Too Early for Birds is a theatre troupe that has been in the works for quite some time, at least since Ngartia Bryan, while still a secondary school student in Meru, saw a centre spread in one Nairobi paper all about young Kenyan poets and spoken word artists.
Before that, he had been writing poetry and short stories of his own but never found Meru to be a thriving literary capital. But the media made him believe it must be happening in Nairobi. It did not take him long after that to join Kenyatta University’s theatre and film department at the same time as he found his way into the vibrant realm of Nairobi’s spoken word performance scene. And not long after that, he met Abu Sense (AKA) who would eventually become his mate, first through spoken word artists like Wamathai, then as they both broke out of school and into digital marketing and finally, teaming up for a Storymoja performance called Occupy Nairobi, which was tragically truncated by the Westgate Massacre which took place just hours before they were to go on stage. But the two got on so well that after Ngatia successfully staged his one-man performance of Losing Grip in November of 2015 for which he combined theatrical as well as spoken word elements in one show at Goethe Institute, both guys realised they had to devise an ‘exit plan’. That is, while they were both still earning their bread in digital marketing, the time was drawing near to take themselves seriously as full-time writers and performers.
