Press release, Printable Reality, 4-8-11

Printable Reality celebrates ...

A YEAR AT THE PAH.

The TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre – The Pah Homestead in Hillsborough - is celebrating its first birthday on Sunday, August 14 with a full programme of entertainment for adults and children, including artist talks, poetry and music. Printable Reality will be showcasing some of the highlights from the previous In VOICE + Music series as well as performances by new artists over the course of the day.

Hot Pink comedienne Penny Ashton brings her defiantly life-affirming and hilarious rhymes to the afternoon’s programme, alongside equally humorous and hard-hitting poet-performer Stephanie Johnson, and the close, three-part harmony singing of Macombee & The Dharma Queens.

Heading the morning line-up are singer-songwriter Bernie Griffen (of The Grifters) with fiddle player Dave Khan (The Grifters, The Broadsides) and their brand of swampy country blues, alongside actor-poet Peter Bland.

Other guest performers include moving sculpture-mime artists The White Wall, and poets from the year’s monthly programme In VOICE + Music, held on Saturday afternoons at the gallery. They include: Siobhan Harvey, Kirsten Warner, Sue Reidy, Jeremy Roberts, Alexandra Fraser, Michael Botur, Rosetta Allan and Matt Harvey.

In Voice and Music is organised by Printable Reality, an organisation committed to raising the profile of poetry and spoken word performance in New Zealand.

WHEN AND WHERE:

TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, 72 Hillsborough Road, Hillsborough, Sunday August 14.

10 – 11.30 AM – music by Bernie Griffen and Dave Khan; poets Peter Bland, Kirsten Warner Sue Reidy, Michael Botur, Rosetta Allan, Alexandra Fraser.

3 - 4.30 PM – music by Macombee and the Dharma Queens; poets Penny Ashton, Stephanie Johnson, Siobhan Harvey, Jeremy Roberts, Matt Harvey.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

kirstenwarner@printablereality.com

BIOS:

Take Pam Ayres, add a dollop of Cosmo Magazine, a slurp of Ruby Wax, a pinch of glitter, a good splosh of silliness and a nice sturdy bra and voila, you have Ms Hot Pink, New Zealand’s hilarious rhymin’ Pop Tart – Penny Ashton.

Singer-songwriter Bernie Griffen (of The Grifters, host of bFM’s Border Radio) and fiddle player and multi-instrumentalist Dave Khan (The Grifters, The Broadsides) bring their own brand of swampy country-blues.

Macombee & The Dharma Queens – Sarah Macombee, Poppy Pritchard and Angel Neshama - are a captivating trio performing original songs in close three-part harmony in a provocative, moving and often hilarious peek into singer-songwriter Sarah Macombee's world.

National treasure Peter Bland returns to The Pah to read from his 11^th, up-coming collection. He is equally well-known as poet and actor (the small-town conman Wes Pennington in Came A Hot Friday) acclaimed raconteur, broadcaster and writer.

Stephanie Johnson’s hilarious, provocative, polished and outstanding performance as a poet take a good hard swipe at contemporary life and politics, a not-to-be-missed appearance by the author of nine of New Zealand’s favourite novels.

Siobhan Harvey is poetry editor of Takahe magazine, a poetry editor of the International Literary Quarterly, her collection Lost Relatives was published this year and she is the national co-ordinator of National Poetry Day.

Today’s MC, poet, journalist and writer Kirsten Warner, a founding member of Printable Reality which organises the music and poetry events at The Pah, was the joint-winner of the Landfall Essay Competition in 2008.

Performance poet Michael Botur has published fiction and poetry in numerous literary journals, been a guest reader at Lounge, Poetry Live, Writers on Mondays, Metonymy, Wellpark and the Pink Noise Art Show and is currently also writing for online magazine Renegade House.co.nz.

Sue Reidy’s novels The Visitation, and Four Ways to be a Woman were published internationally, she is a former BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award winner and Buddle Findlay Sargeson Literary Fellow, and her poetry which has appeared in Landfall, ILQ, Bravado, Takahe, JAAM and the NZ Listener often casts an ironic eye at language and popular culture.

Rosetta Allan was joint poetry winner of the Metonymy poetry-art collaboration held at Corban Estate in 2010, when her second volume of poetry Over lunch was published.

Alexandra Fraser’s outstanding poetry has published in Landfall, Takahe, Poetry NZ and in the anthologies Our Own Kind, Just Another Fantastic Anthology, Auckland in Poetry and Moments in the Whirlwind.

When Jeremy Roberts is not MC-ing at Auckland’s long-running Poetry Live, teaching primary school or driving his daughter to band practice, he is scribbling furiously on notepads in between free-weight sets and gazing at empty margarita glasses...

Matthew Harvey was the runner up in this year’s Poetry Idol competition and the winner of the Utter Brilliance 90 Second slam. He has performed in the UK (London & Leeds) and also as part of the show “GUSH: Love and other filthy habits” in Christchurch and as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival.