Shaking the Dust at the Slam Final
Here’s Dr Helen Gregory – performance poet, lecturer and researcher – with her take on the atmosphere of the Shake the Dust Slam Final. On my way to London I worried that I wouldn’t have anything to write about, wouldn’t notice anything new. After all, I was only making a flying visit to the slam...
Speech Debelle to Headline the National Shake the Dust Slam Final!
Stop the presses! We’re ludicrously excited to announce that we’ve confirmed a fantastic headliner for the National Shake the Dust Slam Final. A Mercury Prize winning, spoken word hip-hop sensation no less: Speech Debelle! Speech and her band will be rounding off the event – but not before the nine highest scoring teams from each...
“Before Money” a poem from Consulting Slam Producer: Deborah Stevenson
A word from Deborah Stevenson one of Shake the Dust’s fantastic Consulting Slam Producer’s. “One of the most unexpected exciting elements of being the Shake the Dust Consulting Slam Producer and Artist Liason is the amount of inspiration it has given me. Every time I visit a workshop I become a participant and I get...
Paul Lyalls: Poetry Heroes
Paul here, Poet coach with the wonderful and talented Greenwich and Lewisham Young Peoples Theatre, working alongside the equally lovely and talented Jennifer Perry (shadow coach). We are having a lot of fun, and our group of strangers are steadily becoming a group of “lets have a bit of a laugh together and do this.”...
Tina Sederholm: Old Skool
It’s an old story, but poetry didn’t mean much to me at school. I loved English Literature, but poetry was just something you had to write an essay about. Weirdly though, I did write poetry for myself. I found an old green notebook the other day. The cover fell off because it had become so...
Poetry Heroes: Benjamin Zephaniah
One of our many fantastic Shadow Poet’s on Shake the Dust, Carmina Masoliver, tells us about her Poetry Hero…Benjamin Zephaniah. I used to think Nurses Were Women I used to think Police Were Men I used to think poets Were boring Until I became One of Them. As a pioneer of British performance poetry,...
Southampton Session with Chris Redmond and Graham Smith
Poet Coach, Chris Redmond and Shadow artist Graham Smith tell us about their latest session for Shake the Dust. Catch their teams performance at the South East regional Final, @ Nuffield Theatre, Monday 25 June | 6:30pm “I knew, when the outline of the workshop was explained to us on the first development day, that when...
‘Poetry Changed Me’: Katy Else
Katy Else is a South-West Shadow Poet on Shake the Dust. Katy tells us how Poetry has changed her… “At school I loved English, fantasy fiction and wild stories but it wasn’t until I hit my teens that I really started writing. I used to be all Gothic and write by moonlight and larva lamp, and what...
Rebecca Tantony: A Love of Words
When I was seven I wrote a poem called, ‘How the Wind Blows’. It was pretty self-explanatory. It talked about how the wind blows, and how in its ‘blowing’ it was able to get everything moving. People walked to work faster, trees rattled excitedly like old bones or false teeth; when the wind blew the...
Robinson Roams
Hi there! I’m back again and for my third blog I bring you news from one of the five North East teams. A few days ago I was kindly invited along to Our Lady and St Bede’s School is Stockton to see how poets Alfie Crow and Sophie F Baker and their team were coming...
Slämärit: Slam in Finland
Shake the Dust asked the young people from the Finnish slam group, Slämärit, how they started writing and performing poetry in the first place. One young person told us; “it was because of my great Finnish language teacher, they made slam poetry seem very interesting, so I wanted to try it myself. I had written...
Slämärit: Leena Heikkila tells us about youth slam in Finland
I’m an International School teacher in Finland, teaching kids between 6 and 18 years old. Through Netlibris I got to hear about Lynk Reach London Teenage Poetry Slam, and with Arja Kangasharju, we contacted Jacob Sam-La Rose, met him, and got hooked! Then we started to get Slämärit going and made it nation wide right from the beginning! Slämärit...
