Who is a TWP sister, and how many performers do we have? Well, we have over 30 poets on our list who have performed for us at least once – often as part of a group set for one of Teesside’s many excellent community arts festivals.

Having so many potential performers is absolutely brilliant, for these key reasons:

1. We can keep our festival sets fresh and varied, with a different line-up of different performance styles each time
2. We can pick the poets best suited to the event – nature poets for environmental festivals, comedic kid’s performers for family festivals
3. We can cover the whole of the Tees Valley by having a pool of performers who live in different areas
4. New performers can gain confidence by appearing on a line-up with more experienced sisters
5. We can – and do! – respond to last-minute requests for appearances, because there is a greater chance of finding someone who is available on the right date, at short notice

But how does this affect the work of putting a set together? We like to keep things dynamic by presenting ‘woven’ sets whenever we can, linking our work together in ways that create narratives, or contrasting arguments. That’s exactly what we did for the Festival of Thrift in Billingham just this weekend, bouncing around ideas about thriftiness and sustainable living. It’s more engaging than just having each of us in turn do three poems and then stomp off, or zone out at the back of the stage!

We work as a performance team to select the right poems in the right order, often working first over Zoom to get the running order right and trim down to the allowed time. Then we might all meet in person and spend a couple more hours rehearsing some simple choreography or moments of ‘choral speaking’ to enhance one another’s poems.

It’s a labour of love, and also good practice for the future when we may want to devise our own longer-length spoken word shows!