East London – Daedalus Theatre Company

Call for Storytellers: Tales of Tower Hamlets on the theme of KINDNESS

By DaedalusAdmin on Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Do you have a story to tell about kindness in Tower Hamlets? We’re looking for storytellers with Caribbean, Somali, or/and West African heritage. If you have a story about acts of kindness, migration, or how Tower Hamlets has shaped your life, we want to hear from you!

About the Project: We’re thrilled to announce Tales of Tower Hamlets, a new storytelling event celebrating the theme of Kindness from the EAST Project. This project will explore the rich history and diverse cultures of Tower Hamlets through stories of migration, community support, and kindness—especially stories of kindness shown by migrant communities to newcomers such as refugees and asylum seekers.

What We’re Looking For:

Stories about acts of kindness within migrant communities in Tower Hamlets.
Experiences of newcomers, especially refugees and asylum seekers.
Historical migration stories linked to East London.
Contemporary stories about migration today.
Personal stories—if you feel like sharing!
Stories that reflect the awesome diversity of East London and Tower Hamlets.

Eligibility:

Events Participation

Call Out for East Music 2

By DaedalusAdmin on Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Musicians! You’re invited to East Music: Song and Tune Exchange Session at Poplar Union on Saturday 6 July

Reserve your free space here

After an incredible pilot session, we are thrilled to be back at Poplar Union for a Summer Edition this July.

Bring your instruments and voices along with songs or tunes from across the world to play, sing and share. There may be an opportunity to play to a live audience later in the evening.

This is a free, friendly and inclusive session for players of all levels of experience. Global Majority* and LGBTQ+ music makers are particularly welcome. The session will be led by one of our East musicians.

Date: Saturday 6th July 2024

Time: 4-6.30PM

Duration: 2.5 hours including a 30 minute break

Location: Poplar Union

Ages: 18+

Artist Spotlight

Artist Spotlight: Paul Burgess

By DaedalusAdmin on Thursday, March 28, 2024

This month’s spotlight is on DYSBIOSIS designer-director and director of Daedalus Theatre Company Paul Burgess, who conceived the project back in 2020 before recruiting a team of creative practitioners last year to delve deeper into social constructions of Nature using a queer and interdisciplinary lens.

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

I’m a set and costume designer by training and self-taught in video and interactive digital, which I use in both performance and visual art contexts. I teach on the side, mainly English as a second language, at my partner’s tutorial school, Angkriz, though I’ve also taught on theatre and theatre design courses at various universities. Both feed my creative practice by challenging me in different ways. I also have various voluntary roles, mainly in the area of sustainability. These also feed into my creative work, and include being the coordinator of the Society of British Theatre Designers’s working group on sustainability and a co-director of Ecostage. I’m also on the Environmental Responsibility Subcommittee at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch, where we’re working on DYSBIOSIS. For fun, I play the violin, most often with The Black Smock Band, which connects with the music and storytelling we do as part of our EAST project. It all adds up to one interconnected creative practice.

What does ‘dysbiosis’ mean to you?

I suggested this as a working title for the project, and it seems to have stuck, so I suppose I need to explain myself!

It came initially from I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong. Having defined dysbiosis as ‘breakdowns in communication between different species – host and symbiont – that live together, ‘ Yong goes on to say:

Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, the loss of wild species, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. On coral reefs or in human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years.

I had already been thinking about the way we use Nature to talk about society, often in ways that are divorced from the reality of the natural world, such as the notion of the body politic, or economic competitiveness being described as Darwinian, or the absurd claim that LGBTQ+ people are unnatural. But what if the metaphorical body politic is suffering from metaphorical dysbiosis?

Major Projects Participation Partners and Collaborators The Company

Daedalus Theatre announce new partnership with Havering Changing

By DaedalusAdmin on Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Date: 16 January 2024

Daedalus Theatre Company has been awarded Creative Community Support by Rainham Change Makers, the local Havering Changing steering group in Rainham, to deliver creative nature workshops in Rainham and Wennington this Spring 2024.

The creative nature workshops are for local adults in Rainham and Wennington with an interest in nature and a curiosity for visual arts. Together, we will work on a collective response to probing questions about nature and local green spaces that will be showcased as a mobile installation. The project will also experiment with sustainable materials and look at ecological ways of thinking. Work with the group, along with the Queens Theatre Hornchurch young company programme, will feed into our next iteration of the DYSBIOSIS project.

The new work-in-progress project DYSBIOSIS began with an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in April 2023. Supported by Arts Council England, we delivered an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in Autumn with a group of exciting creative practitioners such as Zia Álmos Joshua and Havering local Kathryn Webb. The project seeks to explore our relationship with nature in the global north through a queer lens.

Events Major Projects Participation

Ten Years East at the SBD Sharing Day

By DaedalusAdmin on Friday, October 27, 2023

Part of this year’s A Season of Bangla Drama, Ten Years East celebrates a decade of our East storytelling project, with an evening of stories and songs. We have lots more to tell you about it over the next few weeks, but first we want to share a clip from the Season of Bangla Drama sharing day.

One of the great things about this festival is that all the companies involved get together for a day a month or so before the opening night to meet each other and learn about each other’s projects. It’s always a lovely event, and is part of what makes A Season of Bangla Drama such a fundamental part of our local arts community here in East London, and indeed the wider Bangla arts community in the UK. The photo above, by the ever-brilliant Rehan Jamil, is the official group photo.

This year, each company’s intro to the rest of the group was filmed by Seema Khalique and edited into a 30-second mini-film by Marble Sinew. Here’s ours:

If you’d like to come and see the show, it’s at 5:30pm on 19th November at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green. You can find out more and book your tickets here:

Book now for Ten Years East

Artist Spotlight Major Projects Partners and Collaborators

Artist Spotlight: Tasnim Siddiqa Amin

By DaedalusAdmin on Sunday, September 17, 2023

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

I’m Tasnim, a queer Bangladeshi-British woman from East London and I am a visual artist, theatremaker and writer. I am Assistant Producer/Director for Daedalus Theatre Company.

What does queer ecology mean to you?

I don’t do very well with long words haha but after spending a week unpacking and consistent Googling I would say queer ecology describes a critical, intersectional and decentralised approach in the way we look at how people, plants, animals and smaller organisms interact with their environment, both locally and globally.

What did you discover about yourself and the way you work during the Dysbiosis R&D week?

I discovered that I really thrive in pressured creative environments bouncing ideas of creatives from different disciplines. It dawned on me that to pursue a project you don’t need to have it all figured out, having an idea is good enough. I never knew I could work with venues this way, the way Paul was doing, to say hey I have an idea and I want to bring along a bunch of people that I’ve never met from different creative disciplines in a rehearsal room at your theatre and see what happens.

The Company

Can you help us?

By DaedalusAdmin on Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Hi everyone,

We’ve created street theatre with local teenagers. We’ve taken our queered, musical version of English radical history to venues ranging from Latitude Festival to Tower Hamlets. We’ve created a performance with primary school kids to share their ideas for a better world. We’ve been part of Eid celebrations, the Tower Hamlets Boishaki Mela and A Season of Bangla Drama. We’ve worked with students at our local uni, Queen Mary. Our storytelling project East has brought together people from across the amazing diversity of East End heritages, including Bengali, Jewish, Somali and Vietnamese, to learn stories and songs from each other. We’ve created opportunities for deaf and hearing storytellers to collaborate and share skills. We’ve given refugees a voice, and we’ve made safe creative spaces for queer artists. We’ve given hundreds of people from all walks of life a chance to develop their creativity, and thousands of people a chance to watch, listen and participate in arts projects.

Artist Spotlight Associate Artists Major Projects

Artist Spotlight: Kathryn Webb

By DaedalusAdmin on Tuesday, July 25, 2023

While we prepare for the next stage of Dysbiosis, our journey through queer ecology and environmental justice at Queens Theatre Hornchurch, we’re introducing some of the amazing artists we’re privileged to work with on the project. First up is Kathryn Webb.

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

Hi! My name is Kathryn and I’m a queer, neurodivergent, working-class creative from Cranham. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been into ‘making things’. In primary school, me and my bestie used to shoot our own version of Doctor Who, complete with ketchup blood, on a camcorder in his back garden. Nowadays my creative output spans theatre, film, poetry and anything in between. I’ve been mentored by Sky Arts, Creative England, Rianne Pictures, and made a short film for the BBC100 Project. My work stems from an interest in marginalised voices, folklore, and queerness. Previous theatre work has been staged at Theatre503, Arcola, Golden Goose, Pleasance, and Omnibus.

What does queer ecology mean to you?

To me, queer ecology is about questioning what we take for granted when we think of nature, science and reproduction. Unpacking the colonialism and white supremacy of the ‘truths’ we’ve been given and expanding our horizons to see beyond binaries. Nature is brimming with examples of queerness – it’s no joke that we’ve always been here and always will. Through this process, I’ve been empowered to challenge the notion that we exist to procreate.

Major Projects Research and Development

Dysbiosis R&D at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch

By DaedalusAdmin on Sunday, April 2, 2023

We had an amazing week developing a new project at QTH, so we should start with a huge thank you to the venue for being so welcoming and supportive. Thanks also to all the creative practitioners involved for their generosity, intelligence and imagination. Clockwise from left, in the picture above: Shakira Stellar, Fran Olivares, Tasnim Siddiqa Amin, Paul Burgess, Nuke Lagranje, Kathryn Webb, Yael Elisheva and Jo Palmer. We also had remote contributions from Zia Almos Joshua and a talk on eco-scenography from Andrea Carr. Some more creative professionals will be joining us as the project develops.

Bringing the community-building ethos and cross-cultural story exchange methodology of our East project together with the visual theatre work of director Paul and the combined art and theatre background of assistant director Tasnim, the project is a critical look at the Global North’s relationship with the more-than-human world, using a lens of queer ecology to question not only the engrained world-views of mainstream Western thought but also some of the heteronormative and binary assumptions of the environmental movement. New themes emerged during the week too, not least how folk stories and myth act as an intermediary in our relationships with Nature. But the big question for the R&D was more methodological, and goes right to the heart of Daedalus’s mission: how to bring together a multiplicity of voices to create a truly collaborative performance that can hold different styles, viewpoints and perspectives. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, but we also know that every project is different, and it’s exciting to start the journey of finding what’s right for Dysbiosis.

The Company

Could you be a Trustee?

By DaedalusAdmin on Monday, January 23, 2023

Daedalus Theatre Company is on the lookout for new trustees. We need people who believe in the value of the performing arts to celebrate diversity, connect communities, foster understanding and explore big ideas. Might this be you?

The trustees’ role is to provide oversight and advice to the artistic director and ensure the company meets its legal requirements, such as reporting to the Charity Commission. The core part of the role is attending four meetings a year, currently via Zoom, and checking the annual report. There’s occasionally some additional paperwork, and some trustees also choose to provide advice on their areas of expertise outside of formal meetings. The role is voluntary.

Tag Archives: East London