Simone Crew '13 performs her poetry at the renowned film festival.
When Haverford freshman and accomplished spoken word artist Simone Crew got an invitation to perform at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, this winter, the prospect didn't even make her nervous. After all, she'd already appeared on National Public Radio alongside acting legend Robert Redford.
Crew had joined Redford on NPR's“Talk of the Nation,” to promote the Youth Speaks poetry competition that his foundation, The Redford Center, supports. "It was scary,” she said.“A lot of people listen to [NPR].”
At the internationally renowned Sundance Film Festival, which was founded by Redford, Crew and three other college-age students from around the country got the chance to showcase their original work. Crew performed two of her favorite poems, both written in the past year and a half, that she said“don't really have titles, but are both environmentally conscious.”
“The experience was great,” says Crew, who was an eighth grader when she first got involved with Youth Speaks, a San Francisco organization that stages spoken word festivals, poetry slams, and reading series, and provides educational programs for school students.“We stayed in a nice hotel for four days, and I got to see nine different movies at the festival. I'd never been to anything like it before.”
Crew, who was featured in the HBO documentary“Brave New Voices,” gave four performances over the course of her stay at Sundance.“One of them was at a fancy dinner with all sorts of entertainment executives. I'm used to bigger audiences I guess, but these were very powerful audiences.”
Earlier this fall, she also performed for fellow Haverford students at the Cultural Explosion show.“That was much scarier than anything at Sundance, actually,” she said.“It was all people I didn't know yet, but would soon, whereas at something like Sundance it's a lot of strangers who you already know are poetry fans.”
“Now I think I'm known around here as“The girl who did that thing,” she said with a laugh.
Thanks to a spoken word group that has formed on campus, Crew will be able to keep doing that thing, even if Robert Redford isn't around. “I can't wait, because most of these people have never slammed before,” she said. The kickoff show is March 27th at 8 pm in Haverford's DC Blackbox Theater.
