Friday Sessions: The Repeat Beat Poet and Jaka Skapin

Welcome to Friday Sessions, free live music every Friday night in our cafe space!

To celebrate the opening of Who we are now, and then… a new exhibition from Danielle Teale’s innovative Collective IDentity Project, thoughtfully curated in collaboration with dancers with Parkinson’s, we are excited to present a one-off, improvised voice and poetry performance featuring its musical director, Jaka Skapin, and The Repeat Beat Poet – award winning spoken word artist, writer and curator. Expect a convergence of the CID project’s themes of compassion, care, identity and collectivity – expressed through Jaka’s layered vocal soundscapes – and The Repeat Beat Poet’s unique blend of storytelling, performance and conscious thought.

About The Repeat Beat Poet

Peter de Graft-Johnson is The Repeat Beat Poet, a Hip Hop artist and broadcaster working to capture and extend moments of time, thought, and feeling. Peter has performed across the UK and internationally at venues including the Southbank Centre and Ronnie Scotts in London, performing alongside artists like Margaret Atwood, Salena Godden, Roger Robinson, and Thundercat. He is also the co-founder of the Hip Hop open mic night Pen-Ting, a house emcee with Hip Hop label and jam night Imaginary Millions, and creator of the Spoken Word radio show #TheRepeatBeatBroadcast and the host of multi-award nominated Lunar Poetry Podcast, which is archived in the British Library. Peter has been nominated for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, selected by BBC 1Xtra and the Roundhouse for their Poetry Collective programmes, and is an Obsidian Foundation fellow. He is published by Magma Poetry, Bad Betty Press, and Poetry On The Picket Line, and his debut single This That was released in 2020 to rave reviews, and in 2021 he was an inaugural writer-in-residence at the Library of Africa & The African Diaspora in Accra, Ghana. His debut pamphlet Testaments To Life And Death will be published in February 2022.

Photo credit: Toby Coulson

About Jaka Skapin

Jaka Skapin is a UK based artist, singer, improviser, composer and producer, originally from Slovenia. He has worked with Danielle Teale and the Dancing with Parkinson’s programme since 2016. As collaborators, Skapin and Teale have worked as co-designers of the CID project approach and bring together a strong team of multi-disciplinary artists. Skapin’s live work is based on collaborative vocal improvisation, and its potential for interdisciplinary convergence with movement, image and sound. Recent partners include Tate Modern, Royal Opera House, Sound Connections, PRS for Music, Southbank Centre, Universal Music UK and Sony Music UK. Skapin has produced music that featured on BBC 6, BBC 2, JazzWise, Afropunk, KCRW, Earmilk, Clash Magazine, Jazz FM, The Selector, The Independent and BBC 1Xtra. Over the last 12 months, he has received commissions from Sound & Music, and The British Music Collection, as well as produced the world’s first fully improvised, song based, six voice album, due for release in 2021.

Photo credit: Jameisha Prescod