Slamalamadingdong Open Slam featuring Philemon and First Draft Theatre: Review

By Candice Reed

On June 19 I had the pleasure of attending a Slamalamadingdong slam for the first time. The night saw Bella Union again filled to capacity as people came in from chilly darkness seeking warmth and light. Slamalama Mama Michelle Dabrowski and dancer Stephen Wulwik teamed up to invite the crowd in, easing us into a curious and relaxed place with an entrancing contemporary dance piece entitled We Speak Secrets.

After an excitable greeting and introduction from Joel McKerrow, ZedEppelin took the stage with the craziest guitar I have ever seen. It is, essentially, a space guitar. Sure, you could call it an acoustic guitar and Novation Launchpad hybrid (a quick Google will explain that better than I ever could), but let’s be realistic here: it was out of this world. After putting his new ‘toy’ through its paces in the track ‘One Year’, ZedEppelin had heads bobbing within 30 seconds of getting stuck into ‘Hometown Crosswalk’, winning himself bonus Cool Points for playing two instruments at once.

MC Mewz laid out some tasty hip hop snacks to whet our appetites, paving the way into slam time.

There were two open mic slots this time around, with Alex and Meena stepping up with a couple of respectable performances. Meena hit close to home during his impassioned plea for humans to open up, to stop seeing our words as burdens on each other.

Rowan White entertained as the evening’s gallant 'sacrificial poet', giving a cheeky but not flippant performance about economic refugees to calibrate the judges scoring before everybody got down to business in the remaining seven slots in the slam. Brendan Dennis blew us all away with an impressive alliterative interpretation of a classic tongue twister. Not once did he trip over his words, delivering them with punch and not a small amount of mischief.

Rainbow-clad Dominic and 'simple but fancy' Eva graced us with love and eloquence, while the so very tall Griffin Kelly gave us 'An Ode to Bukowski' which had the more well-read among us cracking up. It served as a solid kick to the pants reminder that I need to read more. I am hanging my head in shame, I assure you.

Improv quartet First Draft Theatre provided a change of pace, the ladies brilliantly acting out suggestions in the form of hashtags previously taken from the audience. To describe them as hilarious would be to deny them the credit they’re due. I suspect I wasn’t the only one with the symptoms of having been thoroughly entertained to within an inch of my life.

First-timer Natasha graced the stage next for a small musical interlude with a clear, soft and powerfully sung ballad on her acoustic guitar.

Another first-timer, Chris Comstock, proceeded to tug on our hearts and I don’t think there was a single person in attendance who didn’t fall a little bit in love with his words after an intense poem about love without expectation, the power of words, and the question: What if you didn’t run?

Local dark folk musician Philemon closed the evening with a trio of songs including her latest single ‘Frame’ and an unnamed track about how love changes every cell in your body that she wrote in the green room before the show. A personal favourite was ‘Shake the Stars’, written from a collection of quotes from an ex-partner.

I had my money on Chris Comstock to win (he came second, with Eva in third place), but I was pleasantly unsurprised to hear Brendan Dennis’ name announced before he thrilled us with a highly comedic piece about colouring between the lines. I can’t wait to see what July’s slam brings to the table.