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Celebrating Sanctuary, part of Refugee Week (16 - 22 June) and the Coin Street Festival, is a totally unique annual event which celebrates the work of refugee artists in the UK. Refugees and immigrants have a transformative and invigorating effect wherever they arrive, making a real contribution to the cultural life of their new home countries. The festival, now in its ninth year, gathers together musicians, dancers and artists who have arrived here from all corners of the globe and gives us a snapshot of our culture evolving. It abundantly demonstrates that such a vibrant panorama of sight, sound, aroma and taste would not exist had it not been for the UK’s hard won tradition of providing sanctuary to those fleeing persecution.

Sunday, 15 June 2008, 2 - 7pm
Bernie Spain Gardens, Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 (adjacent to Oxo Tower Wharf), nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo

This year’s highlights include Indie rockers Noisettes tearing up the main stage and Book Slam who will bring a vibrant literary strand to the festival including exclusively commissioned work by Nikita Lalwani (her debut novel The Gifted is serialized this month on BBC Radio 4) and Mir Mahfuz Ali (one of Exiled Writers Ink’s emerging writers and refugee from Bangladesh). The festival will also feature Gypsy Soul from London-based Russian-born singer/ songwriter Angelina currently making waves on Atlanta’s R’n’B scene, Congolese soukous from new Londoners Kasai Masai, Sephardic Flamenco by Los Desterrados and Mukka, probably the finest UK-based exponents of Romanian music. There will also be a multitude of stalls selling mouth-watering dishes and drinks from all over the world, a dedicated dance stage, workshops and activities for children (such as UK charity Afghanaid’s workshops to make kites likes the ones seen in the popular book and film The Kite Runner), plus information stalls in the Festival marketplace.


SANCTUARY STAGE - hosted by DJ Ritu (BBC London 94.9 FM)

Headlining the festival’s main stage are the Noisettes, one of the most unconventional and imaginative bands in modern rock, who perfectly articulate some of the points the festival is making. Their hugely talented vocalist and bass player Shingai Shoniwa is of Zimbabwean heritage - Zimbabwe has been decimated in the past few years and many Zimbabwean have had to seek refuge abroad. An effervescent actress and ex-choirgirl from a Zimbabwean single mother and the niece of one of the Bhundu Boys, London-born Shingai sings “like Billie Holiday on PCP while patrolling the stage like an Amazonian Warrior with an eye for fashion.” Together with guitarist Dan Smith and drummer Jamie Morrison, they have been burning up stages from Tokyo to NYC with their “ragged but energetic garage-influenced indie rock with the ferocity of punk but with a soulful, bluesy edge” (AllMusic.com). The band is currently working on new material for the follow up of What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?, their 2007 debut album.

Mukka, lead by charismatic Romanian singer Dana Codorean-Berciu, brings together musicians from former Yugoslavia, Russia and Romania, and fresh UK talent from Scottish and Celtic backgrounds. They have played the Glastonbury Festival as well as the Queen’s Concert at Buckingham Palace and are known to whisk their audience on a whirlwind journey through deepest Transylvanian melancholy to joyful abandon, whipped up by frenetic Balkan instrumentals.

UK’s leading Sephardic Jewish group Los Desterrados fuse fiery Balkan Gypsy melodies with the rhythms of Morocco and Turkey and phrasings from Spanish Flamenco with contemporary styles of music such as soul, jazz and flamenco to create a rootsy contemporary sound like no other.

Singer/ songwriter/ pianist Angelina, a self-proclaimed proud ‘refugee’, was born in Moscow but raised in London since the age of 10. She mixes her Russian culture with the Soul, Ska and LDN Town sound producing her own brand of Gypsy Soul. Through her debut EP ‘My Passport’ and a very popular MySpace page she has been gaining fans worldwide and has even traveled to Atlanta to work with the management company of Grammy Award-winning R’n’B star NeYo.

London-based Congolese band Kasaï Masaï deliver the traditional sound of the most remote equatorial villages, with an urban twist. Named after a river, Kasai is a region in Congo which lies in the heart of the rain forest where many tribes such as the Baka still maintain their traditional lifestyles. The Maasai, just like the Baka, are another dignified tribe whose lives still centre around a nomadic existence.
BOOK SLAM SESSION IN THE ACOUSTIC YURT - hosted by novelist Patrick Neate

With 2008 being the National Year of Reading Book Slam, the brainchild of Ben Watt and Patrick Neate, will be bringing a vibrant literary/ spoken word strand to this year’s festival featuring cutting edge spoken word and acoustic music.

Part of this will be two exclusive commissions: Nikita Lalwani whose debut novel The Gifted is serialized this month on BBC Radio 4, and Mir Mahfuz Ali, one of Exiled Writers Ink’s emerging writers and refugee from Bangladesh, join forces to create an epic poem which resounds to the themes of Celebrating Sanctuary and Refugee Week: flight, arrival, sanctuary, prejudice, identity, welcome and finding your own voice in a new country. The work will be premiered at the festival with a reading by both authors. Celebrating Sanctuary has also commissioned writing workshops from Jacqueline Walker who dominated the literary pages and airwaves earlier this year with the publication of her novel Pilgrim State.

There will be more music in the Acoustic Yurt with the London Bulgarian Choir, Zimbabwean bass player Mashasha, Syrian virtuoso Abdullah Chhadeh, Arabic music’s most innovative qanun player and the Lani Singers from the Indonesian province of West Papua whose songs are rooted in the sacred rituals of the Lani tribe whilst also highlighting the struggle that their people endure under Indonesian occupation.

SUNKEN GARDEN DANCE STAGE - hosted by Jane Cornwell (Evening Standard/ Songlines/ BBC World Service)

The Sunken Garden Dance Stage will once again boast a vibrant mix of professional and amateur dance coming out of the refugee communities, with performances ranging from celebrated choreographer Myriam Ojeda’s Tiempo De Tango dance company through to the precise classical Tamil dance of the youth group Narthanya Kalilya, to Congolese soukous and the body popping art of Ethiopian traditional dance. And don’t forget to bring your dancing shoes as you will get a chance to learn a little nifty footwork from some of these dance troupes.

http://www.myspace.com/celebratingsanctuary