Free Practice 003

Free Practice is a bi-monthly poetry night shaped by a conversation between two poets. In an ongoing exchange between the poets and their work, space is created for echoes, responses and interruptions.

FREE PRACTICE 003 Features Chloe Filani + Thembe Mvula

Doors: 6.30pm
Practice Starts: 7.22pm Sharp!

Free Practice exists because we noticed something missing in the poetry landscape. While many nights spotlight a wide range of voices on a single bill, Free Practice makes room for something more focused: a duet. Two poets, one stage, and a shared space for dialogue that’s improvised, porous, and alive.

Across 45 minutes, two poets move in and out of each other’s work; riffing, responding, colliding, and letting their poems take on new forms in the presence of each other. Think of it like a back-to-back DJ set: two selectors weaving a shared sonic and emotional journey, guided not by a script but by energy, trust, and curiosity.

After the poets have performed, the evening transforms into a conversation and Q+A hosted by Rohan Ayinde. Serving as interviewer and first responder, Ayinde guides a discussion that traces the threads that emerged during the performance.

Free Practice is a site for overlap, for listening, and for spontaneous invention. It’s an invitation to witness two voices finding new rhythms together, and to learn in the spaces between them.

BIOS:

Chloe Filani an artist, poet, and performer using the intersections of Blackness, womanhood and ancestral knowing. Her work pulses with power, vulnerability, and a language that refuses to be tamed.

Using poetry and embodied dance performance, Chloe channels myth, memory, and personal cosmology into presence. She doesn't just perform-she conjures. She presence, her voice becomes invocation, her words fracture silence and stitch new imaginaries.

Her poetry has been published in Playing femme by 16nst gallery press, Boy brothers friend and Montez Press ‘Interjection Calendar, she has live recording of her poetry is on Anthems podcast and is on a vinyl recording from 180 studios with the poetry with collective Black geographies, and through touching bass event at RA, on radio NTS Live with Rudy savage

She’s performed poetry at Late at Tate, ICA, Somerset House, Prim Black x Burberry, Blackgirl picnic, Writerz Scribez, Royal academy, 180 studios and Reference points

Thembe Mvula is a South African/British poet and storyteller whose work is rooted in truth and curiosity, attending to what people and places reveal about who we are, where we belong and how we heal. Thembe works across poetry, screenwriting, performance, musical collaboration and visual art. Exploring love, transcendence and freedom, her writing considers how these surface in the body, in Black and migrant memory, and in everyday intimacies. An alum of the Obsidian Foundation, Barbican Young Poets and the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Thembe has headlined nationally and internationally as a performance poet, including at the Tate Modern, Oslo Afro Arts Festival, Latitude and Dublin Book Festival. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, Propel and Magma Poetry magazines, and has been anthologised in Part of a Story That Started Before Me (Penguin Random House, 2023), Before Them, We (Flipped Eye Publishing, 2022) and The Black Anthology (10:10 Press, 2021). Her forthcoming poetry pamphlet Cloud Vigil will be published by Valley Press in September 2026.

Arrangör: Rohan Ayinde