Biography:
Artist, Model and Facilitator, Winslow Schalkwyk, a self-described "Artist in motion, currently parked at Poetry Station," is a Cape Town gypsy, living and working in the shadow of Table Mountain. Born in 1980, as South Africa was beginning to experience of a slow waning of the apartheid regime. It comes as no surprise that at the crux of his work is always a prevailing theme of FREEDOM. At age 6 he began his love affair with the stage at a pre-school graduation play and the two have been inseparable ever since. After cutting his teeth the Ikhaya Soul Sessions in 2005, he has been a growing force on the local Spoken Word Circuit.
Adopting the stage persona, Winslow7Star, he has been a featured performer at the Local Goes Vocal stage of the 2007 Cape Town Festival, the PANSA We All Benefit concert held at the Baxter Theatre to raise awareness and funds for the refugees affected by the xenophobia attacks in South Africa during 2008. He was also chosen as one of the emerging poets to participate in the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) Songs Worth Singing/Words Worth Saying project.
Winslow has been the host, stage manager and organiser for Verses Spoken Word and Soul Hop Sessions in Cape Town. He performed, as part of the Verses Project at the 2009 Jazzathon in January 2009. In the same year, he was the face featured on the 2009 Pep bus, taxi and train campaign. In his capacity as a facilitator, Africa Day 2009 saw him facilitating workshops aimed at encouraging young writers to explore what makes them African with The Alliance for Refugees in South Africa (AFRISA). Chosen as a participant in the inaugural Joke Whaller-Hunter Environmental Pilot Programme, he worked with learners from Eben Donges High School in Kraaifontein and Observatory. The project culminated in an Anthology of Poetry entitled Water, Cycles and Cyphers. Upon meeting singer/songwriter/guitarist, Julian Karrsen, the Free Flow Experiment was born, a live poetic, soul rock outfit with Winslow as lead vocalist. He has shared stages with, Khoi Khonnexion, Primrose Mrwebi, Trevor Sampson, Claire Philips, Mbali Vilakazi and Khadija Heeger.
Related Podcasts & Events:
Boxes
How comfortably we place ourselves in boxes
Give ourselves titles like gay, coloured, man
Defining ourselves by an external criteria
Causing inferior and superior social cast systems
That governs who we are,
Dictates how we act,
Polices our will
And controls us with fear
Leaving us useless, enslaved, another numbering a system,
Another face forgotten, another life unfulfilled.
Then, at the end of our time here, to be placed in another box
In the ground with writing in concrete stipulating who we are
Or who it is that we are conditioning ourselves to be
If I could cast from myself this face, this skin, this legacy
And no longer feel the need to complain
Or fit into boxes that refrain
Maybe then I could wear the label sane?
And if I could find a religious or a social system,
A surrogate reality,
A fable
A once upon a time story of misplaced glory
Maybe then I could comfortably wear the label me?
Which box will I fit in comfortably today?
Who must I be in order to get paid?
Why stray when there is a paved way?
Instead of being somebody new
Let's all just press replay.
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