Culture club marked its halfway point this week. And we celebrated it by looking at spoken word.

Week Five was fantastic and Savhanha and I took a leading role by giving our young members an introduction to spoken word. The session started off with me leading an activity called “impostor” developed from the wildly popular mobile game ‘among us’; it had a team of innocents trying to figure out which one of them was the impostor in a series of 2.5 -minute rounds just by asking questions and voting on who sounded like they were lying. The kids had a lot of fun and got a chance to take a closer look into intonation.

Next, Savhanha lead a poetry exercise where the young people looked at ‘Harlem (a dream deferred)’ and the classic ‘Beach Boys’ (yes, they are classed as a classic now). We explored the many forms that a poem can come in from monologue style to song form and what kind of techniques can be used to build a poem such as rhyme and repetition. They then took some time to create their own short poems about whatever they wanted from their favourite animal to the people in the zoom call.

So, in short, we had a good and fun week that allowed the kids to think outside the box and learn more about one of the most powerful forces in this universe: the spoken word.

Blog post by Michael Mihoc