Open Mic at Aura
Aura café recently held an Open Mic Night enabling talented young people with a talent to perform poetry and music. “This café is geared towards young people and I have always wanted a platform to showcase students from university and schools. Other open mic nights in Colombo are aimed at the late 20s crowd,” said owner Malisha Kumaratunge.
Aura Café is a very unique building made up of two reclaimed shipping containers stacked one on top of each other painted in pastel colours. Inside is simply decorated yet brightly lit with the week’s specials written in chalk on blackboards.
Outside there is a well-landscaped modest sized garden, a water feature, large rocks and picnic tables for seating with two medium sized coconut trees. It was in this charming space that the night was held.
The organiser of the event Grace Wickremasinghe a 20-year-old poet and law student had brought together a mixture of poets and musician. The very young performers played to an equally young crowd. Most musicians played on acoustic guitars with a mixture of solo artists as well as bands made up of no more than three members.
The musicians played safe yet skilled covers of hit songs by Ed Sheeran and Chris Isaac. While the poets read their own material, some for the first time. This mix of music and spoken word gave diversity and will encourage others to perform at future events.
For very young musicians to perform their own material is difficult as they do not want to displease their audience. Confidence will certainly be gained with more events such as this one. One of the only signers to attempt his own material was Mario Ananda Abeykoon who had written two songs when he was 15 and now at 25 has found the courage and stage to perform his material.
The performance that stole the show was 12-year-old Tiana Senerathne, while singing so softly and eloquently she made a group of construction workers opposite the café, down power tools and listen to her sound.
Emmanuel Eze a Nigerian IT student at the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, who sang vocals with a guitarist and female vocalist at his third open mic session said of the night “it’s a beautiful space and so chilled out. The outdoor experience makes it a more casual, relaxed and free to perform.”
