The Organisers

Don Kinch

Barbados born Don Kinch has been a respected playwright and director for over twenty years. Having established Staunch Poets and Players in London, Don moved to Birmingham in the late 1980’s in search of fresh creative ground, working with young local talent and The Arts Council he developed the Third Dimension Theatre Company and African Peoples Theatre. The great void in Black artistic expression during the middle and late 1990’s led both him and Soweto to create Nu Century Arts.

Don describes the personal effects of Nu Century Arts as liberating, “I have managed to combine a career as a lecturer in performing arts with my writing. This has rescued me from the perils of the freelance black writer seeking opportunities in an ever changing landscape of trends, arts funding policies and the see-saw interest of theatre and TV producers.”

Driving towards a truly unique artistic voice, his theatre company has benefited from with kindred institutions yet still maintaining strong creative autonomy, “Working within a structure such as Nu century Arts has afforded me the great privilege of working consistently around specific themes and trying to find the whole in a sea of fragments.”

Soweto Kinch

The Live Box is lead and often hosted by saxophonist/MC, Soweto Kinch. Since his debut album release “Conversations with the Unseen” in 2003, he has picked up a string of awards including; BBC Radio Jazz Award for Best Instrumentalist and Ensemble (2004); Urban Music Award for Best Jazz Act (2004); a MOBO for best Jazz Act (2003); and a Mercury Music Prize, ‘Album of the Year’ 2003. For further information see, www.sowetokinch.com, www.dune-music.com.

Soweto has chosen to remain grounded in Birmingham; disproving the idea that little of international artistic merit can be produced from the city’s black communities.

Rather than simply replicating the current trends and fashions from the U.S. Soweto has honed his own unique style of Hip Hop and Jazz, and skills of stagecraft whilst performing at The Live Box. Whilst he continues to tour as widely as The United States, Armenia, South Africa and Tanzania, The Live Box is the space where experimental work is tried and tested, and where he has his strongest support base.

“The Live Box has provided the best possible experience, in leading a group and finding my own voice” he argues, “and its certainly given me the confidence to try my more unconventional ideas out on audiences.”

The intentions of the Live Box mirror his own, proving that jazz music is immediate, universally appreciated and as relevant as any other art form in the new millennium. Equally, his own brand of Hip Hop has found legitimacy, its organic, live style going against the grain of commercial pre-packaged music – which one audience member described as, “the difference between a fine hand cooked dish and a microwave meal.”

Soweto goes on to describe, “The fact of human interaction, audiences conversing with performers, conversing with each other, will always give the Live Box the edge over just sticking on a CD, or listening to DJs.”