AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Footlight bar11/25/2023 While the performers encouraged one another in a back room, one of the night’s organisers, Sara Poursafar, entered in tears. Habib limped through the rest of the set.Īfter a second standup act, the organisers took a break to address some technical issues. “They can be really subtle things, like someone saying, ‘Where are you actually from?’ or, ‘Your English is really good.’ Or, ‘What’s in the bag, you fucking terrorist?’” Most of the crowd talked over the punchline. “Microaggressions are small acts of everyday discrimination, but they do build up,” he ventured. The point of the evening was to provide a space where BME performers could articulate their frustrations and struggles, and Habib had included a few jokes about race. Next, Habib, a Muslim who grew up in Birmingham, took to the stage. ![]() “I walked in and immediately knew it was going to be terrible,” Habib recalls.Īt 8pm the lights fell and, undeterred, the first act struggled to make her rendition of Nina Simone’s I Loves You Porgy heard over the din. So many people had spilled into the venue that the audience for the open-mic night had been pushed into a corner. ![]() When one of the acts, standup comic Hasan Al-Habib, arrived, however, he was surprised to see the bar packed with revellers, many obviously drunk from a beer festival that had run throughout the day. ![]() The Robinson College student venue – which, alongside undergrad-cheap pints, sells bags of dried pasta and tins of baked beans – was booked for an evening of music and comedy from a lineup of black and minority ethnic (BME) Cambridge University students. The atmosphere inside the Red Brick Cafe Bar on the night of 11 February 2018 was unexpectedly raucous.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |