Thursday 30 April 2026, 7.30pm
S*an D. Henry-Smith & friends /// PACES THE CAGE
with dove / Christine Kirubi (flute, vocals) + Tavish Timothy (guitar) + more guests to be announced
Together with a cast of diasporically encountered collaborators, S*an D. Henry-Smith presents an improvised reading-performance in celebration of the release of their newest collection of poems, PACES THE CAGE.
PACES THE CAGE, S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second collection of poems, engages voice, sound, and improvisation as collaborative language-making, and method in the arsenal of collective autonomy. The poem and score; stage, audience, and performer; all are boundaries the poet, artist, and performer aims to articulate, and then fog again over, making us all active and implicit witnesses to what unfolds. Accompanying their voice, the poet plays their divined instrument: Cadence Player 001, a microphonic guitar fictionalized from their poems, later made material.
As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking, and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators. Written across seven years, the collection reflects on and imagines from performances with a range of Black diasporic multidisciplinary artists with roots in music, poetry, performance, and visual art, often staged in the round. For Cafe OTO—their London debut—Henry-Smith performs from the book, bringing together longtime collaborators, Tavish Timothy on guitar and dove, Christine Kirubi plays flute and offers voice. Surprise guests will be named at a later date.
S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer exploring Black/queer diasporic collaborative practices rooted in experimentalism, improvisation, and transdisciplinarity, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing. They have received awards and fellowships from the Rijksacademie, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, and Poets House. Recent solo exhibitions include “rea(l)m” at Metro54 (2025), “tremor low” at ROZENSTRAAT (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns (2021). Henry-Smith has read, performed, and exhibited previously at Artists Space, Stedelijk Museum, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Perdu, MoMA PS1, 47 Canal, SAVVY Contemporary, Cubitt Artists, Juf, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Issue Project Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Basilica Soundscape, and elsewhere. They perform musical compositions as sunchoke; as a bandmate, they are half of twill (whose twill split was released summer 2024), half of PhantomSun, half of Depth Address, and a fifth of Black Boots.Their book Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019), the co-author (alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson) of Consider the Tongue (2019), and the director of Lunar New Year (2021). PACES THE CAGE (2025), their second full-length collection of poems, published by The Song Cave, is out now.
https://seanhenrysmith.com/
https://tempotransstudios.bandcamp.com/
dove, Christine Kirubi is an artist-poet based in London. She is the author of WILDPLASSEN published by the87press and Partures. published by Gong Farm.
Tavish Timothy is an artist and composer exploring memory and image through loop and echo. Together with S*an D. Henry-Smith they write and perform as twill.
