About the Actant
© Cop Shiva
Joshua Muyiwa, not yet 35, started writing poetry because he was told, ‘it is time to stop seeming arty and pretentious and actually earn the tags by doing something’. As a writer: he started by covering the dance and culture scene for TimeOut Bangalore and presently writes – Gazing Outwards – a weekly column for the Bangalore Mirror and The Queer Take, a fortnightly column in Firstpost. Joshua also writes for publications like The Hindu Business Line, Mint Lounge, Chimurenga, LensCulture, among others. As a poet, he has won the Toto Award for Creative Writing in English in 2012 for The Catalogue, a series of nine poems on the history of photography and poetry told through the romantic relationship between a photographer and a poet. In the past few years, he has begun to take his fascination, fondness and faith in text and find different ways to present, perform and play with his poems.
© Joshua Muyiwa
Come, Lie With Me was a desire to return, replicate and resonate with the starting point of Telling Stories/Telling Lies, a series of poems that played with the real-life events of telling stories to a lover in bed. Here, the audience was invited to be the lover. They were invited to wait, to linger, to lie in bed with the poet while they are being read one poem. While growing up, the poet/performer remembers, to steal time with someone close to him, he’d take them into his bedroom. They’d lie down, talk, share secrets – dropping the boundary between their bodies, their breaths.
Come, Lie With Me plays out to remind him (or us) that the world is still (mostly) filled with good people – the kind we’d steal away into our bedrooms.