This Thursday, Kirsten Luckins will be performing her acclaimed spoken word show, The Moon Cannot Be Stolen, at Empty Shop in Durham.

The show is a combination of poetry, travelogue and confronting a former self. Kirsten created the show after re-reading her India travel journals, sixteen years after writing them. The different person she found in them inspired her to create the show, exploring how ‘encountering a former self is just as shocking as getting lost in another culture.’

Kirsten has been receiving fantastic reviews, with Sophia Walker, BBC Slam Champion 2013, calling it ‘the best show I’ve seen in six years on the fringe’, the Edinburgh arts festival. She has also sold out many venues on the current tour, including Queens Hall Hexham and the Live Theatre Newcastle. Empty Shop is a much more intimate space, and promises to deliver a unique experience of the show.

The title is taken from a zen fable, which ‘may or may not be about the search for the authentic self.’ Containing metaphysical enquiry and even a little Tarot-reading, the show promises to be a mystical look at losing yourself, finding yourself, and everything in between. Kirsten describes the question at the heart of the piece as ‘how far is it possible, necessary, desirable to go in order to examine and understand who we are?’

Kirsten is an event organiser herself, as well a performer and poet, coordinating the north-east programme for Apples and Snakes, one of the leading organisations for performance poetry in England. She regularly explores themes of spiritual, emotional and sexual identity in her work, although a recent attempt at NaPoWriMo proved she could write about making chicken stock if needed.

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen starts at 7.30pm with a running time of sixty minutes. Tickets are £5, or £4 for students.