New poetry video!

One year on from the UK riots, and the looting continues. I mean, of course, the looting of our public services by the Conservative government and their corporate allies.

Here's my new poetry video all about it, featuring me prancing about on the streets of London, fighting back with the power of dubious rhymes. If you like it, please share and help me get this message out there!


smash and grab from rikki indymedia on Vimeo.


Thanks so much to the wonderful Rikki for filming and editing this.

Performance video round-up

I've got a new poetry video on the way - it'll be here very soon, but in the meantime here's something I've been meaning to do for a while: a round-up of my performance videos.

Quite a few people have pointed cameras at my wild prancey rantings over the last few years. Here are some of the ones I can bear to show you. If you've been vaguely following my adventures you'll probably have seen some of these before, but probably not all of them. Unless you're stalking me. In which case: thanks! I did wonder where all those YouTube hits were coming from.

This is the first of my videos that anyone actually watched: it's "Lifestyle Choice", live at the April 2009 Climate Camp at Bishopsgate, London during the G20:



A few months later, there was a longer Climate Camp at Blackheath, and I performed "Risk Assessment" there in a rather noisy marquee:



Continuing the theme, here I am at another Climate Camp - this time in Edinburgh in 2010, with "Consumed", a poem about consumerism and greenhouse gas emissions (oh yeah):



Stepping back to 2009, I worked together with Vicki at Tenner Films to make "A Modest Proposal", on location at Dungeness nuclear power station.  It went on to win a Limelight Short Film Award in 2011:



In Spring 2010, I made this video of "Election Day" with the excellent Jamie from Pheme Films and the sound tech skills of Cameron Hills. Despite being a bit out of date it's still my most popular video, with over 5,300 views:



As a contrast to that, here's a video from April 2011, of me performing "No!" - a poem about climate change denial - in the RISC bookshop in Reading. Even though it's a wobbly handheld camera and it's split over two videos, I'm still very fond of it because the audience participation is flipping great:



Of course, we mustn't forget the poem that led to my being arrested and hit with a £1,500 fine! Well, sort of. Here's "Shop a Scrounger", filmed by Zoe Broughton and edited by Pete Speller:


Shop a Scrounger from Pete Speller on Vimeo.

Here's something a bit different. As well as performing my own poems, I've recently been part of an activist troupe called the Reclaim Shakespeare Company. We've been invading the stage before BP-sponsored plays with our own short "guerrilla" performances about oil and the arts. Here's a performance from the Roundhouse in June 2012, involving me in a giant BP-logo-shaped ruff:



...and here we are again in July 2012, this time at a BP-sponsored Shakespeare Exhibition at the British Museum:


RSC at the British Museum from rikki indymedia on Vimeo.

Finally - for now - this is me at Lushfest in July 2012, performing one of my oldest poems, "Don't Buy It". Happily, I think more people have woken up to this message since I first performed it in 2006, but I was at a festival run by an ethical soap company so I couldn't resist (I should note that Lush do in fact fund a lot of great activist stuff, including - ahem - the Reclaim Shakespeare Company, so this poem is probably aimed more at their customers than at their staff):



Thanks everyone for all your support over the years. If you like any of this stuff, please do feel free to share it around. And, of course, there's more on the way soon...