ZONES OF AVOIDANCE
This event on 30th October 2014 has past.
Contact: Box Office: 023 9281 4875
Zones of Avoidance, winner of The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Written and performed by MAGGIE SAWKINS and directed by MARK C HEWITT.
Zones of Avoidance combines moving testimony, vivid language and humour with the voices of those in recovery from addiction.
Full information: www.zonesofavoidance@wordpress.com
Price: £10.00. (£10 (£8 unwaged))
Time: 7.30
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Reviews for ZONES OF AVOIDANCE
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maggie sawkins
Tue 11th Nov 2014 14:42
Review from writer, William Sutton
I enjoyed Maggie Sawkins’ Zones of Avoidance even more second time round, if ‘enjoyed’ is the right word for a show that left me sobbing.
Though Zones of Avoidance won Maggie the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for Poetry, this is no mere poetry reading. Maggie and her director Mark C. Hewitt have woven a tapestry of words and images, telling the story of Sunny Girl and her descent through the circles of addiction. We begin with real recordings in which addicts discuss their problems with humour, articulacy and immediacy. These interviews alone are hugely affecting.
Maggie’s poetry tells the story of her daughter’s struggles and how they affected her relationships, especially, in the last section, with her son. The poems, delivered sometimes live, sometimes on video, have the clearcut, hard-hitting quality of a documentary, with the shimmer of poetic illumination: moons and stars, half-moons and tides.
“I’m reading ‘The Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ –
I want to understand what drove my daughter out in the snow
with no coat or socks, in search of a fix.
I want to understand what divinity led her
to set up camp in the derelict ‘pigeon house’
after running out of sofas to surf.”
Maggie is a poet, not an actress. The varied media, with moments of music, video and silence, offer us a different ways to listen, allowing the story to unfold in our minds at its own pace. The show wins us not through dramatic insistence but through a gentle rhythmic sincerity, with flashes of humour, flashes of pathos. A highlight of Portsmouth Bookfest, this powerful chronicle of lives damaged by addiction is a show that should be seen not just by poetry lovers.
http://www.william-sutton.co.uk/…/zones-of-avoidance-by-ma…/
More about Maggie and future shows:
http://zonesofavoidance.wordpress.com/
Zella Compton’s review of the show in the Portsmouth News:
http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php…
The director of Zones of Avoidance, Mark C. Hewitt, is holding a workshop on live literature on Saturday 29 November in Portsmouth.
Excuse me while I return to reading ‘The Confessions of an English Opium Eater’.
Review is about ZONES OF AVOIDANCE on 30 Oct 2014 (event)