Performances

Jean "Binta" Breeze

Jean “Binta” Breeze is a poet, playwright, actress, dancer and choreographer. Credited with being the first female artist to break into the male-dominated arena of dub poetry, often described as a performance poet, Breeze is known for the remarkable range of her poetry and her use of many African diaspora musical forms: reggae, jazz, mento, blues, in structuring her written work. She acknowledges Louise Bennett as the major influence on her performance mode. She has performed her poetry widely across the Caribbean, Europe and Africa and in the USA . Jean was brought up in rural Jamaica , and studied at the Jamaican School of Drama in the 1970s, at the same time as Oku Onoura and Mikey Smith. She migrated to London in 1986, at the invitation of Linton Kwesi Johnson, and now, when not touring abroad, divides her time between England and Jamaica . She taught Theatre Studies at Brixton College , and has acted and done choreography for the Yvonne Brewster's Talawah Theatre Company in London . Her books include Riddym Ravings (Race Today, 1988); Spring Cleaning (Virago, 1992), On the Edge of an Island (Bloodaxe, 1996), The Arrival of Bright Eye and Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2000). She received a NESTA Fellowship to write her latest book, The Fifth Figure (BloodAxe, 2007), a poetic novel-memoir that takes its form from the Jamaican version of quadrille dance. Jean Breeze has also produced several audio versions of her work, including Riddym Ravings (1985), Tracks (1991) with the Dennis Bovell Band, and Riding on de Riddym (1997). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies of Caribbean poetry, such as Voiceprint (eds. Stewart Brown, Mervyn Morris and Gordon Rohlehr, 1989), Caribbean Poetry Now (ed. Stewart Brown, 1992); Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry (ed. Kwame Dawes, 1998) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). One of her plays, The Healing Touch, was produced at the Royal Court Theatre , London ; another, Hallelujah Anyhow (1990) was produced by the British Film Institute as part of the Windrush commemoration.