miscellaneous

There’s a pretty comprehensive list on my old blog of work I did pre-2018. This list picks up where that left off. It’s very ad-hoc but then so is my life. Dramaturgy is not well represented here: really it needs its own page. But, y’know, eventually.

I’m currently working with Selina Thompson Ltd as one of two dramaturgs for Twine, a new work exploring ideas around adoption, state-organised care of children, and family abolition.

2022-23: working with CROWD – international dance exchange, a collaborative network of European dance organisations co-creating a residency programme for dance makers who engage with communities as part of their practice, sometimes facilitating conversations and sometimes documenting them. Here’s a collection of observations from the 2022 residencies and here's a set of interviews, reflections and notes from the 2023 residencies.

2021-23: As part of Moving Roots, a collaboration between Battersea Arts Centre and four organisations across England and Wales, I led a writing programme designed for people who don’t usually write about theatre to write about theatre.

2021-22: I was critical friend, dialogue facilitator, and documenter of Imagining Futures, an experimental network of 12 European performance festivals. 

2019-2022: dramaturgy with Paula Varjack on two works that pivoted (for obvious reasons) from live performance to theatrical film: #thebabyquestion, exploring social pressures particularly on cis women to have children, and iMelania, using the former First Lady of the United States to consider being female and ‘foreign’.

2022: two participatory workshops made in collaboration with Dreadnought SW (Exeter) and Sophie Crocker/Georgia Bates (Newcastle) for Poet in the City’s Herstory festivals, inviting people to remap/rethink their cities through stories of care. 

2021: I worked with the brilliant designer Kevin Mount to create Signal Fires: 6 Notebooks, a participation-minded collection of texts from the pandemic collaboration between Fuel, Headlong and ETT. Please buy a paper copy, it's so beautiful.

2021: A mix-tape of stories about Unfolding Theatre’s experience of the first year of pandemic.  

2020: With Amy Letman, a long research project for Battersea Arts Centre in London, interviewing staff in all departments to create a set of recommendations to improve working conditions and pay and management structures. 

In 2020 I also designed and co-facilitated four conversations under the title wtf next, on the problems and possible futures of theatre-making. Here’s a summary of the whole in Exeunt, which links to much more substantial documentation (including a BSL-interpreted summary). 

And I interviewed the performance company Encounter and turned it into a twine. 

2019: A pamphlet for Local Trust on how four Big Local communities set out to transform their neighbourhoods with art. I also created a chill-out space for one of the big Local Trust gatherings in London. 

2018-19: A library of case studies written as part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Inquiry into the Civic Role of the Arts. 

I’ve given classes in and enjoyed conversations about creative critical practice and dramaturgy at Central School of Speech and Drama (thanks, Joel Anderson), Roehampton (thanks, Joe Kelleher), and Rose Bruford (thanks, Joseph Dunne-Howrie). 

Some accidental production and stage management work includes: the book launch for So Mayer’s A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing; the filming of Varjack-Lowry's #thebabyquestion, for which I was also dramaturg; and a solidarity fundraiser for Sisters Uncut and GRT groups hosted by Lola Olufemi.  

An interview with Phil Cleaves for Essential Drama.