On Monday Words Apart were invited to the Royal Society of Arts Youth Awards for Innovation for winning a 2 and a half thousand pound funding application. It was a great evening with 3 groups being awarded funding too. This year, the RSA received a lot of applicants across London so Words Apart have done incredibly well to get the award for our project. A special thanks to our mentor/poet/musician Arjunan Manuelpillai for leading Words Apart and being an inspiration to all of us.
The evening started with a session of ‘mingling.’ We showcased our poetry with a laptop and different pieces on our table. Everyone was quite new to the concept of networking but includes repeating the same 5 minute speech until it becomes integrated in your verbatim.
We were then presented the award, fellow Words Apart poet Edward and I gave a quick introduction on Words Apart. Edward O’Garro Pridde performed a fantastic poem which blew everyone away about the nature of Youth Centre’s and their importance. Edward also explained the concept of our film project which will screen in Barnet in the near future and will be based on youth identity.
The award was for our project called ‘Twisted Tongues.’ The award given to us was for a film we will be making this summer, it will be a 10 minute drama written in verse incorporated with parkour. It incorporates our youth poetry group – Words Apart and another Youth parkour group. Parkour, also known as Free-running is the art of going from A to B in the most extravagant way. So walking to college would mean doing back-flips, running up walls and jumping off the top of a bus-stop. The parkour group is run by the recent winner of a Sunday Times Film competition, Lish David.
It was an evening which rewarded the efforts of everyone in the group. Words Apart have made great strides this year having performed at the South Bank Centre in the Royal Festival Hall supporting some of Palestine’s best poets. As well as performing at the Finchley Youth Theatre, the Harrow Arts Centre and the Rumi Festival. We were even invited to the Albany Theatre in Deptford to see the incredible theatre production: ‘Krunch.’ We have also increased our on-line presence with our YouTube Channel: WordsApartPoetry and our blog site: www.wordsapart7.blogspot.com ( a website coming soon)
This summer heralds some exciting projects for Barnet based youth poetry collective ‘Words Apart’ with the film being made as well as the continued weekly Monday night poetry jams. There will also be a monthly live lounge exclusively for young poets to be held in the ‘Rumi Cave’ – A café in Willesden Green in tandem with community based charity Ulfa Aid.
