The Gods are All Here. Phil Okwendy

When clearing his mother’s house, storyteller Phil Okwedy made an astonishing discovery of a series of love letters from his father to his mother.  Extracts from these letters form the backdrop to a powerful and compelling performance that mixes extraordinary and everyday stories of myths, folktales and song from the African diaspora with Phil’s personal experiences of growing up as a child of dual heritage in 1960 & 70’s Wales.  Charting the time of life when children are said to view their parents as gods, Phil considers if his parents were, in fact, the gods he had believed them to be…

Phil says:  My work is driven by a sense of absence and a need for relevance. When I began to tell stories, I felt this as an absence of a tradition that I could tell from; an absence of a tradition I could easily connect with; an absence, in fact, of a cultural myth: Welsh but not quite Welsh, Igbo but never having lived in Nigeria, born in Cardiff but a stranger to Butetown where my father lived while in Wales and where my sister was born, I have felt compelled to try and make the old stories, the folk tales and fairy tales, relevant in some way. So, at the heart of The Gods Are All Here are the questions that myth has always sought to answer – questions that are always relevant: Who am I? Who are we? And, what does it mean to be human? In mixing together personal story, family history, folktale and myth these old stories have contemporary resonance and relevance and can provide the starting point for other stories to emerge and other voices to find their place.

This is the long awaited visit of Phil that was postponed in April 2022 and again in April 2023.

We will be zooming this event.

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Time: Apr 5, 2024 07:00 PM London
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