Moves Like … Luka Lesson

I guess I was always collaborating. The first time I performed in public was busking with a friend in the Valley on weekends in Brisbane. He’d bring a speaker and his guitar and I’d bring a microphone and we’d just jam and freestyle for a few dollars. I’m a people person, I love to bounce ideas off someone I trust and who’s art I respect. The whole orchestra thing started in Beijing actually. Myself and James Humberstone, a composer from Sydney Conservatorium were both appearing at an education based conference in China. We met there and clicked straight away and he invited me to collaborate with him. We’ve been making a lot of work since then behind the scenes, long before I was asked by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra to work with another composer, Gordon Hamilton. I guess I kind of fell into it and it has pushed my skill set exponentially to work with that level of musicianship.

​Yeah, edutainment comes from KRS One’s album of the same name. It has always been a driving force behind my work. I think slam or spoken word does that mainly because it is so raw. It’s cheap. It’s easily accessible. It’s ancient: we’ve been telling stories forever. And in general, because of these things it seems to be more democratic or ‘of the people’ than some other forms of art. It’s in the streets with us, in the gutters and jails and clubs and bars. Not always, but most of the time. And that means the people who experience varying forms of oppression can access this form of expression in order to impact, push and sometimes break the back of those systems of oppression via language, narrative and passion.

I think our current societies contain within them a ‘used by date’ for human beings. Old people are ignored, silenced, suppressed, controlled and seen as useless as soon as they stop being financially ‘productive’ within a capitalist system. It’s ugly, and it diminishes all of us.

When the wisdom of our old people is no longer a part of our collective consciousness/narrative, we are all less than we could be, and more likely to make the same mistakes generation after generation.

 I guess I wrote that piece because I was answering a challenge from another poet to write a ‘funny’ poem.

Although I’m funny in life, I’m not often funny in my writing, and since my Yiayia is the funniest person I know, it made sense to do that with a poem about her. It was her birthday the day that I wrote it, and I performed it that evening – so that was also a factor. It’s the craziest thing really – that poem has possibly had the biggest impact of all of my poems, and yet it took me only 30 minutes to write and I never thought it would travel this far. From Greece, to Hong Kong, to South Africa – everybody tells me they have a Grandmother ‘just like’ my Yiayia when they hear it.

Vulnerability. Honesty. Love. Resilience. Dignity.