Southbank Centre

Malala Yousafzai's activist work championing the educational rights of girls led to her being shot by a Taliban gunman in 2012, when she was just 15 – but she refused to be silenced.

She came to the Southbank Centre to launch her memoir I Am Malala on Sunday 20 October 2013, appearing in conversation with former Southbank Centre Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The following year, Yousafzai became the youngest ever Nobel laureate.

In our recording of that talk, hear Yousafzai speak about sibling rivalry, her love for the landscape of her home in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and, of course, her belief in the power of education.

'We need to change the ideology. We need to tell people what the real power is. You are not powerful if you have a gun, because through guns you can only kill. You are powerful when you have a book, when you have a pen, because through pens you can save lives. And that's the change that we want to bring in our society.'

Join poet Holly Corfield Carr, exploring human and non-human ways of looking at and listening to trees, in this podcast from Hayward Gallery's Among the Trees exhibition.

Holly considers artworks by Giuseppe Penone, Robert Smithson, Roxy Paine and Mariele Neudecker, and interweaves her own words with poems by Vahni Capildeo, Emily Dickinson, Sasha Dugdale and Alice Oswald.

In this episode of Think Aloud we turn our attention to poetry, and sit down with the London poet and founder of poetry collective Out-Spoken, Anthony Anaxagorou.

With him we delve into how poetry can rewrite history, the ways in which he has developed and established his own voice, and how, when this is not a poem, he is not a poet.

We also hear from South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, for whom breaking established rules has been key to her poetry, on why the language of women comes from more than just the mouth.

"I mean as a kid I absolutely despised poetry...it was as dry as trigonometry… it was like looking at a traffic cone” 


ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen didn't just write new music, he created music that had never before been imagined, transformed sound, influenced musicians from classical to Kraftwerk to The Beatles, all while believing he was born on a distant planet.

Electronic musician Actress and Southbank Centre's Director of Music, Gillian Moore spoke to Harriet Fitch Little about his legacy.

"Stockhausen was the first person to open a sort of sonic box that said to me, anything is really possible with sound."

ACTRESS

In this episode, Harriet Fitch Little asks is this a golden age for political humour? Why do we laugh at politics and do we need to?

She speaks to joke writer for Private Eye magazine Tom Jamieson, and comedians Tiff Stevenson and Kieran Hodgson about the effect of current affairs have had on comedy.

“Satire sits bleary eyed & unshaven in a cheap motel room surrounded by empty vodka bottles quietly sobbing as it watches the news.”

TOM JAMIESON

Invented in China over 2,500 years ago, the abstract strategy game Go is thought to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.

In March 2016, the Go world champion Lee Sedol accepted a challenge to play against a computer program called AlphaGo. In the second game of a five game challenge series, the computer made a move no human in the game’s vast history would have considered. This move, Move 37, was not only unique and creative, it was beyond the minds of the world’s greatest Go players.

In this latest episode of our Think Aloud podcast, presenter Harriet Fitch Little speaks with Southbank Centre's Performance and Dance Programmer, Rupert Thomson and actor and director Thomas Ryckewaert about their fascination with Move 37. They talk about what this moment meant for arts and society, and how ultimately it may shape our relationship with artificial intelligence.

Also in this episode, we hear an interview with Patrick Tresset, an artist who has programmed robots to draw portraits for him. Working in Tresset’s own style of drawing, they act like an artist and has no idea how the drawings will turn out.

Move 37 by Thomas Ryckewaert comes to Southbank Centre on 14 March, 2019. Buy tickets here: http://bit.ly/2GGlvD0

In this episode, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by paralympian, TV presenter and children’s author Ade Adepitan, and children’s book critic Imogen Russell Williams to talk about the lack of diversity in children’s literature.

“I suddenly started to get a perception that certain people did certain things, that main protagonists, that strong characters, that hero characters were all white, middle class.”

ADE ADEPITAN

They discussed why children’s literature is so behind, why we can’t eliminate the past and who should be dealing with this - the authors, the publishers or the parents?

Also, children's author and illustrator Nadine Kaadan answered the burning question: how do you create a character for children?

To see all the events at Imagine Children's Festival and to buy tickets, go to https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/imagine-childrens-festival

How do you make something not funny, funny?

How do you deal with nerves?

Who is your dream comedy sidekick?

Do people expect you to be funny all the time?

Which of your jokes goes down the best?

Harriet Fitch Little brings you a Christmas special that reveals the tricks of the trade of stand up comedy. Listen to the questions we put to our panel of comedians about the highs and lows of their career, their confessions and their secrets. And of course, they manage to make it funny...

You can hear more podcasts at: www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Inspired by the forthcoming Soundstate festival, Harriet Fitch Little is joined by Southbank Centre's Music Director, Gillian Moore; Susanna Eastburn, CEO of Sound & Music; and Dai Fujikura, composer of contemporary classical music.

They discuss the trouble with genres, how writing music will never be the same and why they don't use the word 'classical'.