Supported by the Goethe Institut’s MobiArts Tour Project
Going on an international tour is the dream of almost every upcoming artist, me included. It comes with a lot of excitement about meeting a new audience, discovering new cultures and experiences. However, there are some things that you just don’t see coming, one of such things that I found during the trip to the horn of East Africa, Tanzania, is reassurance.
Penboy lights up the stage in Goethe Institute Dar es Salaam
Though the tour is yet to come to a close, I can confidently say that the performance in Goethe Institute Tanzania was the longest, a 50-minute-long performance of 7 awe-inspiring, reawakening, and rejuvenating poems (Click here to stream all poems). The poems performed cut across different yet interconnected universal themes.
While I as an artist put up an unforgettable show for the Dar es Salaam audience, the accompanying sound from the Action Music Academy band made the performance more special and unique. (Watch full performance here).
Hidden Moments: Back Stage Talks
I love being in front of the mic and standing under the spotlight, that’s home to me. But away from that, I always look forward to the chats behind the curtain. After performing for close to an hour I left the stage all tired and sweaty but the interesting conversation I had with members of Poetry 255, a platform that empowers poets and performing artists in Tanzania, was quite reenergizing. I got first-hand information about the nature of their work, and how it is contributing to the growth of the country’s spoken word industry. I also shared a little about Cameroon’s spoken word industry and the entertainment industry as a whole.
TRAVELLING BACK IN TIME
If there is one thing I will always appreciate about art, it’s its ability to take you back in time. While in Tanzania, I had the privilege of getting a guided tour of the vibrant port-city, Dar es Salaam (vlog available here). The place has beautiful scenery and infrastructure which is truly captivating, but what stole my heart were historical relics such as monuments of Tanzania’s most renowned Pan Africanists. Looking at each of them, I felt a sense of reassurance and renewal of purpose.
GALLERY
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