Open Secret! Wednesdays (2nite!) @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais in Paris’ “Amor vincit omnia” quarter. At 8:30pm, open mic sign-up lights up like a Roman candle, & at 9pm, art explodes! Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4). Innovations in writing, song, comedy, performance art, theater, & dancing queenery! Join the celebration!
Tonight’s theme is “Calling all troubadours!” (But yes, any & all performers are welcome). What the heck does this Leo clown mean by this shout-out to music types? Lemme take a moment to ask him…OK? OK. Is music the universal language? (Or am I confusing that with math, or with wildly gesticulating with your hands?) Is it older than cave art? Dunno. Maybe drumming is. But music certainly uplifts us, non? Come have some fun!
Gowri K is a Tamil American poet, performing artist, teaching artist, and lawyer whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka. Her advocacy has addressed animal welfare, the environment, the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused in the U.S., and justice and accountability in Sri Lanka. Her publication credits include two peer-reviewed scientific journa articles and poetry appearing in Drunk In A Midnight Choir, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Bourgeon, Lantern Review, and Washington City Paper. She was a member of DC’s 2010 Southern Fried Slam team and has performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage (in 2013 and 2010), Capital Fringe Festival, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company events co-sponsored by the Poets and Writers Readings/Workshops programs. At the 2014 Atlas Intersections Festival,she produced and performed in “Yasmeen,” an original work co-written and co-produced by Huda Asfour, a Palestinian composer and musician.
Rethabile Masilo blogs at Poéfrika and co-edits Canopic Jar. He is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho and has lived in Paris, France, since 1987. His work has been published in various anthologies as well as hard and soft-copy magazines, including Canopic Jar, The Bastille, With Our Eyes Wide Open, Seeing the Unseen, Tears In The Fence, New Coin, Botsotso, Badilisha Poetry, and others. In 2014 his poem ‘Swimming’, published in New Coin Poetry, Vol 49, N°1, won the Dalro First Prize. The same poem won the Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry in Periodicals in 2015. 
Jonathan Schiffman has established himself as a tolerated presence on the Paris SW stage. Originally from New York City, Jonathan received degrees from Yale and Juilliard, then came to France on a Fulbright Scholarship to study music, wine, psychedelic drugs and plenty of other shit. After his fellowship money ran out (much of it squandered on a single overpriced meal in the 16th arr.), Jonathan served as an assistant conductor to the Orchestre National de France and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Then Jonathan served as Music and Artistic Director of the Orchestra of Avignon where for three seasons he subjected his ever-dwindling public to a strict musical diet of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Philip Glass. After his unexpected firing, Jonathan pursued a freelance conducting career while devoting the remaining 95% of his time to the writing of a novel, or, more precisely, to the mental preparation necessary to one day sit down and write a novel. This novel will possibly be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2017. Since 2014, Jonathan has been thrice elected to the SWIC (Spoken Word International Council), a governing body which formulates the rules and guidelines for all official Spoken Word chains and franchises. In addition, Jonathan is the co-founder of SW3 (recently defunct) and SW4 (moribund)
SpokenWord Paris 