The Great Northern Slam for autumn 2018 comes to Northern Stage (Stage 2) on 4 October.
Sixteen of the best slam poets in the North have three minutes each to wow the audience with their words and delivery. Each round eliminates contestants until only two poets are left to battle it out for the prize, pride and the glory of becoming Great Northern Slam Champion.
The special guest will be Rowan McCabe is the world’s first door-to-door poet whose show Door-to-Door Poetry played in Stage 3 in early May.
Stage 3
26 September
This Really Is Too Much
A 'genre-busting' performance by Gacefool reveals the downright absurd realities of life as a 3-dimensional, high definition, water-drinking, salad-eating, WO-man in modern society.
27 September
Alif presents Scratch Night
Alif is a new independent venture for playwrights of colour who want to share their stories with the North East.
2 October
Suicide Notes... the spoken word of Christopher Brett Bailey
Bailey's words deliver "a linguistic kaleidoscope of caustic cartoons, crackpot prophesies and demented erotica, verbal diarrhoea, dirty jokes, venomous poetry and tall tales that corkscrew deep into nightmares and tonight he is a voicebox and a microphone and nothing more: a potty mouthed poet, a reverend with a forked tongue, a stand-up comedian from Hell, delivering a symphony of verbal adrenaline and twisted humour, a dense, poetic blend of the hallucinogenic and the hardboiled, a live action short story collection for the depraved, the depressed and the death obsessed."
3 October
Gulliver Returns
By Dan Coleman, after Jonathan Swift
A new play about broken dreams, enduring love and the weird world we live in inspired by Gulliver's Travels.
12 October
Rob Kemp: The Elvis Dead
Lee Martin for Gag Reflex in Association with Geoff Rowe
Cult classic horror movie Evil Dead 2 reinterpreted through the songs of Elvis Presley.
23 October
O No!
Jamie Wood
A psychedelic ride and a wonky homage to the woman damned for destroying the Beatles. It borrows Yoko Ono’s art instructions to ask whether falling in love is always catastrophic. It’s about reckless optimism, avant-garde art and what we might yet have to learn from the hippies.