STACEYANN CHIN | LIVE REVIEW
Buffalo Bar, Cardiff, Sun 15 Feb
“If I can’t read a love poem in Cardiff where can I read it, right?” – Staceyann Chin
Internationally renowned Spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin came to Cardiff for the very first time and it was a foot-stomping, sweat drooling from the walls kind of night – I felt lucky to be there.
The support acts were a fantastically heavy dose of Cardiff creativity and first on the bill was singer-songwriter Lily Beau, who had I previously seen and who had totally blown me away. This girl is 16 and absurdly good – it really hit me when she said before a song that she ‘wrote it a few years ago’. There is nothing cooler to me than the bravado of a young woman and Lily has heaps of it. For instance, she sang about the likes of Whitney and Beyonce and how ‘if you put them all together you’d have her’. Lily played mostly her own soulful material, with a few covers – a standout was her take on India.Arie’s Brown Skin, incorporating some spoken-word by this awesome poet next to her and I really, really wish I knew her name.
Next up was lit-hop kid Zaru Jonson, his words exploding at super pace and in powerful contrast with his excellent slacker-demeanour. Jonson was followed by another poet, whose material contained a number of Pokémon references, so I was sold. After the hugely encouraging display of Cardiff talent, a woman who had come to us from Jamaica via New York took the stage.
And pretty much the first thing Staceyann Chin did was get off that stage and walk into the crowd. She instructed us to sit on the floor, with her commanding the small space in the middle and, in retrospective, I couldn’t have imagined the show being any other way. It made for such an imitate performance – which seems only fitting considering the raw, unapologetic honesty of her poetry. Chin is a real powerhouse of a woman; her notable presence had the crowd clinging onto her every syllable. Plus, she was funny as hell.
She read first from her memoir The Other Side Of Paradise, before launching into her poetry – it didn’t once feel like a recitation, as she slipped from conversation into verse. So with us all sitting around her in sweat-wet t-shirts, Staceyann dropped lyrical truths on feminism, on love and on identity. Not much gets me more excited or hits me harder than great poetry and her words totally punched me in the gut but like, in a good way. By the end of night I was sitting in the corner looking like a real life ‘heart eyes’ emoji.
words SARAH MCCREADIE