Thanks to our generous crowdfunders, we’ve made some great plans for East Voices, the next stage of our ongoing East storytelling project. We’re particularly excited to be partnering with BSK London and Numbi Arts to bring storytelling and story-sharing to an even wider range of people. The big idea behind East Voices is to test and then make available ways of working online, something we’ve never done with East outside of documenting our work on the East Archive. This approach allows us to continue doing our work of using stories to connect people and build bridges between communities, even as the pandemic drags on. That will all get underway soon. Watch this space!
We should be on tour now with Gerrard Winstanley’s True and Righteous Mobile Incitement Unit. Today we would have been at Slung Low’s venue The Holbeck. Slung Low’s work during the pandemic has been a source of inspiration nationwide, and it’s hard to think of a better place for a piece of theatre that’s all about reclaiming the collective, progressive side of England’s chequered past. Hopefully we can be there in 2021.
Health and the preservation of life obviously come first so we’re happy to postpone. But one of the ironies of the situation is that the original version of Mobile Incitement, made well before the first case of Covid-19 was detected, was an outdoor show and naturally quite socially-distant. Not only our subject matter but our format are truly of our time! Still, we need to be confidently past the worst of the pandemic before we can tour. John Ball, during the Peasants’ Revolt, famously declared that “Now is the time”. But right now, no, it isn’t.
Shamim Azad, one of the lead artists in our East storytelling project and a long-term Daedalus collaborator, has been recognised for her work with the local community during Covid, and we’re feeling very proud indeed! Here’s how The National Lottery describes the project:
The exhibition – titled, The National Lottery’s 2020 Portraits of the People – honours 13 of these artistic champions for making a significant difference to lifting people’s spirits this year, using some of the £30m raised by National Lottery players every week for good causes. The digital exhibition can be visited on the websites and social media of: The National Portrait Gallery, London, The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, The MAC in Belfast, IKON Gallery in Birmingham, Summerhall in Edinburgh, Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham, Ruthin Craft Centre in Ruthin, Wales, The Photographers’ Gallery in London and the British Film Institute (BFI), and the portraits will also be on display at BFI Southbank in London.
Click here or on the screengrab below for the full portrait and article on the National Lottery blog:
Big congratulations, Shamim, from all your Daedalus colleagues!
A couple of weeks ago, Sef, Shamim and Paul had their first planning session and rehearsal since the Spring lockdown. It was great to get started on the work we’ll be doing as a result of our crowdfunding campaign. It was great too be in the same room for the first time in many months…So we’d like, once again, to take this opportunity to thank our donors: thank you!
Once the project is fully underway we’ll be working online. Any further social distancing or lockdown measures won’t then be a problem. In fact, that’s the whole point of this project! But… the second lockdown has kind of caught us before we were quite ready for that. We are persevering, nonetheless, and hope to to share the first story with you soon.
There’s a lot more to look forward to. We’re very excited to be working with theatre-maker and BSL intepreter Laura Goulden. Poet Stephen Watts popped in to discuss a possible collaboration. And we’ll be putting out a call for community members to join us and be coached online in storytelling. So do please watch this space!
Our crowdfunding campaign raised £4850, thanks to you! So East Online is on! Information on events will be posted here and to our mailing list. Those of you who opted for rewards will get them soon.
Happy storytelling!
We had to stop everything at the beginning of lockdown, including our fundraising. We applied for emergency funding but didn’t get it. We’re holding fire on our touring show Mobile Incitement. But, with so many people isolated by coronavirus and its knock-on effects, this is absolutely the right time for our storytelling project, East.
The whole East project is about bringing people together, creating links between different communities, and sharing stories and songs. It’s about friendship, sharing and multiculturalism, and the way songs and stories can help us deal with what the world throws at us. It’s not on a huge scale and may not sound grand – it certainly doesn’t seem to appeal much to major funders – but we believe it’s very valuable work. East London is home to an extraordinarily diverse range of people, but many folks don’t really know others outside their own communities, at least not socially. It’s also a place where wealth and poverty, privilege and marginalisation, and indeed tolerance and bigotry, sit side by side. And it’s a place facing many threats and challenges that would benefit from greater solidarity and co-operation. The need to build bridges, share experiences and learn from others is clear. We think that the exchange of stories and songs, and, more importantly, the learning and re-telling of each other’s stories and songs, is a richly rewarding way to address this need.
But, although lockdown is easing, our normal format – bringing people together around a table with food and singing and stories – is still a long way from being viable. So we’ve come up with a plan to move the project online. Some of it is straightforward, such as adding to our online archive so as to make more material available in the absence of live events, but some is more exploratory. We’re not exactly sure how best to reconfigure our gatherings but we have lots of ideas to try, and by the end of this project we’ll be able to take our work forward in new ways that will be valuable even when live events are possible again. “Resilience” is a word that is perhaps overused at the moment, but that’s exactly what this particular stage in the life of East is about.
We’ve launched a crowdfunding appeal to make all this happen. It only seems right for a project so embedded in our communities to be supported by our communities. Please take a look at our video and then click through to our crowdfunding page.
If you can give, please do. But whether or not you donate, do please spread the word. It may sound like a cliche, but it really does make a difference!
We hope you’re all well and staying safe.
We’ve had to reschedule our activities, and we really only have one active project at the moment: Gerrard Winstanley’s True and Righteous Mobile Incitement Unit, which was to start touring in June, with a second leg in the autumn.
We’re working on the basis that we should still prepare for autumn activities, while being ready to move them to if we have to. To this end, we’ve come up with a plan based on two priorities: to protect the health and safety of everyone we work with, artists, venues stuff, the public and all, and to maximise opportunities to provide paid work for artists during this emergency by moving as much of our activity online as possible. (We’re only funded on a project-by-project basis so have no funds to pay artists outside of project work.)
You can read our statement here. It will be updated as the situation develops. We also welcome any advice, because we’re just finding our way through this strange new territory, just like everyone else! You can always get in touch with us by via email or social media.
We’re looking forward to a great event in Tower Hamlets. We were asked to provide some live musical support for A’ Team Arts 40th Anniversary – Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. And it’s all happening tomorrow afternoon!
A’ Team Arts runs a range of Youth Arts programmes across Tower Hamlets, and we worked with them last year on the Silk River project. This year, as with Silk River, we’re getting our long-term collaborators The Black Smock Band involved. And, also as before, the project involves various sites across the borough.
This time, however, the focus is on estates, a nod to the early days of ‘A’ Team Arts. There’s dance, parkour, puppetry, physical theatre (created by a practitioner from Frantic Assembly) and music, and it’s held together by two themes; one is the described by the title Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and the other is the environmental crisis we face.
Come down and join us. We’ll be starting from Shandy Park at 2pm. There’s more info here: http://www.towerhamletsarts.org.uk/?cid=70475.
In June we lost someone who was not just a friend of Daedalus but instrumental in its beginnings. Paul Burgess writes:
“Sam was involved back when we were a student company, most memorably starting what would become a regular series of trips to the Edinburgh Fringe. He not only had the idea that we should take our site-specific production of the mediaeval morality play Everyman from Brasenose College Chapel to a church in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, he made it happen. He put in the hard work and produced it. I remember the exact moment he suggested it, in the living room of his rented second-year accommodation in Oxford. But it was typical of Sam not only to come up with brilliant and (as it seemed at the time) bonkers ideas but to give generously of his time and intelligence to make them happen.
“The whole thing was hard work, as Edinburgh Fringe on a budget always is, but also a success. The performances, in St Mark’s Unitarian Church, were moving and atmospheric, with music echoing from the organ loft above the audience. Apart from some teething problems during the first few shows, things went pretty smoothly. We managed to find some old photos from the trip to help us remember.
“More recently, in fact only this year, Sam had been talking to us with typical generosity about becoming a trustee. Having decided it was too impractical, since he now lived the other side of the world, we had started to think about what other role we could find or create so he could pick up again, after many years, his role in shaping the company. But we lost this amazing, kind person who touched so many lives before it could happen,
“What a terrible loss, felt by such a huge amount of people from all around the world.”
East 3 (Shamim Azad, Sef Townsend, Paul Burgess) will be sharing stories and songs in the Family Zone as part of our East Storytelling project with BSK. 1pm, 4pm and 5:30pm. Plus there’s so much else happening, of course! Its a huge event, and we know it’s going be a great day!
More info here: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/mela
Hope to see you there! Weavers Fields in Bethnal Green.
