Poetry readings by two British-born, lakeside area thespians will be broadcast on a local television channel throughout next week’s nine-day International Book Fair (FIL).
A crew from the Universidad de Guadalajara’s Canal 44 this week filmed Michael Warren and Dave McIntosh reciting ten classic poems by William Shakespeare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin and Christina Rossetti.
The recordings will be shown on Canal 44’s nightly program summarizing each day’s goings-on at the fair. The United Kingdom is this year’s invited guest.
Producer Manuel Arrellano said in previous years Canal 44 has featured similar literary pieces from FIL’s guest countries, including Israel and Argentina. “This year we wanted to make it authentic and have native speakers,” he said.
The readings went off without a hitch, with Warren and McIntosh demonstrating performance skills acquired over many years.
A poet and playwright who graduated from King’s College, Cambridge with an Honors degree in Mathematics, Warren moved to Toronto from London at the age of 30 and became involved in what he calls “a fairly serious” poetry group. “I started writing poetry when I was 18 or 19 and it’s something that has always felt natural to me.”
Warren published his first book of poems, “A Particular Blue,” five years ago. “It took me 50 years to put together but I now have enough poems for another volume,” he says.
Warren moved to lakeside in 2000, and two of his plays, “The Perfect Alibi” and “Murder By Proxy,” have been performed at the Lake Chapala Society.
McIntosh started his lifetime involvement in community theater 55 years ago in his hometown of Greenock, Scotland. He continued to tread the boards in Swindon, England and Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lived for 35 years. After a spell in Bermuda, he and his wife moved to Ajijic, where he appears regularly in productions put on by the Lakeside Little Theatre, for whom he also serves as a vice president.
Warren and McIntosh said they both enjoyed reading the classic British poems and are looking forward to seeing how the results turned out next week on Canal 44.
Canal 44 is broadcast on free-to-air Mexican television, as well as on cable networks Telecable and Megacable. Their programs are also live streamed at udgtv.com/canal44/envivo.
Arrellano says the poetry readings will be shown each evening on an hour-long program that will begin around 9 or 9:30 p.m. on each day of the FIL, which runs from Saturday, November 28 through Sunday, December 6.