Poet as Setting

NEW EVENT JUST DROPPED: July 31st @ Love Shack

An evening of interdisciplinary experiments between poetry and sound, somewhere between sonic world-building and spellcasting. With an open Mic to boot.

Bring your poetic experiments, your scrappy drafts, a poem a song something between the two, something old or something new.

Featuring interdisciplinary sets from 2tender, Nomakhwezi Becker, and Riwa Saab, followed by an open mic.

Poet as Setting invites you to step into our portals and allow the audience to step into your poetic portals tooooo.

DOORS AT 19:00

EVENT START AT 19:30

About the artists:

Tatenda Naomi Matsvai (aka 2tender) is a facilitator and devised performance maker, working with spoken word poetry in theatrical and non-theatrical performance contexts. Their performances are joyful, participatory, and multidimensional infusing their lived experience with myth to challenge colonial cosmologies.

Tatenda’s work has won the Vault Origins award, been double Offie nominated, and performed as part of Theatre Peckham, The Roundhouse Camden, The Cockpit for Voila Europe! festival and Between.Pomiędzy literary Festival (Poland).

Their poetry will be published in the Barbican Young Poets anthology (2024). Tatenda’s currently writing a TYA show which will tour with Halfmoon in 2025-26.

Nomakhwezi Becker is a South African–German interdisciplinary performer, writer, and facilitator working through poetry, theatre, and storytelling. Her practice explores home, memory, and belonging across multiple languages and lineages, often drawing on the technique of Call and Response. Recent works include Holding Ground (Camden People’s Theatre, 2025) and Waiting for Lift Off (University of Johannesburg, 2024). Her poetry and plays have been published internationally, and she has performed at Poetry Africa, Southbank Centre, and Translationale Berlin. A Barbican Young Poet (2023/24) and Starting Blocks artist, she is passionate about collaborative, embodied approaches to creative research and archive.

Riwa Saab is a poet, sound designer, and theatre-maker. Her work primarily lives in the live realm, excited by what transpires in spaces of gathering and congregation. She's interested in how art puts people and our relationships at the centre of the political narratives we inhabit. Some recent themes she’s explored in her work include the unpacking of generational and familial baggage, and the politics of pop princesses from Asmahan to Shakira. She has performed her original work at Southbank Centre, the Barbican, and has been published in numerous online publications. She is an alumnus of the Barbican Young Poets collective. As a producer, she has curated events such as New Night, a multidisciplinary performance and games night, and When the Land Speaks, a guided excursion through Hackney Marshes exploring what it means to develop a relationship to the lifeforce of the land we reside on as uprooted peoples.