Ballads and Romances / Old poems, New voices

Last night I performed, along with Ilona Gumowska, Damsel Elysium (with Ali Welsh), at the Ognisko Club in South Kensington. This was a small performance that we put together and partly improvised, for the launch of the new translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s ‘Ballads and Romances’. Mickiewicz is Poland’s National Poet and was the pioneer of the Polish Romantic movement - Last weekend marked not only Lewandowski’s career first World Cup goal, but also 156 years since Mickiewicz died. I say partly improvised because I didn’t do any improvising at all, though Ilona and Damsel Elysium did! In the spirit of the evenings when Mickiewicz would improvise poetry (sometimes with Chopin at the piano!), we thought it would be great to embrace this in a similar sort of ‘salon’ atmosphere.

Before we did our bit, the translator of the poems, Charles Kraszewski, gave a short talk on the origin of the poems and the love story that sits under all of them and then, to an intimate but packed house, we did our bit. I was performing for the first time since 2011, which was a little nerve-wracking, but it all came off really well. Both Ilona and Damsel Elysium are truly brilliant and authentic artists, and it was an honour to be able to jam with them like this. I hope that we’ll have some sort of video document of the performance before too long - I’m also waiting to see if any decent photos were taken because I was too busy delivering the poems to be able to take photos as I might normally do...

You can see an interview I gave about it a couple of days before here:

And here’s a photo that I found on the Ognisko Facebook page, though I’m afraid I don’t know who took it!

The evening was made possible by the wonderful Marta de Zuniga, the Director of the Polish Cultural Institute, who is incredible at creating Partnerships between Poland and the UK, and none of it would have happened without the tireless commitment and generosity of Natalia Puchalska.

It was a lot of fun and it was great to be performing again - most of all it was another example of how wonderful collaboration can be when it involves genuine, authentic and generous artists.

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