The Spalding Suite, where poetry meets basketball: From hip-hop to hoop dreams

When Inua Ellams was 15, his family moved from England to Dublin. "Back then Dublin was, how shall I put it, at a youthful stage in its race relations," Ellams says elegantly. "They had these ready-made stereotypes for black kids. One was that I would be into hip-hop. The second was that I would be good at basketball. The problem was that, at the time, I didn't like either."

But Ellams did love English. And his English teacher was also his PE teacher, and an avid basketball fan to boot. "I was struck by how this person whom I admired hugely could have these opposing passions," says Ellams. "Plus, the boys I did my English homework with were the same boys with whom I ended up playing basketball. So the language of literature and basketball began to emotionally inform each other. For me, the way a game of basketball plays out is similar to the way a poem plays out. A basketball match can be transformed in its final seconds by moves you cannot predict. The transformation in a poem works in the same way."

If Kate Tempest is the queen of today's thriving spoken poetry scene, Inua Ellams is its king, even if he wears the crown reluctantly. A softly spoken, Nigerian-born 30-year-old, who moved to the UK when he was 12, Ellams started writing poetry at the age of 16. He is a published poet and playwright who regularly performs his poetry live but who also melds spoken word and theatre into luminous new dramatic forms: his loosely affiliated sequence of monologues, which began with 2009's The 14th Tale, explored autobiographical questions of identity and migration.

His latest devised piece, The Spalding Suite, brings together his passion for basketball and poetry, although this time he has also drawn on the work of five other poets, including Roger Robinson and Jacob Sam-la-Rose, all of whom are basketball fans. The show, directed by Manchester Royal Exchange's Associate Artist Benji Reid, will blend movement, hip-hop, spoken word, a live beatboxing soundscape by MC Zani and a score by DJ Eric Lau to tell the story of a basketball team and their complex emotional relationships with a minority sport that ranks way below football, rugby and tennis in the British consciousness. Most of all, it's a hymn to the sublime athleticism of basketball.

"It's a show about belonging, about family," says Reid as he and Ellams sit down for a drink after a long day of rehearsals. "It's about a man who finds redemption through the game. There is also this idea of flight in the show that draws on Greek myth. Basketball is all about boys on a journey to defy gravity."

Art and sport often serve as similes for each other: the extraordinary theatre of a great game of football; the long narrative arc of a five-day test match. Reid, who started his career as a hip-hop choreographer working alongside Breakin' Convention's Jonzi D and now works predominantly as a physical theatre director, likens basketball to ballet, although it was basketball's sheer dynamism that first attracted him as a young boy, despite his father's best efforts to interest him in cricket. "I was really into dance and body popping as a kid," he says. "If you take the ball away in basketball and just show the movement as a piece of choreography; how you stop, bounce and pass: it is like a dance.

"I have to admit I am drawn to watching the NBA [America's national basketball league] on TV because most of the players are black,"he adds. "Except, I didn't want to impose a racial dimension on the show," chips in Ellams. "The sport is much more racially diverse in the UK. In America it grew out of social segregation, so it has strong links to hip-hop and black urban culture. Here it's more democratic."

Ellams has written poetry about basketball before – "Leather Comets" explored racism on the court at school in Dublin. He started writing poetry as a teenager after his best friend, Stephen, committed suicide. With Stephen he had discovered Shakespeare and Keats, as well as hip-hop stars 2Pac and DMX, and writing down his thoughts became Ellams's way of talking to his lost friend. He is a highly promotable ambassador for the genre – he is young, talented and passionate, and writes with an ease and a beauty that is both immediate and transporting. Crucially, though, he takes poetry out of the classroom into urban spaces – city streets; a basketball court…

Ellams himself doesn't care too much for labels. Certainly The Spalding Suite is determinedly uncategorisable. He emphasises that it's not the format that matters, but the words. "Poetry doesn't live in spoken word, that's just another vehicle to deliver elements of the poetic," he says. "'I just want to write beautiful text, and leave it to people who want to listen."

'The Spalding Suite' is at Southbank Centre, London SE1 (020 7960 4200) before embarking on a UK tour (www.fueltheatre.com)