Story Story And An Evening With Lanaire Aderemi

Story story is a three-day digital festival taking place between 5th-7th of February, comprising open conversations, commissions and workshops, and culminating in a screening of an evening with verse writer: a documentary by Lanaire Aderemi. The festival aims to amplify the voices of emerging writers, poets, and theatre-makers, while equipping them with the tools needed to share their stories with the world.

Speakers include Inua Ellams, Wana Udobang, Koye Adesanya and more….

As a poet, playwright, performer, and much more, Lanaire Aderemi is a perfect representation of the multi-hyphenate generation. Through the use of audio, video, and written word, she has been able to craft artwork focused on amplifying the stories of black women. In her art, marginalized voices are moved out of the shadows and into the center, put on full display for audiences to take in. Her work is grounded in rigorous research as evidenced by her winning the Peter Gutkind prize for the highest dissertation score in sociology at the University of Warwick.

In addition to thorough research, her work is informed by the lived-in experiences of herself and the stories of those she shares. She has undertaken residency in the Birmingham REP poetic theatre makers programme, along with poetry commissions from the BBC Coventry City of Culture Trust and Tate Modern. Always looking to push boundaries, she released a collaborative EP with rapper King Solomon, a genre bending trip fusing poetry and music together. Her first play, ‘You Did Not Break Us’, a play based on the Egba market women protest in Nigeria, was presented at the Birmingham Rep Theatre during her residency. Her second play, ‘An Evening with Verse Writer’ won the 2019 Shoot Festival Development Award and was commissioned by the Warwick Arts Centre in October 2019. This play encapsulates the interdisciplinary nature of her work, as poetry, music, and visual art merge for a dynamic theatre experience. The interactive aspects of the play draw upon the call & response nature of Yoruba oral tradition, an integral part of her culture.

Lanaire is able to explore the politics of memory by examining our relationship with memory and why we remember certain histories yet forget others. Memory remains a core theme in her work and as she progresses, she looks forward to archiving the experiences of others so that their memories can be honored as their stories are told. Founding her own production company, Lanaire Aderemi Productions, is the next step in bringing the marginalized to the center and asserting that the personal is also political. The first film from the production company will be a documentary that both shows and explores the rich context around ‘an evening with verse writer’. Regardless of the medium, her passion for authentic and interactive storytelling is the hallmark of this bright young talent