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Beautiful performance by Sam Burns-Warr about a lost friend, about bushfires, about letting people go, and where do you start from when you decide to start? and much more. Simple, honest and utterly heartbreaking. Recorded outside the only takeaway restaurant still open in Penrith at 1.30am on that particular October evening.

Part of the Rizal Fountain Raps: Penrith X Edition.

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David Finnigan steals a line from Prince as the starting point for this spoken-word piece about the uncertainty we grapple with every time we embark on a relationship with someone new. Filmed at the side of the road somewhere in Penrith on a spring night in October, wearing a borrowed leather jacket.

Part of the Rizal Fountain Raps: Penrith X Edition.

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A poem / monologue / story written and performed by Jordan Prosser, pacing back and forth across the rooftop carpark of Penrith's colossal and iconic Westfield Plaza shopping mall. Detailed, intricate, conflicted, morally ambiguous and chain-smoking: hits the spot exactly.

Recorded as part of the Rizal Fountain Raps: Penrith X Edition.

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Gorgeous spoken-word performance by Georgie McAuley, recorded in a carpark in Penrith, Western Sydney, warm October evening, swigging champagne straight from the bottle, telling beautiful stories about the office routine, the moon, and the ways we get by. Dig.

Part of the Rizal Fountain Raps: Penrith X Edition.

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Rizal Fountain Raps: PENRITH X Edition

On Finig's blog, a discussion of the four most recent Rizal Fountain Raps, recorded by 2MW while we were on tour to the Q Theatre in Penrith in October 2013.

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The Rizal Fountain Raps III: Quezon City Edition

The third entry in the Rizal Fountain Rap series - The Quezon City Edition - was a pretty epic undertaking. While in Manila in August 2013 for Sipat Lawin's LOVE: This Is Not Yet A Musical, Too Many Weapons decided to invite a whole host of other artists to record their own Rizal Fountain Raps. With the help of cinematographer Shane Parsons and sound engineer Nick McCorriston, myself, Sam, Jordan and Georgie were joined by Daniel Darwin, Nick Delatovic, Simon Binns, Sarah Kaur, Nikki Kennedy, Sarah Walker, Nick McCorriston, Nathan Harrison and George Rose.

Image by Sarah Walker Over just two days, Shane, Sam and Nickamc recorded no fewer than 15 spoken-word performances in 15 different locations around Quezon City, Manila. There are some extraordinary works in this bundle - and holy shit, the variety.

Nick D's cosmic love poem Blood Stars Atom Black is an epic introspective journey and a beautiful love letter all at once.

Nikki Kennedy's eerie, halting Manila is an ode to the wet season floods captures the lovely transient strangeness of that fortnight-long adventure.

The live performance of Nathan's extraordinary Twitter ode to Matchbox 20 Yourself Or Someone Like You is utter confusing genius.

Sarah Kaur's streetwise kid-chasing rap Look Over There On The Right is 60 seconds of pure joy.

Nickamc's five minute live rendition of a garbled mess of junkmail Spam Squabble is weirdly hypnotic and contains several moments of actual beauty.

Sarah Walker's intimate miniature Mineshaft is utterly gorgeous and contains the line 'the lines on your knuckles drifting south / years streaking like dirty water' which I fucking love.

Simon Binns' John the Baptist is a fist-pumping slice of social commentary hiphop featuring gorgeous guest vocals from Joelle Yuvienco.

Daniel Darwin's heart-wrenching confessional Lonesome End is a stunning three minute burst of virtuosic intimacy wrapped in incredible language and imagery.

The title of David Finig's Song For Baby-O, Unborn was lifted from a poem by New York poet and Beat Generation fellow traveller Diane di Prima. David's performance travelled through the LoveNOT swimming pool venue and featured underwater choreography from an all-male line-up of back-up dancers.

But the BEST, out of all of them, is Georgie McAuley's consciousness-raising anthem Paddle Pop Rap, featuring Sam Burns-Warr (percussion) and several Quezon City kids (confusion). This works for me on so many levels, I can't even.

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The Rizal Fountain Raps: Editions I and II

Even more inexplicable than the Sparks Off (and, possibly, a little cooler?) is the Too Many Weapons tradition of the Rizal Fountain Raps. Since our 2011 trip to Manila, every city we've toured to has hosted a new edition of this series, in which each of us write an original spoken-word piece, and perform it live to camera somewhere in the city.

I. RIZAL FOUNTAIN RAPS The inaugural Rizal Fountain Raps took place in September 2011 in Rizal Park in Intramuros, Manila. David, Sam and Jordan recorded the first three raps in front of the iconic (and deeply fucking weird) Rizal Fountain, where the synchronised jets of water and laser lightshow are choreographed to a year-round soundtrack of christmas hits. David Finig - Platypus Fever Jordan Prosser - The Beginning Sam Burns-Warr - Poisoned Balloon

II. PENRITH EDITION The second Rizal Fountain Raps season was the Penrith Edition. In April 2013, while in residence at the Q Theatre in Penrith, Georgie, David, Jordan and Sam performed new pieces in the quiet streets and carparks around Penrith Westfield. Georgie performed a beautiful extract from UK company Made In China's We Hope That You're Happy (Why Would We Lie?) - much love to Tim Cowbury and Jess Latowicki. Sam's Cool Dude With A Cool Pool is a stand-out - such perfect comic timing - and Jordie's epic Mercury Retrograde takes my breath away every time. Mine (David's) was called You Just Walked Out In The Street and it's about carparks, underpasses and empty roads at 5am.

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David's version of Nights in Rodanthe features Richard Gere as an evil dictator's right-hand man in charge of organising his deceased master's state funeral. It features Kid 606 and Clams Casino, which is already an improvement on the original, and the lines: 'This Fall, you will watch a powerful ruler be buried. You will kneel at the feet of his procession. You will moan and rent your clothes. Horses will trample you. And in the end, your battered body will be placed in the outer chamber of the prince's grave.'

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Jordan's A Spacewalk To Remember places Mandy Moore and some jock actor in SPACE CAMP, and the superb line 'I can do STUFF!'

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Sam's Hitchcock-ian #NotSoSafeHaven masterfully brings the subtle creepiness already latent in the original Safe Haven to the surface.

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The Sparks-Off

By far the weirdest and easily my most favourite Too Many Weapons pointless side-project (possibly my most favourite pointless side-project EVER) was the Sparks-Off.

While in Penrith in early 2013, Sam introduced us to the magic of Nicholas Sparks. Sparks is a novelist whose romantic novels have been turned into some of the most popular films of the last decade. He's the writer behind The Notebook, A Walk To Remember, Message In A Bottle, Dear John, Nights In Rodanthe, Safe Haven, Dear John and The Last Song, which have all become massive box-office hits and Hollywood staples. After Sam showed us the trailer for every single Nicholas Sparks film we immediately realised that (a) every Nicholas Sparks film trailer is exactly the same and (b) we needed to somehow pay homage to these extraordinary examples of the film trailer artform. Without any hesitation, we wrote and recorded brand dialogue for Nights in Rodanthe, Safe Haven and A Walk To Remember trailers. These are, without doubt, the Too Many Weapons works I am most proud of.

Sam's Hitchcock-ian #NotSoSafeHaven masterfully brings the subtle creepiness already latent in the original Safe Haven to the surface.

Jordan's A Spacewalk To Remember places Mandy Moore and some jock actor in SPACE CAMP, and the superb line 'I can do STUFF!'

My (David's) version of Nights in Rodanthe features Richard Gere as an evil dictator's right-hand man in charge of organising his deceased master's state funeral. It features Kid 606 and Clams Casino, which is already an improvement on the original, but I'm mainly proud of this line: 'This Fall, you will watch a powerful ruler be buried. You will kneel at the feet of his procession. You will moan and rent your clothes. Horses will trample you. And in the end, your battered body will be placed in the outer chamber of the prince's grave.'

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Easily my favourite thing the four of us have recorded is the posse cut we created during the Penrith tour of Kids Killing Kids in October 2013. 2MW On Tour features a verse from each of us over Ta-Ku's most excellent track Hey Justin, plus, finally, the story of WHY our collective is called what it is called, and an array of what might possibly be, actually, too many weapons.

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The Greater Manila Audio Experiment: Pirates of the Carribbean: Do You Mind If I Smoke While You're Eating?

The first accidental Too Many Weapons side-project was the Greater Manila Audio Experiment. While in Manila in September 2011, I received an email from New York playwright, Ira Gamerman, out of the blue, wildly and effusively praising U2's early output and their work with Brian Eno on The Joshua Tree. We felt we had no choice but to turn Ira's ramblings into a radio play-script and record it. Once we'd done that, the next logical step was to write and record 14 more short songs, raps, poems and radio-plays, and record the whole bundle as a soundcloud mix. Highlights for me is Georgie's Rappez-Vous rap (which I recorded over a Baths track), Jordan's autobiographical primary school radio play Crazy Robots Of Childhood, and Sam's amazing reinterpretation of my spoken-word rant Things Are Improving Every Second Of Every Day into mellow blunted rap Crocodile On The Dancefloor.

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Too Many Weapons side-projects

Too Many Weapons is a theatre / writing collective made up of Sam Burns-Warr, Georgie McAuley, Jordan Prosser and David Finnigan. We came together for the first time in the Philippines in 2011 to adapt Koushon Takami's novel Battle Royale into site-specific theatre performance / live-action game Battalia Royale for Manila company the Sipat Lawin Ensemble, then regrouped in Melbourne in 2013 to create Kids Killing Kids, a documentary theatre performance about the Battalia project co-produced by MKA and the Q Theatre, and featuring guest director Bridget Balodis and designer Mel Koomen. Battalia Royale and Kids Killing Kids were both fairly large-scale projects, and both involved a lot of travel to foreign cities to undertake intensive creative developments. It turns out that living together in close quarters for weeks at a time has a weird effect on the four of us, and we keep finding ourselves taking on new and weird side-projects in the middle of working on our main show. These tend to involve someone coming up with a stupid challenge, daring everyone to write a brand-new radio play, or a rap, or a spoken word performance piece, all of us laughing about what a stupid idea that was, AND THEN ALL OF US GOING AHEAD AND DOING THEM.

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Presented by MKA -- Melbourne-based theatre of new writing -- Kids Killing Kids uses documentary footage, interviews and photos, as well as testimonials from members of Sipat Lawin, to tell a very personal story about four over-confident foreigners who wandered into Manila and inadvertently helped create theatre history.

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Essential reading for the Battalia Royale fan: this is Isab Martinez's relationship map of Class Hope, showing you who likes who, who dated who, who hates who and who's only doing who for the sex.

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Kids Killing Kids

Kids Killing Kids is a documentary theatre work about violence, about theatre and about the Philippines. In 2011, Australian writers Sam Burns-Warr, David Finnigan, Georgie McAuley and Jordan Prosser traveled to Manila to adapt pulp Japanese novel Battle Royale for the stage for Filipino theatre company the Sipat Lawin Ensemble. The resulting performance, Battalia Royale, followed a cast of 40 through an abandoned school as a class of 15 year-old schoolchildren attempt to murder one another. The show opened to an audience of 250. On the second night there were 450, and by the third night the audience numbered more than 950. Within days, Battalia Royale had attracted a cult following, dedicated fans creating fan art and fan shows, and was receiving coverage on international press including Reuters, CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera. But the backlash against the show was just as great as the fan response. Critics - including some of the performers themselves - condemned the show's visceral celebration of violence, and members of the UN's Subcommittee for the Victims of Torture sought to shut down the show for 'merchandising brutality'. Sipat Lawin and the four Australian writers were accused of glamorising bloodshed in a country where war, conflict and torture is very much a part of recent history. In Kids Killing Kids, Sam, David, Georgie and Jordan seek to understand why it was that Battalia Royale triggered the response it did. Through interviews, stories and footage they examine the Philippines, the Pinoy people and the Battalia project and ask: what are the ethics of putting a work of hyper-violent teen-sploitation onstage? Was there any redeeming value to the Battalia project, or are we just getting our kicks watching kids destroy one another?