Olumide Popoola

Olumide Popoola, a young spoken-word and performance artist
from Berlin, has been getting more and more attention on the music and slam
poetry scenes. Not only Joseph Bowie, head of the legendary U.S. band Defunkt,
waxed enthusiastic about her during their recent joint concert in Berlin, but a
growing audience from the slam poetry circuits have also acclaimed her pointed
and erotic ‘she poems’.

Olumide uses storytelling, dramatic expression, and music to get her message
across. Whether it is a story about desire or a political subject, her focus is
on the beauty of life, on our ability as human beings to learn and transform,
and on spirituality. Her style leans on the Caribbean tradition of poetic
expression, as well as hip-hop culture and African storytelling. To create
modes of performance that differ from the usual theatrical experience, she has
collaborated with painters, musicians and sculptors. She has travelled
extensively and put herself in different cultural scenarios to develop her own
individual ‘Diasporic art’.

Olumide Popoola is of Nigerian-German ancestry and has a comprehensive
background in dramatic arts. She studied at the theatre department of Utrecht’s
School of the Arts in the Netherlands and participated in Guillermo
Gomez-Peña’s Masterclass in Performance Art in London. Popoola has been
publishing her poetry since 1988, in such publications as the German magazine
Afro Look, Y-Magazine (a popular youth magazine in Johannesburg, South Africa),
and Wasser in der Wüste, an anthology of writings by Afro-German Women (Berlin:
Orlando Verlag, forthcoming). She also co-edited Talking Home (Amsterdam:
Bluemoon Press, 1999). Her work has been featured on radio and TV in Germany as
well as in South Africa and the Netherlands. In spring 2000, she founded Ms
Lady Pride Productions, a collective of black artists from all disciplines,
promoting and organising events and performances mainly with women artists of
colour.
At City of Women, Olumide Popoola will perform with Berlin-based jazz pianist
Carolyn Carreon del Rosario. Rosario, who was born in the Philippines and has
resided in Berlin since 1984, performs in various jazz clubs and theatres both
with her own group and with other bands, in Germany, Japan, Tunisia, Italy,
Switzerland, Portugal, and New York. She studied piano, jazz, and music
literature at the College of Music (University of Philippines), and advanced
jazz and piano theory with Walter Norris and Aki Takase in Berlin, as well as
with Gaei Allen in New York. Rosario won the Berlin Studio Competition, which
allows her to record her compositions with her group Kullintang Floating on the
Konnex Records label.

Organised by: Mesto žensk / City of Women
In co-operation with: Klub Gromka, Metelkova Mesto