A PERFORMANCE of spoken word and music will be one of the highlights of new festival BridLit Fringe.

Kirsty Allison and The Children of the Burning Sun is a new music project and will be performed at the Lyric Theatre in Bridport on Wednesday, November 14 at 8pm.

Kirsty is collaborating with musician Gil De Ray for the performance.

She said: "I started the poetry with music after making the film Double Play, with Gil - and he wrote music to go with a poem I'd chalked up around New Orleans.

"I started performing words in 2009, when I began working on my novel (which is out next year on Wrecking Ball Press) - because I needed to find different ways of working with words.

"It's easy to get looped into house styles commercially, and I was doing fashion copywriting and making and scripting films at fashion shows, and started out writing about music, fashion and subculture for magazines, so the poetry has always been about pleasure.

" The music's an extension to that - we want it to be relaxing, and not to grabby - it's different from the project I did with Dave Barbarossa - the drummer from Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, that was a lot more about me shouting over the drums...this is more of a whisper."

Kirsty said words are at the centre of what she does.

She added: "Doing it with music seems very natural given my past, DJing, and writing about music. I like working to brief - I did a fundraiser for Gaza's Children Cinema recently, so wrote something on Palestine, and am part of a Women 100 show where I'll put together my thoughts on MeToo.

"I've worked with musicians like Youth, the producer, at Portobello Live, and The Egg (down at the Grinagog festival) - with them it's pretty freestyle, getting on stage, and MCing, it's very live.

"With The Children of the Burning Sun - Gil and I are going to start recording soon - there's a big difference not having melody to guide a song - but Gil singing is a beautiful thing..."

Also performing are Niki McCretton and Batang Kali. Niki is an award-winning solo stage performer who is now exploring stand up comedy.

She is also the director of A Load of Stuff and Nonsense theatre company, and the owner of tonight’s exotic venue, the Lyric Theatre, which she describes as a ‘lab for experimental performance.’

Batang Kali work closely with members of Veterans for Peace UK to produce powerful renditions of true stories. They are a drum and bass duo based from the south west, who have worked with, amongst others: Automatic Dlamini, John Parish, PJ Harvey, John Cale, Rob Ellis, Torres, I Have a Tribe and Ex-Boss.

*Kirsty Allison and The Children of the Burning Sun, Lyric Theatre, Bridport, Wednesday, November 14, 8pm. Go to bridlitfringe.co.uk for tickets.