Photo collage featuring Shamim Azad, Farah Naz, Sef Townsend, Michele Chowrimootoo, Paul Burgess, Tasnim Siddiqa Amin (left to right)
We’re delighted to announce that Daedalus Theatre Company will be part of the 22nd year of A Season of Bangla Drama, with the latest iteration of our East Storytelling Project: East to Elsewhere. Our performance at the annual festival, at 7:30pm on 14th November 2025 in Tower Hamlets, marks a turning point. Our last performance at Season of Bangla Drama celebrated a decade of the project. This year’s show marks the beginning of an exciting new phase.
Following a period of planning, dreaming and discussion with members of our storytelling community, we’re widening the project’s reach. Having recently taken Mobile Incitement to Exeter and run one of our Creative Nature workshops in Sheffield, our performance at A Season of Bangla Drama pilots the format we hope to use to, well, as the title says, take East elsewhere.
The performance itself will, nevertheless, be firmly rooted in our home borough of Tower Hamlets, with stories from the area’s various cultures and an open mic. The theme of this year’s festival is kindness. Stories and songs of migration – of belonging and not belonging – have always been central to the East Storytelling Project. This is only partly by design; it’s also down to where we are and our decision to deliberately seek out tellers from the borough’s different communities. Our take on the festival theme is the kindness – and the unkindness – with which migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are greeted, and the kindness that makes people take terrible risks in order to support or be with their loved ones. East Storytelling Project as a whole stands as a form of resistance to attacks on asylum seekers and refugees, instead offering a community of kindness and cultural exchange through shared stories and music.
We have space for one new participant. If you’d like to tell a story with support from professional storytellers, drop us a line here. We’re particularly keen to find somewhere from the local Bengali community. If you’d like to keep it more casual, please sign up for the open mic! We’ll also be running a consultation program alongside it, to find out how, as an arts organisation, we can best serve our local community.
Big thanks to St Margaret’s House, where we ran a social for past, present and new participants, which directly led to the creation of East to Elsewhere, and to the Mayor’s Small Grants Programme run by Tower Hamlets Council, which has funded the show and enabled us to launch this new stage of the East Storytelling Project.
Join us at 7:30pm on 14th November at the Brady Arts Centre for a celebration of stories, community and kindness.
