We’re delighted to welcome The Other Room, who present Phil Hall, Vanessa Place, and Alan Halsey and Mick Beck performing poems by Hugo Ball.

Vanessa Place writes poetry, prose and art criticism; she is also a criminal lawyer and co-director of Les Figues Press. Her most recent work is available in French as Exposé des Faits, and in English as Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument (Blanc Press 2010-2011). A work of non-fiction, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, was published by Other Press in 2010 and Notes on Conceptualisms, with Robert M. Fitterman, by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2009.

Phil Hall is a Canadian poet whose work has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize (2006) & the Governor General’s Award (2001). His most recent books of poems are The Little Seamstress (2010) & Killdeer (2011). Over the years, he has collected two decks of playing cards from single random cards found on the streets.

Alan Halsey and Mick Beck will perform their arrangements of the sound poems Hugo Ball wrote for the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. In all his work Halsey’s ‘strategy is to subvert our expectations of poetry, to make us look at the moon from the dark side’ (Ian Seed). Beck’s uninhibited versatile tenor sax and his pioneering work with the under-used bassoon (his solo album Life Echoes  gives both instruments a run for their money) add a startling emotional dimension to Ball’s ‘verse without words’.

www.otherroom.org