Rise SLAM Showcase Team FINALISED!!!!!

After 3 months and 153 applicants, 4 furious quarterfinals and 2 sweating semis, the Rise Slam Showcase Team is finally fixed. A panel of professional judges paired with randomly selected audience members battled it with slippery score cards and scorching voices to pick just 16 emerging artists/ acts to take through to the FINALS live at the Rise Festival in Finsbury Park on Sunday July 15.

THE JUDGES, THE JUDGED & THE JURY

The semi finals defied all expectations. City Hall was jamming and jammed full of stamping teens, proud puffed-up parents and screaming peers who gave every bit of their last breaths to blow each performer onto the stage. Klaxons screeched and streamers spat. And then a silence as each poet, rapper and beatboxer took to the centre spot of centre stage and centerd him or herself. Pins dropped and poems wrere born. Bright and contagious as graffiti.

Each of the artists spun stories of London hard-won streets, about the diversity of their city, about their homes and hopes and hearts. There was a special emphasis this year - in response to the recent escalation in youth-on-youth killings -  on gun and knife crime in the capital. The response was overwhelming, artistically over-powering and inspirational. We had not expected so many of the stories to have come from a a place of gritty realism rather than imagination - but there they were time and time again. Name after name, commiserated and respected.

If you missed seeing these exceptionally talents unleash themselves at the semi finals you will get another chance at the Rise from 12 midday in the Comedy Tent - before we divide into 4 separate teams to hit every stage on the festival site.

THE JUDGES

Melted Demerera * Cashman * Maggie Crosbie (Subtext) * Jules Mann (Poetry Society) along with Dorothea Smartt Steve Tasane & Joelle Taylor

THE TEAM

Chinedum Nwonkokor SIC SENSE Tom Donovan JAMAL MSEBELE S.E All Saints Crescendo HABIB ARABZADA Daze Osuide MUAZZIN AZIZ (with Jabedul Islam & Joseph John Baptiste) Danielle Miller POSITIVE LIFE (Onome Edgeworth & Stephanie Miller) Eleanor Jackson FAHRI FRANCES-TUDOR Jermaine Smith & Blaire Barrett RICARDO DE COSTA & AMBROSE YENGE Teon Blake