Join spoken word artist Nick Makoha and musician Tara Franks to explore how spoken word and music can be used to support delivery of your school curriculum, and beyond. The day will also include a chance to network with spoken word, literature and music organisations. Suitable for primary, secondary and special schools.
The session will be facilitated by Nimble Fish, creative producers and facilitators with extensive experience of helping to create the conditions for creativity in the classroom, and working with teachers to reconnect with innovation in their practice.
In this session
Spoken word artist Nick Makoha will work with found
objects, personal interests and a variety of performance and poetry techniques
to encourage participants to use poetry in new ways. Each participant will
create a short piece of poetry in the session. Please bring a favourite
song and its lyrics, which we will use as a starting point.
Using voice, movement and 'body percussion', Musician Tara Franks will explore how we can
create musical stories with children of a wide range of ages and abilities. In
the session, the group will begin to devise a brand new piece of music
together, and learn how to do this with pupils. Please bring an object from
school or classroom - something easily available - that might be fun to make a
sound with.
About the artists
Nick Makoha is a dynamic spoken word artist and writer born in Uganda and currently residing in London. He is one of ten contemporary poets in the UK to have been selected for Spread the Word’s Complete Works development programme. His one-man show My Father & Other Superheroes has just completed a UK tour and he also recently won the Brunel African Poetry prize. His poems have appeared in the TriQuarterly Review and Boston Review and his first full collection of poetry The Second Republic is in the anthology Seven New Generation African Poets.
Tara Franks is a musician. Having worked in education since 2003, receiving a PGCE from Homerton Cambridge and then later an MMus in Leadership from the GSMD, an important part of Tara’s work involves leading creative projects in collaborative composition/improvisation, percussion and vocal work. She has worked for organisations including Arts First, Barbican, Aldeburgh Music, Royal Opera House, Serious, Kobe University, Japan, and co-founded an on-going song writing project/leadership programme in Mexico City, Sunland Express.
