Photo credit: Andy M. Lee, courtesy of Carol Leaming
Inscribe: Choreopoetry - The Orality of the Body with Carol Leeming MBE D Univ FRSA (Elected Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts)
Date and time: Saturday 29 November 2025 at 11am
Venue: Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester, Lancaster Road, Leicester, LE1 7HA (view map)
Accessibility: Accessible toilets, complimentary ticket for assistant, wheelchair accessible
Price: £12 to £20
Book online now
This Inscribe workshop is aimed primarily at poets, writers and performers of Black and Asian heritage. We'll explore how we write choreopoetry—poetic prose or long-form poetry for the page and stage—and by the end of the workshop, you'll understand how to devise a short performance piece of choreopoetry, using the choreopolectics© methodology created by Carol Leeming.
We'll be introduced to what is understood to be choreopoetry and its trans-Atlantic expressions. In particular, the major influence of African-American writer and poet Ntozake Shange; of Black British theatre/performance pioneers such as Bernadine Evaristo, Jackie Kay, and Dorothea Smartt; and of Carol Leeming herself. We'll be introduced to her praxis choreopolectics©, which fully incorporates poetic prose with the orality of the body, primarily using non-Western rhythms, dialectics, and physical theatre.
Our workshop welcomes entry-level, intermediate, and advanced Poets/Spoken Word Artists. We'll all be willing to creatively collaborate across different performance aspects, including live text, music, physical theatre, and still and moving digital images to create powerful, compelling, and immersive narrative experiences that engage audiences.
If this sounds like you—come join us! As Carol Leeming says, Dare to diva! and be part of an exhilarating, playful, adventurous day of enabling our authentic voices and moving beyond the page.
Inscribe acknowledges the partnership of the University of Leicester's Centre for New Writing, Dare to Diva Productions, and support from the Attenborough Centre and Writing East Midlands.
About the facilitator
Carol Leeming MBE D Univ FRSA (Elected Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts) is a British artist, poet, playwright, singer-songwriter, performance artist, and dramaturg of Jamaican/Antiguan descent, born in Leicester. She grew up partly in Kingston, Jamaica, then returned to Leicester. Her work often draws on diaspora, identity, voice and performance. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes choreopoetry—a blending of poetic text, movement, music and theatre.
Leamings' chorepoems, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diva’, ‘Love the Life You Live… Live the Life You Love’, and ‘The Dreadful Dance of Ms Iniquity’ are archived by the National Theatre. Her choreopoems have been staged at major venues, including the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
Leamings' debut poetry chapbook, 'The Declamations of Cool Eye', was published in 2016 (first edition). Her poems appear in several major anthologies, including Bloodaxe Books' Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (eds. Jackie Kay et al). Carol was TEDx Speaker for De Montfort University, in addition to being a public speaker on various topics. She is Director/Lead Artist of Dare to Diva Productions which she founded over 20 years ago, and is a committed mentor and educator which includes being guest-lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and Derby University. In July 2025, she received an Honorary Doctorate from Loughborough University.
A forthcoming choreopoem /'chamber opera' project, 'Go Where the Songs Are', is currently in development, together with a new full poetry collection, Eclipse of Dread.
