I was recently asked to curate and host a new live reading night at The Wall at World Bar called CONFESSION BOOTH, and the first event is TONIGHT! (I’m shit at remembering to update this site! Yeah!)
RHYS MULDOON, NADINE VON COHEN, DARRYN KING, MATT BANHAM, NATHAN HARRISON and SYMONNE TORPY will be sharing their darkest confessions with the audience. Audience members will also have a chance to make an anonymous confession, which I’ll read out at the end of the night. I’ll be making a confession after all, and it is about the worst thing I have ever done – an incident that led me to coin the term ‘proudshame’.
It’s at 7:30 upstairs at 24 Bayswater Road in King’s Cross, free entry and free champagne on arrival.
Here’s a cool little interview on Time Out Sydney about the event:
Confession Booth curator A.H. Cayley explains the thinking behind Sydney’s new night of spoken word.
Why did you choose these particular speakers?
I’m a huge fan of everyone on the bill. That was pretty much it, really – the selection criterion was ‘are you awesome?’. Nadine von Cohen is such a clever writer, and her almost-performance art Twitter feed is hilarious. But honestly, her stuff for The Vine – she takes these often flimsy topics and subverts them, makes them wildly funny and hugely engaging. That’s not easy to do.
Darryn King‘s great in Time Out, but when he’s able to write more creatively he’s just superb. I fucking loved his Banksy piece. Even just on Twitter, his sense of humour and timing is marvellous. He’s a Penguin Plays Rough alumnus, too, so he comes with a certificate of awesomticity.
Nathan Harrison‘s Sydney Fringe performance of Georges Perec’s The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise at PACT last year was amazing, and Applespiel, the ensemble in which he writes and performs, just keeps kicking new goals, so I really wanted his voice on this bill.
I think Matt Banham‘s going to be an interesting one. All I know about his confession is that it will be set to music. He’s very easily misunderstood; his sense of humour is so dry and absurd at the same time. But then, he comes out with these perfectly written observations! No Through Road’s ‘How To Make You Cum’ is such a gorgeous, heartbreaking song. If you can write something so beautiful about passionless fucking, you’re on the bill. No question.
Symonne Torpy‘s probably my favourite emerging writer at the moment. She emailed me last year with a link to her blog, The People Collector, which I was expecting to be really shit, or very self-congratulatory, because who emails strangers a link to their blog? Anyway, I clicked on the link and decided within about half a minute that I had to commission a piece from her for the next issue of PAN Magazine. I love the way she sees things, I love her voice. Her sense of character and empathy is stunning. A real acid wit, too.
I probably don’t need to explain why I chose Rhys Muldoon; that one explains itself. He’s achieved so much in Australian film, TV and theatre, but his reading at the last Men of Letters event sealed the deal. It was one of the most joyfully, explicitly pornographic things I’ve ever heard in public – he basically spent ten minutes sexually harrassing the entire audience. And yet, he’s adored by parents nationwide for his work on Playschool and his new kids’ album, I’m Not Singing. Also, Genie From Down Under was the greatest TV show ever. That’s the main reason he’s on the bill, really. Read the whole damn thing.
