An Evening of Poetry and Music: Bindii readers at Halifax Cafe, 11 February, 2016
On Thursday, 11 February, I
spent an evening at the Halifax Café with a large and enthusiastic audience for
the ten Bindii poets who read their work.
We were also fortunate to have musicians
Munetaka Umehara and Alexander Ask performing A Midsummer Walk, their original work for Japanese flute and
didgeridoo. Munetaka’s great niece Natsumi performed on percussion to accompany
the other musicians.
The event was organized for
Bindii by Lynette Arden, on behalf of the Adelaide City Council and the Box
Factory Community Centre. The readings were structured by Lynette Arden, Julia
Wakefield and Sara Sims into themes: Nature, Childhood, Love, grief and loss,
Humanity and finally, Music. Each theme was welcomed by a gong, sounded by Gail
Umehara.
Julia Wakefield was MC for
the event.
Readers were: Sara Abend-Sims, Maeve Archibald, Lynette
Arden, Lee Bentley, Belinda Broughton, Dawn Colsey, Margaret
Fensom, Jill Gower, Julia Wakefield, Athena Zaknic.
Following the readings and
an interval, the musicians took over and transported us into a world of sounds
where the flute and didgeridoo echoed and played off one another, accompanied
by the staccato of the percussion. The sounds reminded me of being in a forest,
somewhere in the heat of summer.
A couple of the audience
members told me they had expected to hear a few poems read, but had not dreamed
they would be transported to another world. They loved both our poetry
and the music. This seemed to be the general reaction.
I think we sometimes forget
the impact Japanese genre poetry can have on an audience. The very compact forms
of haiku and tanka can say so much in such a short time and space.
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