POETRY
Showcased new poems for the first time live last night at the brilliant @TheWordZooUK 'Tackle', 'Apple of My Eye', 'Cruise' and 'Devil's Hole'
#performancepoetry #spokenword #performanceart #liveart #queerwriting #poetry
A short video poem that critiques power relations within gay male culture.
As artist Clunie Reid commented upon this work: ‘What is brilliant in the work is that Lee is troubled about it, that gay culture is not straight forward. The drawings with the irony create a kind of troubledness about gay culture and discloses (Lee's) personal relationship to it’
#poetryfilm #shortfilm #queerfilm #queerfilmmaker #videopoetry #indiefilm #gayfilm #gayfilmmaker #gayfilmmakers #gayfilmmaking #animation #queerwriting #digitalanimation
'Oh do me a favour mr rainbow flag waver!’
‘love what you’re doing here with colour intruding on the b&w’
‘oooh, a crap ally is the absolute worst “Pink washing is not clever, no matter how clever the pun” - HECK YES’
‘that was incredible, love the visuals’
‘Fear is still here when two worlds collide. They call themselves allies but really they’ve lied’
I loved performing 'Camp' and ' Juicy Lucy' at last night’s @incitecabaret
#performancepoetry #liveart #performanceart #poetryfilm #videopoetry #newmedia #spokenword #poetrycommunity
‘Tart observations in tight rhyme about how show and show business can often get mixed to a confusing degree.’
‘Fabulous stuff, Lee. In the straight monochrome bubble in which I live I hadn't heard of Gary Lucy. But I'm delighted you've introduced me to him. “Kris Akabusi"??? Marvellous’
A short poetry film about British actor Gary Lucy with a collage of images charting my homoerotic desire for British TV personality Gary Lucy, seeing him on television, half naked on the front cover of gay magazine Attitude, seeing him (straight) playing a gay man on British tv soap Eastenders, and erotic fantasies I have about ‘big boy Juicy Lucy’.
The poem is playful and fun for the first couple of minutes but by the end the repetitive chanting takes a darker, more disturbing turn ...
Great seeing my poem ‘Bears with Bananas and Bubbles in their Boxers’ published in @cityastheatre ‘Encounters’ Thank you @elistagram and @fi_ku! #queerwriting #poetry
SECTION WITH TEENAGE SKETCHBOOK
FULL SET
LIVE ZOOM POETRY PERFORMANCE FOR PRAGUE BIENNALE (2022)
CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY
My poem 'Postcards' has been published in this anthology -thanks Rodney Wood and Greg Freeman. with other fine contributions by Heather Moulson, Tom McColl, Matthew Paul, Robert Garnham, Elaine McGinty and many more!
You can watch the poetry film version here:
https://filmfreeway.com/POSTCARDS980
#poetry #writeoutloud #poems #anthology
#performancepoetry #spokenword #performanceart #liveart
This short poetry film explores the difficulties surrounding letting go of something/someone whilst recognising that you need to move on. It is an ode to remember to practice self-care and discard things/people who give you negative energies. They are not worth your time.
The film juxtaposes imagery that I shot in the Summer of 2022 at the High Rocks National Monument, U.K with pencil drawings I made long ago of entrants queuing up to reclaim submitted artworks that were rejected from a competition.
‘Lee Campbell’s inspired audio-visual take on misheard pop music’ Write Out Loud Poetry
This short poetry film takes the viewer on a journey to Juniper Park, a space of imagination inspired by a moment of mishearing the song lyrics to Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi.
'The combination of James and your Nanny is great! Really like retrospective combination'
A personal story about childhood, desire and longing / unobtainable love including pencil drawings of my grandmother when she was young and later in life with my Dad and me in 2010 juxtaposed with imagery seeping through lettering made in 2022.
‘I enjoyed this because as a gay man I can relate to the situation of men living double lives. Your poem, with humour, exposes this sad fact of people in years past being fearful of acknowledging their sexuality' ‘Brilliant depiction of the awful awkward sex education of so many secondary schools.’
‘The internalised homophobia in this piece is so important’
‘Adored the imagery of Grammar School Guy put on the fryer cos workers don’t want his voice in McDonalds. Going out and looking at him and wanting his burger in your baps, that’s the comedy! Grammar school guy is genius writing, almost with a tinge of innocence because it’s never going to happen’
This short animated poetry film explores the ways that queer people have to learn to covertly hide their sexuality very often before and after they realise they are gay/lesbian/queer etc. The film shares personal stories from my own experience as a gay man, and the different ways I had to navigate my homosexuality growing up through ‘covert operations’.
‘Loving the little snippet vibes … like fleeting memories’
'Self-affirmation and self-acceptance are the keys to a contented fulfilling life. To each his (or her) own, they say'
'Brilliant, inspired and inspiring in equal measure, and - as ever - delivered with positive intent'
'‘Really related to that, that some camp or feminine qualities that some gay men have because sometimes we (gay men) don’t acknowledge that we have that so it’s like they are invisible.'
This short poetry film speaks about my difficulty as a teenager growing up gay in a heteronormative environment in 1990s Britain, me being a ‘lad’ (a man demonstrating stereotypical almost hyper masculine behaving) and trying to act my ‘lad-self’ to fit in with others (my heterosexual mates) by speaking and behaving like a ‘lad’. ‘Sound manly, act the geezer on my Harley. Hide the fact, in my bedroom, I learnt Polari’. speaks about my fear of acting/sounding ‘camp’/effeminate to not reveal to my friends I am gay. The poem finishes with sharing how I overcame these difficulties and no longer worry about how I act/behave/fear of sounding camp; ‘I was born with this voice. I did not have a choice. My voice no longer haunts me, it liberates’.
This short poetry film contains drawings that I made in 2005 and 2018, moving image footage shot on my Sony Ericsson Cybershoot K800i mobile phone in 2007 and photographs taken on my iPhone in 2018.
LEE CAMPBELL: SEE ME: BRIGHTON FRINGE 2022
Combining humour, performance poetry and visual moving imagery made up of my personal archive as an artist of nearly 25 years, SEE ME is a multi-media, immersive, (almost) autobiographic solo performance sharing my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. It presents a journey through different relationships (to my dad, teachers, school peers, work colleagues, to the gay community, alter ego, my partner, and spaces of queer imagination) I have experienced as a working-class gay British man interspersed with various references to the cultural context that (any)one can relate to George Michael, late-night TV, bad porn, fancying schoolteachers etc. As I perform, physical props in the space bring to life certain parts of the poetry, including cassette tape recorders, photocopies of a large scrapbook I made as a teenager and hand-drawn pencil drawings of a dog called Rufus.
SEE ME: A collection of poems that I have written and sounds and imagery made up of my personal archive as an artist of nearly 25 years performed at Runt of the Litter, Hackney Wick, London in May 2022. Click play to watch video below.
‘From the live euphoria of #football, to homosexual desire and the macho body in action’… Thanks for @insta.inksweatandtears for featuring my #poetryfilm Let Rip: The Beautiful Game
https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/hear-me-hear-my-silence-poetry-special-lee-campbell/
These poems were performed live via Zoom. The imagery that you can see is from my personal archive of artworks from the last twenty five years. A montage of young queer experience.
'Incredible pace and touch of humour' Paper Tiger Poetry, Tea House Theatre London, 30th July 2021
Thank you Jason Why MC and for audience comments for 'Spinach and Eggs' #spokenword #spokenwordpoetry #poetry #performancepoetry #papertigerpoetry
'JUNIPER PARK' PERFORMED AT INCITE POETRY JULY 2021 AND PUBLISHED
CLICK ABOVE TO PLAY POEM PERFORMED IN FULL
Comments