Chris Newens is 30 and from Kingston-upon-Thames, UK. A sometime journalist, sometime playwright, before helping to set up Fourplay he was co-founder of its predecessor, The Montmartre Dionysia, and so has been behind the push for more English theatre in Paris for almost four years. His journalism, meanwhile, recently won him the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize 2016.
Alice Selwyn Brace is 23 and from Kingston-upon-Thames, UK. A journalist and editor for several publications including Louis Vuitton Travel Guides and fashion magazine Wheretoget, she co-founded Fourplay in 2015 after acting in and directing numerous productions around Paris, including for the Montmartre Dionysia and Shakespeare & Co. bookshop.
Noman Hosni isn’t really the kind of guy you can easily pigeonhole. An expert Jack-of-all-trades, he’s a collector of vocations: director, host of the famous TV show Garage on TSR 2, avid practitioner of extreme sports—one might understandably assume he’s hyperactive. His role models include Ricky Gervais, Michael McIntyre, and Daniel Tosh, among many others. After a trip to the legendary stand-up clubs of the United States in 2006, he finally decided to take the plunge and go into comedy. Winner of the 2009 Night of Humor, he was an accomplished member of the Swiss Comedy Club, where he honed his style night after night. After performing at the Montreux Comedy Club in 2010, he participated in the Open du Rire for Radio Rire et Chansons. A Debjam Comedy prizewinner, he was chosen by Jamel Debbouze for the Marrakech Festival of Laughter and invited to join the Comedy Club troupe in Paris starting in September 2011. Hosni also performs in English with the International Comedy Club (formerly known as Funny Laundry) in Geneva , Lausanne , and Zurich . In the not-so-distant future—who knows?—he may even take the boards of London by storm. In the meantime, one thing’s for sure: the sky’s the limit for Noman Hosni.
“Dareka performs his poetry since 2005 in France, then in USA, and everywhere his feet can land on. He is now traveling through France and Europe to satisfy his thirst for poetry. He hosted the popular Paris Poetry venue, “Slam au Downtown”, for two years when he wasn’t rocking the stage with his experimental fusion punk jazz spoken word band, La Bête Aveugle. He got his poem-tales series turned into a play once, hosted a workshop at the USA national poetry slam, another about poetry performance in many schools of Casablanca, represented France at the London Poetry Olympics, rode a horse in Icelandic mountains (unrelated), got his poetry recently displayed in an art gallery in Japan. He often performed his poetry in very strange places, such as a pizzeria in Rio de Janeiro, a church in Hanover, a Sephora make-up shop in the Ardennes forest, on a tennis table in a craft shop turned vegetarian restaurant in Porto, and so on, and yes, he liked it. Just as his life, his poems are metamorphic animals, and he’s a zoo keeper in hell. They are trees and buildings, little skeletons dancing under the moonlight, lonely kids lost in urban mazes, sewing needles stuck in his frail stupid little heart. They are maelstrom of rhymes, soda drinks in a night bar, for a drunken public. They are you, they are him, they are life and death kissing in a blink, but it does not really matters.”
James Jewell is a jack of all trades: poet, rambling man, singer songwriter, filmmaker and sometimes slave to the big system to make a buck. James and his wife Kara have been kind of nomadic wonderers from their home in the hills of Pennsylvania to Nashville, Los Angeles, Toronto and now Paris France. James poems have a strong sense of his Pennsylvania roots while being influenced by the weird and wonderful adventures he and his wife have experienced. James has now been part of the Paris scene for almost six years. Strongly influenced and inspired by the Paris scene he has released “Ships Made of Fake Fur” on Corrupt Press.
Chris Burke
SpokenWord Paris 