds.”

What The Trees Know is on Saturday, July 15th, 6 to 6.30 and 7.30 to 8 pm at the St Paul’s Roof Pavilion, 4th floor, The Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX.

View the full programme here.

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