Open Secret! Your home for experiments in all the performing arts. Wednesdays (2nite!) at Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais, 5è. Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4). At 8pm, nightlong sign-up starts, then at 9, poésie muse-ic theatre divine comedy performance art & dance. Make your own major. Tonight’s theme is Under Pressure. With special musical guest Tim Watt, whose work ranges from the sweetly melancholic to the existential to the Rock of ages. (Bio below)/
London musician, now residing in Paris, Tim Watt captivates an audience with haunting melodies and complimenting soulful vocals. He has performed a vast array of shows over the years, from the neon lights of Las Vegas to such legendary folk venues as The Troubadour in London and The Bitter End in New York City. His songs are sculptured with poetic lyrical content inspired by the works of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Nick Drake, with more recent influences consisting of Jeff Buckley, Ryan Adams and Jack White to name a few. The eclectic collection of influences ranging from folk to the punk rock movement provides a unique body of individual compositions to the listener.
Nupur Saraswat is a passionate stage performer, who brings an electric energy on stage along with her bold words. Her volatile words and performance style has been praised by the most sought-after lyricist of Bollywood – Javed Akhtar with whom she has shared a stage in 2016. She has performed for big stages like UN Women, TEDx, India Conversations, Under 25 Summit, and DPS schools.
Zoé is a French actress and poet born and raised in Paris. She has studied acting from Paris to the USA and made her film debut with Marina de Van and Denis Lavant in the adaptation of Thumb O’Neil for Arte. Having recently acted in Srinath Samarasinghe’s On The Skin(Sur La Peau), in 2016 and 2017 she has been onstage with the Makizart/La Poursuite in Molière’s The Miser, and with the collective Les Jenous in The Miracle of the Deglingue. Zoé has been creating poetry since 2015 and performs here and there with visual artists s
Accompanying Zoe on the piano will be Ed Bell, editor and co-host of Paris Lit Up.
Benjamin Aleshire is based in New Orleans, and travels the world as a poet-for-hire, composing poems for strangers on a manual typewriter. His work is forthcoming in Iowa Review and Boston Review, and he was recently featured in El Mundo, in Spain, and on SinoVision TV, in China. This summer during a residency at the Künstlerhaus Vorwerk-Stift in Hamburg, he created an artist-book of visual poems, ‘Currency’, from rags picked in the St. Pauli market. You can commission him every afternoon in front of Shakespeare & Co.
Naniso Tswai is a Berlin-based author and academic. His work is strongly embedded in broader issues of justice and peace, particularly as these relate to human rights and identity. Over the past five years he has shifted his focus from academic writing to fictional writing, this has come in the form of short stories and novels. He is also a Spoken Word performer, an artistic outlet which allows him to express himself with a different voice. He is the founder and current co-director of Berlin Spoken Word (BSW). BSW is an international group working on various projects based in Berlin. Its main event – which draws an audience of over 60 people each week – is a weekly open mic night providing a familiar space for spoken word poetry, stories, music, comedy and more. Several times throughout the year it invites international artists to be featured performers at the event. In addition to the open mic night, BSW also runs various other projects. Most prominently, these include Sharing Words that Matter (SWTM) and Berlin Unspoken. SWTM is guerilla poetry outreach project which aims to spread awareness and engage the community in current and continuing social and political issues. Berlin Unspoken is BSW’s literary magazine. It features both local and international artists and is published quarterly.
Troy Yorke’s poetry seeks beauty in the absurd and surreal, celebrating the darker corners of life, our minds, and our society with irreverence and humor. His work embraces the hidden brilliance in things we normally consider abhorrent and taboo, bringing marginalized voices centre-stage in a variety of experimental forms, language-play and character monologue. His works have been published in various literary magazines in North America and Europe, most recently in Upstairs at Duroc (Paris), and was included in the anthology The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2013 from Australia. He is currently on the editorial team for The Bastille, an Anglophone literary magazine based in Paris and released his first published collection of poetry Hole in My Side: Redemption of the Moon-Hooker in 2014.
SpokenWord Paris 