Performance: Come Beautify the Night with Otis Mensah

Enjoy a one-off evening of live music, poetry and film starring Sheffield-born, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, Otis Mensah, whose ground-breaking work spans fields of literature and sound. For this rare-UK performance, Otis will bring together exciting acts from London’s avant-garde jazz scene, seigfried komidashi and Yumé NET, to join the stage.

The evening will include an exclusive screening of Otis Mensah and Jamal Sterrett’s film Come Beautify the Night, and an exclusive artist in-conversation.

The theme of the evening is inspired by Otis Mensah’s film, Come Beautify the Night, which combines avant-garde musical-form with traditional elements of rap-flow and cadence. The film reflects on the body as landscape across seven movements, beginning in the North of England and closing in Berlin, it’s a film about transition and rewriting home, which can be illustrated by the colliding dark / light textures and tonal shifts seen in the film. This work was recently acquired for Sheffield’s City Art Collection and is on display in the Graves Gallery. 

Otis Mensah 

Otis Mensah is a Sheffield-born, Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans across fields of literature and sound, exploring the aesthetic fabric of language and cadence to evoke ethereal portraits of the body, family and race. Drawing from a rich lineage of Black musicality that informs their poetic-sonic practice, Otis derives multidimensional text from childhood, dreaming and nature. Following their tenure as the first Poet Laureate of Sheffield, Otis has published a debut poetry collection Safe Metamorphosis with Prototype London and performed live at Glastonbury Music Festival, We Out Here, XJAZZ Festival, and shared stages with the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Moor Mother and Benjamin Zephaniah.  

Jamal Sterrett 
Jamal Sterrett is a self-taught performance artist exploring body, consciousness, and movement. Drawing from his autistic sensory experience, he treats each thought and bodily form as carrying its own consciousness, with improvisation as method and material. Stemming from Bruk Up, Mutation, and Ballet, his practice balances external and internal response, generating self-contained works or intuitive interactions with environments.  

seigfried komidashi 

seigfried komidashi has charted a palpably remarkable trajectory, from school practice-room experiments to avant-garde sound bricoleur to established voice within London's jazz ecosystem. His most recent artistic evolution reveals a deliberate shift from spontaneous improvisation toward calculated intentionality.  
 
Yumé NET 
Yumé NET crafts coruscating, otherworldly musical landscapes that explore what it means to be human in an increasingly online society, using experimental, electronic jazz as a framework. Tender but heavy, calculated but loving, her music invites the listener to explore what lies between and beyond the 0s and 1s.  

The suggested ticket price is £12, but we know that cost is a barrier for some. “Pay What You Can” tickets are also available so that those who need them can attend, paying whatever they can afford to give. Equally, if you are able, you may choose to pay above the standard ticket price to cover the cost of someone else’s ticket and support the event.