#inzync

Luka Lesson - "Please Resist Me"

Pull in to InZync on the 26th of March to see this Australian slam champ drop his rhymes in the flesh!

Two poetic households both alike in dignity, in the fair Mother City, where we lay our scenetake to the stage for a battle of words at the Zabalaza Theatre Festival

 Kate Ellis-Cole is an enigma. Always perfectly styled, she carries herself with a secret confidence that’s almost regal. Grace and eloquence spill from her lips in conversation and it’s difficult not to form certain preconceived expectations when this soft-spoken lady steps on stage: she’s white, she’s a woman and she clearly sounds privileged. And then she opens her mouth.  Kate’s poetry and subject matter is far from what the initial impression would lead one to expect. From political satire to the strong cross-cultural ties she experiences with land and country, her poetry reflects magnitudes of conscientious and sensitive living and there’s something about her and the unapologetic sincerity with which she speaks and performs that’s endearing and mesmerising. 

“I think it’s because I don’t try to get up there and speak with pomp and ceremony.  There’s nothing affected about what I want to talk about. There’s a conversational aspect to that and I think people enjoy it”. When pressed whether she’s aware of the initial impressions she conveys, and whether it affects her performance, she admits that it does play a part, especially to surprise the audience. “I have strong conservative streaks. I’m this straight-laced, academic girl. But I absolutely play to that. I love saying ‘fuck’ in front of an audience”.  Yet the “fuck’s” she spits aren’t purely used for shock-effect. There’s thought behind them. Anyone who’s seen her perform her infamous “F-words” can attest to the skill with which Kate writes. She puns, expands and transcends.

Her talent germinates from the unabashed passion she has for words. I’ve never met anyone who’s as obsessed with punctuation, definitions or semantics as Kate is. She somewhat sheepishly admits that she’s read a dictionary from cover to cover, and as the blush blossoms on her cheeks the slight dimples around her smile reveal the truth: pure and simply, words form a part of Kate’s being. “I was four years old when I learned to read. And my way of teaching myself to read was to label things that I drew. If I saw a word and I understood it, then I’d transcribe it. And it sort of became how I understood things, and how I saw the world”. And the practice to pen the world down continued. “I always kept journals, like when I was ten I got my actual first journal, like a leatherbound one, and started annotating my life. And then, when I hit the angsty teenage years that’s when the actual stanza and verse poetry happened. But writing has always just been what I do, you know? In my spare time, and when I’m bored, when I’m frustrated, when I’m excited, when I need to organise. It’s just how I make things make sense.  You put it all together and then, decode”.  

It seems almost natural, then, that her first performance stemmed from the same space. To Kate, spoken word is more personal and more biographical than poems read on paper, because the essence of the performer is so closely intertwined with the performance.  “The first spoken word I did was about my dad. Not my biological dad, my adoptive dad – he’s the one who raised me. And I like to make the juxtaposition because he was raised by his Zulu nanny which, you know, speaks to our Apartheid past, sure, but it’s not so much about that. It’s more about the fact that she was his parent: race aside, geography aside, culture aside, the fact of the matter is, she raised him. And he then raised me.  And that, I feel, was written very much for the audience, because at the end of it I go, ‘I want to talk to you and engage with you’ and I feel like I’m not just standing here and you’re looking at me going, ‘white girl what are you doing here’.  Don’t discount what I’m saying based on my appearance. As Eminen says, ‘there’s a certain feeling you get when you spit and people are getting your shit’”. The discussion returns, once again, to her position as white and women in a generally male-dominated, hip-hop dominated, space and I’m lead to ask, again, what constituent to Kate, on stage, is pre-meditated, what is rehearsed, what is immediate and sincere, what is the something that makes her great?

Kate explains that the larger body of her work springs from random happenstances that cross her path, and that she prefers not to force creative impulse. “I always feel like the writing for something is very difficult. Writing for an impersonal space is very difficult to me because of my bias idea of what poetry is as the space it inhabits in the world - it’s self-expression. So, usually I start writing to an impulse and I’ll see how far it gets me. Then I’ll leave it, I’ll let it stew. Usually what happens to me is a line, or an image comes into my head, something stupid and it’s usually not something particularly poetic, but I’m like ‘I can write about this’.   And then it knits itself. It goes from being a line, to a helix and then it threads itself and works its way into a whole tapestry”.  Kate’s explanation is poetic in itself and I wonder whether she realises this, that her mode of expression is poetry. When I ask her whether she knows this, she almost shyly explains that, to her, “inauthentic poetry is the worst kind” and that there’s nothing premeditated about her writing. Our conversation turns to the nature of creative writing and the much discussed debate on inspiration vs. perspiration.  Kate explains that, to her, the impulse or image or feeling always comes first. “Especially with stage poems. I’ll start writing and a beat while come out, and I want to follow it -  I want to see where it goes.” Kate explains that she sees her work in line with the Derridean theory of language and signs and their deconstruction.  Derrida speaks about language and the deconstruction of the sign and, consequently, the signified - about ‘just letting it go, letting it run’. “I just play with words. I do use stagger rhyme for impact and effect, but mostly it’s just the words and how they come. But also because that’s what makes it a little cooler than talking. It’s not so much, ‘look what I can do with words’, but ‘look what words can do’. Put these words together and look what comes out of there. I’ve always felt that language is this really alive, really vital energetic way of engaging with the world. So it’s more to be sort of ‘words are fucking cool – look everybody!’”.

Despite her second place at the Inzync Spring Slam ’12 and representing the Inzync slam crew at the recent Cape Town Open Book Festival’s slam competition, Kate lists her performance with Antjie Krog as one of her highlights. “It was very daunting, because I’d done an Afrikaans poem and I’m not an Afrikaans firs-language speaker. But afterwards, she came to me and shook my hand and said, ‘dit was so mooi’. And then she remembered me the second time I met her!”. It’s endearing to watch her become slightly star-struck as she recounts the experience, because her telling, and its passion, encapsulates so neatly that ‘something’ about Kate: raw, unbridled authenticity.

“To me, poetry is not about how well your iambic pentameter matches up. It’s about how it makes you feel. How uncomfortable you can be. How comfortable can you be. For example, if the literal thought that goes through my mind is, “I wish I could fucking set myself on fire” I sit down and write and it’s not necessarily good but it feels like I’m set on fire - that’s the process, that’s why we keep doing it. It’s being alive, it’s breathing, except harder or louder than breathing. And, I don’t know, maybe that’s where the authenticity comes from. I’m not writing to be like “please like me”, I write because I have to write because if I don’t there’s a part of me that doesn’t make sense”.

According to Kate her favourite space to perform in is still the Inzync poetry sessions, precisely because the audience that gathers here share a similar interest in the vibrancy of spoken word. “If you know that people are going to hear your poems it changes them from the get-go, it changes the writing stage.  If you’re writing for yourself, there is no ‘I don’t care what you think of me’, but performance means that people are going to judge: that’s what they’re there for”. Kate admits that her stage poetry tends to be “quite angry” and “political”.  “I like to talk about women’s rights, because I feel that my persona on stage is very different to the other feminine vibes that happen, being white and English, and given my age. So, I like to speak from that demographic”. She admits that she often feels daunted, because she’s a woman. “It shouldn’t matter, it really shouldn’t because it’s poetry but as a white woman I often feel I have something else to prove that my credibility is hard won. That’s why I like to talk about the body. To write to that space. To pull outside of the skin. I don’t want to inhabit the body let’s rather inhabit the space outside of the body”.

“That's why I like the grass roots level of spoken word that Inzync and SLipnet is involved with. I love that it’s a huge conversation, it’s a way to encourage people to speak about their lives and their histories and their futures, especially along those scar tissue lines of apartheid: black, white, rich poor, high or low class.  It all gets forgotten the moment you get on stage and all you have are words”. She smiles, and I feel like she’s about to tell me a secret. “Ewok says something like ‘poems won’t change the world, but it might change the way you think, and you might change the world’. And, you know, you can write things down, but once you’ve written them down and you speak them….it’s LIFE. It makes it tangible, it makes it real - that’s what spoken word is for”. 

http://slipnet.co.za/view/inzync/inzync-innie-huis/ Performers on the night were: The InZync Slam Team – Thabiso Nkoana, Kate Ellis Cole and Mc Verassings; e… Video Rating: 5 / 5

I hate poetry.

 All my life I’ve managed to skilfully avoid it. I sniggered with the rest of the sceptics at the “wannabes” trying to be “deep”. I tactfully chose the test questions on novels and theory in all my English Literature tests during my undergraduate studies, and throughout my postgraduate career, also in English Literature, I vaguely responded to discussions on Plath and Cummings and deflected to their novels.

 I attended my first Inzync poetry session on 19 October 2012. Only because a large group of my friends were going and FOMO threatened my social death. I half-heartedly listened to the performances on stage, but was more dedicated to buying drinks at the bar and hovered on the outside, chatting to the odd acquaintance who ducked out for a cigarette. Then I met Kate Ellis-Cole. We quickly became friends and I started attending more and more poetry sessions to see my mate set it up and break it down on stage. I’ve never known someone to be as passionate about words as Kate is, that takes poetry as seriously as she does, that exudes it from every pore. She introduced me to Adrian Different and Pieter Odendaal, the minds behind the Inzync sessions and the sincerity with which they proclaim their love for poetry touched me. Pieter’s work resonates with traits of the old greats like Opperman and Leipoldt and with a touch of modern Breytenbach and Krog. On the other side of the spectrum Different fires provocative words in tight beats that coax your heart to palpitate to his rhythm. Nothing more palpable could convey the diversity in poetry than these two. My attitude towards poetry started to change. When I met Alison-Claire Hoskins I felt slightly star-struck.  Her stage presence is magnetic and the sophistication of her talent is displayed in the complexity of the imagery she uses to explore multitudes of connotations.

I started writing reports on Inzync for Slipnet and my engagement with poetry deepened. As did my feelings of hypocrisy. I’m a literary scholar, I know how to analyse texts and excavate meaning from layers of suggestion and connotation. But who am I to write this critique? I’m not Kate, or Adrian, or Pieter. I’m not Allison-Claire Hoskins or a wordsmith like Thabiso Nkoana. I’m safe. I get to sit in the audience and judge the naked performer on stage, fully clothed behind the fourth wall. Your imagery is clichéd, the rhyme is forced, I’ve heard this topic a million times before.

 I hate poetry.

 I hate poetry because it scares me. It’s one of the most daunting practices I’ve come across. Edged on by Diff I decided to reluctantly perform at an Inzync open mic slot and then at the most recent Inzync Poetry Spring Slam. I told myself I’d do this, to experience the other side to the coin. I’ve spoken to Kate and Diff about their process to writing, but it wasn’t until I actually sat down and started slicing at the page that  my admiration for their talent turned humbling. Do I write according to a predetermined beat or do I figure out what the inherent beat is to what I’ve written? How do I find rhymes in words that sit interestingly together, but not come across as clichéd or just plain bad. What if no-one cares about what I have to say? This is no good. This is embarrassing.

 This is why I hate poetry.

 It takes a hell of a lot of guts to present something you’ve written. And hard work - to edit and revise your words sure, but to reconstruct your own insecurities as well.The lights on the Inzync stage blind you, so that you can only make out the ghostly silhouettes of the audience members – no facial responses, no smiles or frowns. There are cameras in your face all of the time and the mic makes sure your voice travels to every nook of the room, which means nothing of what you do is lost, or hidden. There’s nowhere to hide. You’re completely exposed. And it’s one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve ever had. From the second I opened my mouth all insecurities dissipate. The energy coming from the InZync crowd is different to everything I anticipated. They laugh with you, they mourn with you, they listen to every word that leaves your mouth with an intensity that’s overwhelming and welcoming and supportive. Because the group of people who rendezvous here on the odd Friday night, the organisers, the emcee, the heavyweights, the photographers, DJ’s, the performers, and every single audience member know this secret something I’ve only recently been let in on: there’s poetry in everything. And this is the thing: once you've been opened to accept this it changes your engagement with the world. You start to notice the quality of your every day words, their tone, their rhythm, the beat explosives create. You start to notice silences in words and emphasis in pronounciation. Language transforms to images and images are translated to language. You take note. Of everything. And it doesn't matter whether you're able to relay this with the skill of Wordsworth or Shakespeare or Blake. Because, ultimately writing is about peeling back your skin and exposing your essence. And there's authenticity in that. There's beauty in that. There's poetry in that.

So yeah, now I hate poetry even more. Because I'm completely hooked.

When you sit down with Adrian Different it’s difficult not to emulate everything about him. You have to consciously tell yourself not to talk like he does, not to gesticulate like he does, not to sit like he does, not to BE him. Because he’s cool. Naturally cool.

As he leans back in his chair and casually calls you “man” or “bra”, you’re pulled deeper into his world and his passions: for hip hop, and spoken word, and Saul Williams – where it all started.

“Me and my brother always used to write raps you know? Fun raps. Coz I mean the first hip hop song I listened to, Digable Planets, “Rebirth of Slick”, and that whole era was like where I’m from. So you know hip hop always had me from a young age. But the more poetical side? Slam poetry got me. I was like – man - I don’t know. 10/11? My sister went through to London. She always knew me and my brother were deep into hip hop. And she hooked me up with this dude, Saul Williams, and she told me, yo, listen to this. She sent me a little CD with ‘Amethyst Rocks’ on, man, and I didn’t know what he meant or what he was saying coz I was like ten…eleven…but then…”

With a kind of childish sheepishness he confesses that he was always writing. Before Digable Planets and Saul Williams. And because of them, he just kept on writing. A “Northern Suburbs kid”, his first performance on stage, aged 15, tanked. “Yoh, man, me and my crew the four elements, we went on stage performing...I choked man...I was like too nervous…”. He laughs, and maybe blushes, at the naïve confidence with which he approached the event. Granted, Diff’s debut was slightly derailed by his battle partner, Shaaid, writing a new battle behind his back and catching him completely off guard on the night. “He dissed me hard in front of the whole grade bra…and I was like…oh shit! Ja I never got him back for that, but that was the very first thing I remember on stage...me and him...” I have to bite back the “shit bra” that’s on the tip of my tongue, not wanting to sound like I’m trying too hard. But it’s difficult. Diff’s language burrows beneath your skin. 

Different credits Durban based hip hop and spoken word artist, Ian EWOK Robinson a.k.a Creamy Ewok Baggends, as being the most influential mentor in his life. They met while Diff was on a school trip to a Grahamstown School’s Festival, and instead of attending the gumboot dancing workshop he was signed up for he attended Ewok’s. “Me and him got into this freestyle cipher...I never even knew I could freestyle…it was the first day that I actually freestyled”. Ewok subsequently entered him into a poetry slam that was happening in Cape Town. Not knowing what a slam was or who the other writers were, and with no internet sources available, Different won, with a piece he still performs to this day – The Darkness of the Night. He was 17 at the time. 

Five years later, Different has GROWN. He’s learned how to handle an audience, to break that barrier between stage and audience, and experiment with imagery, “using language in itself to decorate the canvas, you know the page”. Not that he’ll ever fully break away from the simple A-B rhyme schemes and quick-fire stagger rhyme, “coz it’s fun man, it’s the best part ever”. While he humbly describes his style as simply being “chilled out”, he re-adjusts his flat cap and sits forward in his chair, as the conversation takes a more serious turn to the nature of his creative process. “I have a notebook that I carry coz I’m always just writing because I just love language and the construction of words. I adapt the way I speak and it’s just me…in this notebook”. Reading “on the constant” plays a big role in his writing process. “I read enough to have a vocabulary. It’s based on vocabulary, you have to have a developed vocabulary. Some cats are just more blessed than others, like Rimestein, that man’s Afrikaans vocabulary is probably one of the illest I’ve ever heard”. One of Diff’s more compelling qualities is the respect and adoration he holds for his fellow wordsmiths. He appears almost star struck when he mentions artists like Ewok and Rimestein, despite arguably being held in the same category. “You can’t be writing, and not read. That just doesn’t make sense. In order for you to put out you need to take in as well”. I’m slightly surprised when he mentions Fanon. Not because Different seems ignorant, but because I was unaware of the influence a writer like Fanon may have on hip-hop, and spoken word.

 “I like drawing on what’s happening in front of me, I’d find all ways how that topic impacts me and my surroundings. Like the other night I had this crazy conversation with a lady at BP about Tik. It was a 5 min conversation and she told me about what happened with her brother and with her cousin because of Tik”. When being peppered about the fundamentals to his creative process he concedes that he first writes on his phone, and then copies it down into his notebook. “You can’t write something once and think it’s gonna be perfect. Not for me. It’s not gonna be perfect. You work on it, you write it over ten, fifteen times. You chop away. Me, I first think it through, you know? Okay, this is the beginning and I want it to end like this. So, the journey has to end here. And that adds a sense of structure to it. But with freestyling man, you just take that leap. You just open your mouth and you see where you end up”.

The second time Different takes me by surprise, is when he mentions that he doesn’t enjoy ‘freestyle’. “I’m never happy with it, it’s always just me making gat. I mean, when we have a gig we do leave an  element for freestyling for crowd interaction - that’s the best way of interacting with a crowd is going amongst them and freestyling about where we find ourselves. That’s why we do it you know? Just comment on the immediate situation where we find ourselves, and to show a bit of skill you know? Like some lyrical skill comes into the element of freestyling. But it adds that immediate sense of enjoyment like “yoh, that’s dope!” you know?” He pauses and reflects on the balance between spoken word as an aesthetic display of wordskill and the connectivity between performer and audience and the message it encapsulates. To Diff, it seems, the ink flows from the tension between the individual in their environment.

“I comment on things that I see, outside and shit. I know there should be people that relate to it always, but, I don’t do it for the relation factor just to get likes on Facebook. Because you’re moved, something happens. And that’s why you go to the page, you know. Just taking notice of things. Sometimes it becomes too much to carry this overwhelming experience, I don’t like carrying it man, I like putting it down on the page so I can remember it”.

Different’s submersion in Hip-Hop is undeniable. His speech, his dress, his attitude, all speak of his persona’s integration into the culture. But, and this is the germ of the person known as Adrian Different, it’s all authentic.  From the moment he started listening to Local Prophets of the City, and illegally tagging “Diff-erent” on public spaces, hip-hop has been interwoven into his maturation and development as man, and performer. “Listening to DJ Ready D and Local Prophets felt so rebellious man. Because it was like, damn, they’re actually saying shit. I’m like 8 or 9 and oh fuck, they’re actually saying shit about where I’m from. What I like about it is the culture. Rap forms part of the culture. The whole concept of everything fusing together, making one major element which is yourself, and how you must have knowledge about yourself and where you come from. And I like history. So, hip hop was a culture that was one of the teachings that told me, yoh, you need to know where you stand, where you come from, all these things in order for someone to take you seriously. That knowledge of self was the element that got me from day one”.

Despite having shared the stage with the likes of Zapiro, Marlene van Niekerk and Antjie Krog, Different admits that some people still struggle to take him seriously and that he’s occasionally treated like a stereotype. “Stellenbosch is a beautifully fucked up place. When I got here in 2007, people were always ‘joking’ about me being coloured, they’d say some shit like ‘oh don’t pull out a knife’ – you know? Always “joking”, but still. And my response would be just to write”. To make his point, he raps out a couple of lines from his famous piece “So-Called Coloured”: "I have a brother who hasn’t spent time in Polsmoor Penitentiary, I have a sister who hasn’t been a statistic of teenage pregnancy, I have a father who’s still around who doesn’t drink himself into a stupor on papsak, better known as Elsie’s Geluk, and as you can see, I don’t do tik”. He points to his frame and laughs, “Coz you know Tik usually makes you thin and shit”.

Different acknowledges the volatile space of Stellenbosch as having blessed him in dealing with encounters such as, racial prejudice, and more importantly, providing inspiration for his passion. “At the end of the day, I really don’t give a fuck if I’m a stereotype or not. I don’t write for anybody man, I write for myself. Interactions that I’ve had that I think are special. Things that trigger me like yoh that’s dope. And I wouldn’t mind if you give me some of your earspace”. He shrugs and laughs.  “I’m chilled out”.

"Stay Different" and follow Diff on twitter, here.