Open Secret! Experimental open mic, Wednesdays underground @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais, Paris 5è.  8pm sign-up starts, & 9 the show ~ Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4). Innovative writing, song, comedy, performance art, theater & more…The theme this week is “Enter the mirror.” Featured act tonight ~ Dareka Daremo & the Ellipses Condition! Melding poetry, music & dance…

Dareka’s bio:
Dareka has performed his poetry since 2005, in France, the US, and everywhere his feet can land on (thus mostly in Europe). He hosted for two years the popular Paris poetry night, “Slam au Downtown” and creates poetry projects with musicians or dancers. He has given workshops in places such as Casablanca & Boston, and even found himself representing France at the London Poetry Olympics. To sum up, his poems are metamorphic animals, and he’s a zoo keeper in hell.

Bio for The Ellipses Condition:
we play.
we jazz.
everything else is …

A former Mad Man (he was a copywriter for various french Ad agencies), David Azencot is now a stand up comedian and author. He has worked for french TV (Le Dezapping du Before sur Canal Plus, “En Famille” on M6, “Docteur CAC” on France 5) and is currently a radio host on Europe 1 with Anne Roumanoff.

His new show, “Flammable”, is about politics, terrorism, environment and mass extinction. So it’s kind of a hit with kids.He performs every wednesday in french at La Nouvelle Seine, which is a riverboat parked near Notre Dame, so you can’t really miss it.  He also performs regularly in english, though he tends to make puns no one understands.

The Ellipses Condition is… the partnered artistry of Pearlann Porter and John Lambert, sharing a commitment to the authentic translation of their inner thoughts and emotions into dance, music and words. Their improvisitions blur the dynamics between movement, musicality and poetry, embodying the philosophy of jazz as a verb lived in every aspect of being. Collaboratively they cultivate new audio/physical relationships, lending living bodies to intangible conversations.

Porter has been the Founding Artistic Director of The Pillow Project and a professor of improvisational dance at Point Park University for the past thirteen years. Lambert has been a professional musician and performing poet in New Orleans and Pittsburgh for over a decade. Together they co-curate and direct The Space Upstairs as lead Resident Artists with a combined 20+ years of experience both locally and internationally creating spontaneous performances, installations and intensive improvisational studies. 

Cecilia Llompart was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida. Her first collection, The Wingless, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in the spring of 2014. Her poetry and prose have appeared in many anthologies and journals. She is also the recipient of two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a fellowship from The Dickinson House, was a finalist for The Field Office agency’s 2016 Postcard Prize in poetry, as well as a finalist for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize given by VERSE journal for her book-length poem Painted Lair. In 2015 she founded the New Wanderers, a nomadic poetry collective, and currently lives in Paris.

Open Secret! An multi-art open mic every Wednesday @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais, 75005 Paris. 8pm ~ all-night sign-up starts, show at 9. Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4).

Our theme this Wednesday, provided by special guest poet/actor Damian Corcoran, is “Mates & Mating!” 😉 Damian Corcoran has been writing poems since his early teens but only recently thought that anyone else might like to hear them. His early works make him cringe, yet there is something compulsive about writing and performing. He has worked in theatre in England and France for many years and has recently started stand up comedy and improvised or scripted poetry performances, in galleries and bars in and around Paris.

Richard Earls writes and performs poetry and songs on subjects as diverse as love, war, family, death and desperation on the dance floor.A musician and songwriter for four decades, he wrote his first anti-war poems five years ago after an encounter with an ex-GI begging on Market Street in San Francisco. This unforgettable experience opened the flood-gates and he is now a regular on the folk and spoken word circuit in the UK at venues such as Songs from Below at the Fiddler’s Elbow, Camden; Hush Hush, in Brighton; The Big Untidy at the Rising Sun Arts Centre,

Reading;  and the Frome Festival.Holding up a mirror to this dangerous and daunting world, Richard takes to task the crooks, marketeers, broadcasters and warmongers who are running the show, and exhorts his listeners and readers to use their vote wisely and treat one another more kindly.

Open Secret! An innovative open mic every Wednesday @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais, 5è Paris. At 8:30, all-night sign-up starts, & 9 the show…Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4). With special guest poet is Lisa Ducasse! And the theme was inspired by her poem, “Silence has fallen on Paris night,” which concerns November’s attacks. She will be accompanied by master saxophonist Evan Laflamme…

Lisa Ducasse is a poet born in Mauritius and currently living in Paris. First published at the age of thirteen, and later in Mauritian poetry magazine Point Barre. She is currently working on releasing her first collection of poems, built around the questions of youth and the feelings that shape and make us… us. Her fascination for the former is perhaps best justified by Patti Smith’s interrogation in her novel Just Kids: “Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”. And as for feelings… aren’t they, in the end, all we have, all we really have? And isn’t that part of the magic?

Open Secret! Open Mic @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais, 75005 Paris. At 8:30 all-night sign-up starts, & at 9 the spectacle. Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4).
Andrew Sweeny is a Canadian-born teacher, writer, musician, meditator, amateur philosopher, and poetic adventurer living in Versailles, France. He has spent the last years teaching at several Paris universities, writing and recording songs, scribbling poems, short stories and various unclassifiable literary. experiments. https://medium.com/@andrewpgsweeny
Carla Drysdale’s first full-length collection of poems, Little Venus, was published in 2009 by Tightrope Books in Toronto. Her first chapbook of poems, Inheritance, from Finishing Line Press came out in 2016. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Paris Press’s Spiraling, PRISM, the Literary Review of Canada & others. In 2014 she was awarded PRISM’s Earle Birney poetry prize. She is currently working on a novel. http://www.carladrysdale.com/