An evening of folk music from Mataio Austin Dean (of Shovel Dance Collective and Les Caravanes) with ensemble, and a solo set from Bianca Wilson (of The Pegwells and Calliope). Austin Dean will be performing an extended, improvised performance (including poetry readings and fragments of other songs) of the Guyanese folk song, August Morning.
Doors 7pm
Tickets £6-10
Mataio Austin Dean, alongside other performers including Alex McKenzie, Nat Philips, Nick Hann, Bianca Wilson, and Tom Hardwick-Allan will give an extended, improvised performance (including poetry readings and fragments of other songs) of the Guyanese folk song, August Morning. Collected by the great Guyanese folklorist, Wordsworth McAndrew, the song originates from the 1830s and the era of abolition. More specifically, it addresses the period directly after emancipation when the formerly enslaved were forced to work as ‘apprentices’ for the plantocracy: thereby prolonging de facto slavery for another 4 years. In highlighting the continuation of slavery beyond emancipation, the song posits a notion of repeating temporality which Austin Dean seeks to instrumentalise to point towards at the ever present echoes of slavery and coloniality in English life today. Slavery is a harm that has been done and continues to be done through the structures of imperialist capitalism and will not be undone until the system is destroyed. Just as the slave ancestors threw off their chains, burnt the sugar cane crop, and fought their oppressors with body and mind, so must we today.
Mataio Austin Dean is an artist, musician, poet, and activist from Portsmouth. Born in 1996 to a Guyanese mother and an English father, Austin Dean’s work often explores, through oral and visual culture, the darkly intertwined histories of Guyana and England. He is best known for his work as a member of the traditional music group, Shovel Dance Collective. Austin Dean sings folksong primarily from the South of England, focussing on songs from Hampshire. He sees his singing of folksong as part of a decolonial process: centring notions of locality, solidarity, and international exchange, and rejecting totalising, imperialistic, nationalistic structures of Britishness and whiteness.
Mataio Austin Dean sings unaccompanied folksong “with a truly unquestionable authenticity …channelling the spirit of Ewan MacColl”
- Tradfolk
Bianca Wilson/Island Girl is a multi-instrumentalist and singer from South of the River. Her practice focuses mainly on the banjo: using it in her quest into music and sound as a celebration of diasporic experience, traversing different epochs of traditional musics in the process.