December 16th, 2022

Doors: 7:00pm (Start time: 7:30pm, Event Ends: 10:00pm. Includes Interval.)

Price: £6 / £8 / £10 (£5 concessions)

16+ accompanied. Wheelchair accessible. For further access enquiries please contact [email protected]

*Due to the train strikes, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa and Arji Manuelpillai can no longer make it. Though this is disappointing, we stand in full solidarity with the RMT and striking workers. We are delighted to instead welcome ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU and MUNEERA PILGRIM.

Raise the Bar presents another evening of dynamic spoken word poetry and acoustic music at Arnolfini, after October's spectacular sell-out show. The event will feature three poets reading from their brand new poetry collections, plus multi-instrumentalist and former world beatboxing champion Bellatrix.

Music from:

BELLATRIX - A spellbinding singer and instinctively expressive songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist, a versatile performer and former world beatboxing champion. In this special performance, Bellatrix will bring their music to life through live looping, including beatboxing, singing, bass guitar, double bass, synth, and uke.

Poetry from:

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU - TS Eliot Prize shortlisted and Guardian poetry book of the year. Anthony is a Brtish-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His latest poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics was published by Granta on 3 November 2022.

MUNEERA PILGRIM - international Poet, Cultural Producer, Writer, Community Researcher, Broadcaster, TEDx Speaker and WOW Festival Speaker. She conducts workshops, shares art, guest lectures, hosts, and finds alternative ways to educate and exchange ideas while focusing on methodologies of empowerment for non-centred people. At heart, Muneera is a storyteller, concerned with telling stories to disrupt mainstream narratives of non centred people globally.

STEFAN MOHAMED - Award-winning author, poet and video maker based in Bristol, reading from his new poetry collection 'Farewell Tour'. He has been performing poetry at pubs, theatres and festivals around the UK for 10 years, and has been praised for his ‘elegant venom and relentless wit’ (Bristol 24/7).

Raise the Bar is the South West's leading live poetry night, running blockbuster spoken word events in Bristol and beyond since 2014.

‘From top to bottom, one of my all time favourite shows’ – Shane Koyczan

'One of the best poetry nights in the country' – Rafeef Ziadah

'Out-loud reactions are encouraged…shaking off traditional theatre etiquette' – Bristol 24/7

|| Full Artist Bios ||

BELLATRIX

There are multifaceted artists, and then there’s Bellatrix. A spellbinding singer and instinctively expressive songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist, a versatile performer and former world beatboxing champion, Bellatrix complements artistic wholeness with an inventive, all-encompassing and hands-on creative vision that can’t help but resonate.

Starting out as the first professional female beatboxer in the UK, Bellatrix - who now identifies as non-binary - has been a trailblazer in their field and is a fierce advocate for those who are under-represented in their communities.

Bellatrix has since made their name as both a solo artist and a highly sought after collaborator, touring internationally and performing at many of the top festivals and venues across the world.

Bellatrix is currently playing bass for Grammy nominated artist NAO, releasing and performing “avant-punk-pop” music as a solo artist, and hosting a monthly radio show on Soho Radio called “Goldenear”.

In this incarnation of Bellatrix’s live show they will bring their music to life through live looping, including beatboxing, singing, bass guitar, double bass, synth, and uke.

Come and take part in a sonic journey through the delicate, the fierce and some serious bass.

Socials: @Bellatrix_music

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.

His latest poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics was published by Granta on 3 November 2022. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year.

BOOK BIO - Heritage Aesthetics

Witty and wide-ranging, Heritage Aesthetics draws from Anthony’s family’s migratory histories – between Cyprus and the UK – to interrogate patriarchy, xenophobia and national divides. Spanning from the British Empire to the contemporary moment, Anaxagorou unpacks the travelogues of colonial writers and military men alongside experiences of racism in the present.

Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony’s gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.

‘Through a keen attentiveness to the complicities and possibilities of language, Heritage Aesthetics reveals how disclaiming a country might be the most honest method of loving it.’ - The Guardian

MUNEERA PILGRIM:

Muneera Pilgrim is a Poet, Cultural Producer, Writer, Community Researcher, Broadcaster, TEDx Speaker, and WOW Festival Speaker with international acclaim. She conducts workshops, shares art, guest lectures, hosts, and finds alternative ways to educate and exchange ideas while focusing on methodologies of empowerment for non-centered people. At heart, Muneera is a storyteller, concerned with telling stories to disrupt mainstream narratives of non-centered people globally and to beautify truths that are rarely told.

Muneera regularly contributes to Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2, she is an Alumni Associate Artist with The English Touring Theatre where she is writing her first play, and she is an in-house poet and thinker, with In Between Time where she developed The Joy Project.

Muneera has written for The Guardian, Amaliah, Huffington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Black Ballard and various other digital and print platforms. She has been featured across the BBC network including BBC News, as well as Sky News, Sky Arts, Al Jazeera, and various other television channels. In 2015 a documentary was commissioned and screened about her former group Poetic Pilgrimage Called Hip Hop Hijabis.

Muneera holds an MA in Islamic studies where she focused on Black British pathways to spirituality, migration, gender, and race. She holds a second MA in Women’s Studies, where she focused on the intersection of faith and spirituality, race, gender, autoethnography and methodologies of empowerment for non-centered people. Her innovation in her work and the use of poetry won her The Ann Kaloski-Naylor Award for Adventurous Academic Writing.

She etches a poetic space of dialogue which is accessible to all regardless of religious and cultural boundaries. Rooted in spirituality she uses communication and art for edification, enrichment and change.

Her Debut Poetry collection 'That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles’ was released in November 2021 through Burning Eye Books.

STEFAN MOHAMED

Stefan Mohamed is an award-winning author, poet and video maker based in Bristol. He has been performing poetry at pubs, theatres and festivals around the UK for 10years, and has been praised for his ‘elegant venom and relentless wit’ (Bristol 24/7). He is the author of the Bitter Sixteen Trilogy and Falling Leaves (Salt Publishing), The Marketplace of Ideas (Stewed Rhubarb), PANIC! (Burning Eye Books) and new poetry collection Farewell Tour (Verve Poetry Press). In 2022, his short poetry film ‘it’s all for you’ was long-listed for the Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry (Poetry in Film category).

“Stef writes about things which scare him and does it so brilliantly that he makes me believe that a life without hope wouldn’t be so bad really,” says Nine Arches Press poet Tom Sastry. “He is also extremely polite and turns up on time.”

Twitter / Instagram: @stefmowords
www.stefmo.co.uk

BOOK BIO - Farewell Tour
Your island is sinking. Your sulky empire. Your stubborn rainy kingdom. The process is already underway - but there’s still time to take a tour… Grotesque, whimsical and ‘refreshingly deranged’, Stefan Mohamed’s Farewell Tour is a surreal itinerary for an end-of-the-road trip. From a grubby b’n’b on the cusp of Great Rot, to the kooky quagmires of Marmite County, via the fractal cul-de-sacs of Battleborough and the oozy streets of Snarlingham, accompanied by a soundtrack of bizarre mixtapes, distorted radio interviews and passive-aggressive audiobooks, there will be no lessons or catharsis. Just you, the journey, and this haunted, haunting, cursed and cursing land.

“Cheeky, observational and deliciously apocalyptic” - Molly Naylor

“Farewell Tour is a bit like coming home from a few nights in literally any city in the world, and then having to spend ninety minutes on a carcinogenic Tube train next to a man eating a whole chicken with his hands. But what I want to suggest to you is that that’s good, actually” - Luke Kennard

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