Event: Reclaim the Mic
Ysella Sims headed to the Barnfield Theatre on Friday 13th June for an evening of poetry, comedy and spoken word from Spork!, featuring Clare Ferguson-Walker, Jackie Juno and Jaidah McDill, and hosted by Ceri Baker. Part of the Reclaim Festival, ‘a patriarchy-smashing week of locally-sourced female greatness’, curated by Katie Villa.
Friday 13th started the way we might expect - badly. News of escalating hostilities between Israel and Iran was making people twitchy and upset. By evening, as we filtered into the red brick Victorian theatre, we were eager for distraction, ready to find something to laugh about. We weren’t disappointed.
Our host, Ceri Baker, came to the stage wearing a t-shirt she’d made while preparing for her slot earlier at M/Others on the Mic, and tonight’s gig. It reads:
‘Bombing for peace is like f***ing for virginity.’
Reclaim the Mic host Ceri Baker. Photo by Ysella Sims
We laugh, united in the dark stalls by the sight of this soft-voiced woman, her notebook stuffed with words, ideas and doodles, the pages marked with flurries of orange and pink, alone under the spotlights of the proscenium-arched stage - reclaiming the mic and helping us back to ourselves.
She props placards from a recent peace march up against the mic stand like she’s setting out her stall. Adapted from eco-friendly toilet roll boxes, they read, ‘A poet who gives a crap about genocide’, and, ‘This place gives a crap about not slaughtering children.’ We laugh at her ingenuity, buoyed by her conviction.
She offers us, Backwards-Looking Dog, a spoken word piece about finding herself, as a parent, in a state of no self - a state of enshitenment! This is followed by a celebratory piece about holding the golden ticket of ADHD, before embarking on a sea shanty/Om mashup about coping with real life - “it’s alright, it’s nearly over!” - she assures us between verses as we laugh and hum along. “Are you warmed up now?” she asks, inviting the first artist to the stage.
“Hello beloveds,” says Jaidah McDill, making us feel beloved at once. She carries a quiet, deep confidence, and we hush to listen to her words, hypnotic and prayer-like. At the end of each poem she claps along with the audience, like a priest crossing themselves after performing a blessing. Her work is affirming and lyrical, self-aware and honest, bouncing with the rhythm, musicality and cadence of song to paint pictures of her relationship to community, family, and divinity. It’s clever, intricately woven wordplay, using rhyme and alliteration to land images. Loving ourselves - and each other - is important, she says, as a woman, and as a woman in the arts. “I love myself,” she says, to a roar of approval from her family in the stalls. We believe too, because we can feel that she believes. Afterwards, as she slips back to her seat in the dark auditorium, Ceri hugs her, returning to the mic with a voice wavering with emotion.
From the divine to the deliciously wicked, Jackie Juno is greeted by rapturous applause and foot-stomping. A firm favourite on the South West poetry and spoken word scene, she has garnered new levels of admiration for the way she’s ‘danced with cancer’, making a successful one woman show, Cancer Dancer, about the experience. She appears, wearing head-to-toe leopard print and a pair of sparkly pink ears sprouting from pink hair, drawing us swiftly into an owl-themed call-and-respond, Twit, Twoo. It’s simple enough in premise but calls for a level of verbal and mental dexterity not available to all of us on a Friday night, creating a sense of hilarity. She goes on to introduce us to a dubious looking owl-themed bag, a gift from a well-wisher. “It’s not an owl - what are these?” she asks, pulling on one of its four legs. She pushes her hands into its pink-lined side slits: “And these? What are these?” she asks, suggestively. “It’s not a bag, it’s a muff. I’ve called her Ophelia. Ophelia Muff.”
Jackie Juno. Photos by Ysella Sims
Her work is playful and subversive, and we love it. “I’m English, so I’ve written a poem called, ‘Sorry’”; “You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing! Being a bitch means I can help my sister to not tolerate tossers.” She’s created a board of positive acronyms for the word witch. My favourite is Woman In Total Charge (of) Herself. Her new book, Extra Ordinary Women, celebrates the unsung heroes among us, sales of which are helping to raise funds for WomanKind.
Headliner Clare Ferguson-Walker brings the energy and wit of Caitlin Moran to the stage - that is, if Caitlin Moran came from Wales and could make you laugh in an ABAB rhyme scheme. She looks like the art she makes - vivid, richly coloured and beautiful. A punk Aphrodite. She confides about some surgery she’s had before berating herself for oversharing, “That’d be the wines,” she says, pouring herself a glass of water “to rehydrate”. We don’t know if it is, but it doesn’t matter, we feel like we’re in - that we’ve won a night out with the funniest woman not in our friendship group.
Clare Ferguson-Walker. Photo by Ysella Sims
Straddling the line between humour and tragedy, compassion and indifference with honesty, she invites us into her world. A poem about transition, about a child questioning their gender, ends with, the answer is to love not the child you want/ but the child you are given.
She recounts a parent’s race at sports day, taking part, last minute, in an attempt to exact revenge on a nemesis from schooldays who’d stolen the boy she fancied. To her children’s humiliation, she tells us, her breasts, “Like the Mitchell brothers, like melons in pop socks, popped out to say hello. But I won by a nipple!”
In Ohmygodhaveyoulostweight?, she offers a multitude of answers to the increasingly fevered question such as, yes, but I’ve been tackling my issues in therapy/yes, but I’ve been volunteering for a children’s charity/yes, but I’ve found a cure for brain cancer.
She ends with a poem about the weirdness of the Covid years, when some people built an extension, and I was pacing the flat, filled with existential dread, taking bites from a block of cheese in the fridge and growing a beard. Called, Me avoiding you, avoiding me, she deftly articulates the revised social rules and psychological wranglings created by our enforced solitude and exclusion.
Afterwards we head out into the Friday night drizzle - a little bit happier for the distraction, uplifted by the humanity, warmth and generosity of each of these women, and carrying a bit of sparkle into what feels, at times, a darkening world.