We had a great time performing Mobile Incitement at the Freedom and Independence Theatre Festival, with some amazing audience feedback. We feel deep gratitude to the many people who made it happen but especially Kazi Ruksana Begum, Tower Hamlets Arts Development Officer, who is an absolute force of nature, making amazing things like this festival happen on tiny budgets, while calmly dealing with the Herculean task of coordinating lot of artists and companies, both professional and amateur. Big thanks also to Mushahed Ahmed, Jules Deering, Ali Campbell and everyone else.
We’re very excited to be joined by Saida Tani for our performances at Freedom and Independence Theatre Festival. Normally, at each place we visit with the project, we work with local people to create a bespoke version of the piece that reflects the radical history of the area. But here, well, we’re back in East London, our home territory. We’re the locals. So why not work with a locally much-loved star?
Make sure you get to see this! You can get your tickets here:
Hope to see you there!
Sef just did a fantastic interview on Jeanette Kwakye’s BBC London Radio show. You need to listen! It includes a clip from Michele Chowrimooto’s story, and some really brilliant observations from Sef about the role of storytelling, the importance of sharing stories across cultures, how the East Voices project works, and how to approach sharing your personal story for the first time.
Jeanette’s shows are great, but if you want to jump straight to Sef’s interview you can start at 01:36:38.
Go to East Archive for Michele’s story and many others.
We’re really excited to be teaming up with Sign for All for this workshop led by two amazing storytellers. Here are the details:
Date: Sat 9 October
Time: 10.30am – 12 noon
Location: Online via Zoom
What is it? A fun introduction to storytelling, exploring how we tell stories physically, with words and using BSL. This session will be BSL interpreted & facilitated by professional storyteller Sef Townsend and Deepa Shastri who is a Deaf theatre access consultant, BSL performer and presenter.
How to book: Contact info@signforallcommunity.co.uk to book your place and get the Zoom link.
Audio version of text:
A special welcome for BSL users:
Do you have a love of stories? Do you listen to stories and long to tell your own?
We are looking for East Londoners who want to learn the skills of storytelling. World-class professional storytellers Sef Townsend & Shamim Azad, alongside artistic director Paul Burgess, will guide you through a process to help you share a story which will be part of the East Voices Digital Archive.
East Voices offers new storytellers free coaching with three sessions including a one-to-one session. You will have the choice of sharing a traditional story from your own cultural heritage or to tell a story from your own lived experience. These stories will be recorded and shared on the East Voices Digital Archive.
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!
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!
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.
Here’s Sef Townsend, Shamim Azad and Paul Burgess in the Family Tent. It’s such an amazing festival, we had a great time, and we feel privileged to be a part of it!