Tag Archives: Queer Ecology

Artist Spotlight: Amy Daniels

As we enter our third phase of our new project, Dysbiosis, we are a team that continues to grow, and so here we have it: our latest spotlight on our newest team member, Amy Daniels. Amy joined us to present our first public sharing of Dysbiosis at the Omnibus Theatre last month as part of the 96 Festival and will be leading on the lighting design for Dysbiosis here on out. 

Amy has been a lover of theatre since she can remember. She studied English Literature at the University of Sussex, then fell in love with all things production during a year abroad at Stony Brook University in New York. She works on a wide range of performance, with an emphasis on the political, the playful and the pondering. Find her full credits and portfolio on her website – www.amydanielslighting.com 


Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

I’m Amy (she/her), a London-based freelance lighting designer (with occasional stints as a technical stage/production manager!) I’ve been working across a range of live performances as a technician since the end of 2017, and during a 4-year stint as Technical Manager at Camden People’s Theatre, I began to focus my practice towards lighting. I am heavily influenced by a broad range of artistic/cultural sources, including visual/fine art, live music & film, and draw on the relationship between humans & light, including scientific disciplines like chronobiology and optics. I am especially drawn to visual artists who use light as a primary artistic medium, such as Olafur Elliason, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman & Nam Jun Paik. I am also passionate about environmentally sustainable artistic & cultural practice and making the artistic spheres accessible to all. 

What does queer ecology mean to you? 

It’s the idea that we don’t take the “objective” or “scientific” meanings of ecological concepts we have been taught as gospel, and an understanding that mainstream scientific and ecological discourse doesn’t always reflect the kind of variation and diversity amongst human beings and the natural world. 

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

I learned more about how I work as a creative collaborator within a wider process: everyone in the room brought an interesting and unique skill set and breadth of ideas to the table. This way of working meant that our output blurred the lines between disciplines and was a truly collaborative process!

A key inspiration during the R&D week?

The literature of queer ecology and philosophy: for example, Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Also: the visual output of Paul Burgess, Dybiosis’ designer. Looking through his sketchbook was very inspirational in terms of thinking about what we want the audience to experience and take away from the performance. And always inspiring me is the visual artist Olafur Eliasson with his incorporation of lighting principles into art and installation.

What has stayed with you from your research into queer ecology?

I have found the relationship between our environment – where we live, work and spend our lives –  and our personal connection to nature really interesting. Living in London, we are all guilty of keeping the ‘city’ and ‘nature’ separated in our minds: a classic example being the idea of ‘escaping’ the city to be in nature, but also our alienation from the ‘natural’ processes which govern our lives like the natural rhythms of time through our use of technology to escape time. 

What are you currently excited about creatively?

I’m excited about using light and light sources in unconventional ways. My practice has always prioritised lighting as a primary storytelling element: often giving performers handheld lighting sources like industrial work lights to create dynamic, choreographed stage lighting, facilitating collaboration with choreography/movement. And Dysbiosis is no different! Using light sources onstage has been a core part of the project so far: giving some of the agency lighting designers usually keep to themselves to performer/facilitators.


Top image: Amy, right, on stage as part of the Dysbiosis work-in-progress showing at the Omnibus Theatre, June 2025. Credit: Devika Bilimoria.

Announcing New Daedalus Production and New Partnership at Exciting Queer Festival in South London!

After two R&D phases and more than two years in development, we’re finally ready to share Dysbiosis, our latest theatre project — and we’re doing it as part of the 96 Festival on its tenth anniversary.

We’re thrilled to bring this work-in-progress performance and exhibition to Omnibus Theatre in Clapham, South London, marking an exciting moment for Daedalus as we step outside our usual East London base to join this landmark festival in a vibrant new context.

Dysbiosis is a queer-led, multimedia performance that unearths the tangled connections between queerness, place, nature and environmental justice. Developed through collaboration with working class, global majority and LGBTQ+ Londoners, it weaves together original music, spoken word, performance and visual storytelling to explore how we live in and with the natural world.

This first public sharing is both a creative milestone and an invitation to help shape what comes next.  Join us at 7:45pm on 25th June 2025.

We’re honoured to be part of the 96 Festival in partnership with Omnibus Theatre, a multi-award-winning venue known for championing new voices, interdisciplinary work, and socially engaged performance. Based in a former library in the heart of Clapham, Omnibus is committed to affordable, inclusive theatre that challenges perceptions and uplifts underrepresented voices.

Artist Spotlight: Nuke Lagranje

For our final Dysbiosis artist spotlight, we meet director, writer, and performer Nuke Lagranje (he/they), whose work draws deeply from his experiences as a queer, neurodivergent person. In the first R&D phase in 2023, Nuke embodied one half of a two-headed, non-human creature—an abstract entity accidentally conjured by an artist. This creature weaves together elements of fairy lore, huldras, and other mythological beings, reflecting a connection to nature and the unseen.

Assistant Director Tasnim sat down with Nuke to discuss his creative practice, the intersections of queerness and nature, making new connections in the industry, and more.

Photo of Nuke Lagranje (right) at Queens Theatre Hornchurch with Yael Elisheva by Hannah Davis.

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

My name is Nuke. I direct, write plays and prose and act now and then. My focus when I write or direct is usually magical realism, social activism and psychology. I produced, wrote and directed Constant Reprises. I am Spanish-Dominican, I grew up in Madrid, moved to England for university then moved to London after graduating from Portsmouth. I am queer, Black-Caribbean and… I love dogs. 

What does ‘dysbiosis’ mean to you?

Artist Spotlight: Paul Burgess

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?

Artist Spotlight: Zia Álmos Joshua

Our fourth artist spotlight is on Zia Álmos Joshua [X] (neutral pronouns) who has a unique position on the Dysbiosis project as the only member of the team who has joined remotely for both R&D weeks. Currently doing their PhD in Texas, Zia has been our academic consultant and human encyclopedia on the project.

Can you give us a quick intro to yourself, your research and your creative practice?

I am a researcher, educator, writer, performer, and activ-ish, born and raised in Brixton, London, UK, currently studying for a PhD at Rice University, in Houston, Tx, USA. My research is focused on posthumanism, and the social, political, and philosophical dimensions of taxonomy, ecology, biology, emergent technology, and consciousness, with these also shaping my creative work (autotheory; poetry; prose; performance art). I am dedicated to teaching and education, and spent the 6 years prior to my PhD at the Linnean Society of London and Wellcome Collection, working in science communication and public engagement.

What does ‘dysbiosis’ mean to you?

Dysbiosis to my mind is a complicated term; it technically means a dysregulation in the/a microbial community (the microbiota or microbiome) of the human body, one that we ordinarily live in a mutualistic-symbiotic relationship with, but for whatever reason is out of wack, and so the health of the body is compromised. How I like to think about it, is imagining the Earth and its ecosystems as kinds of bodies with well-regulated mutualistic-symbiotic relationships, and that we are presently entering a stage of existence where a lot of human-related activities and processes have pushed the boundaries of what those various bodily entanglements can tolerate, and the planet itself, or various parts of it, are entering into dysbiosis, ecosystems out of wack, spiraling out of balance.

Reflections on Dysbiosis R&D sharing by Olivia Catchpole

Theatremaker and writer Olivia Catchpole joined us for our R&D sharing at the end of the second week of R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch on Friday 1st December 2023. Read on to hear her thoughts on the project and her own interpretation on the meaning of Dysbiosis in relation to her own political standpoint.


Dimmed lights lend an air of expectation to the scene as we come cautiously into the room, wondering what’s in store for us. I’m wondering what “dysbiosis” means and how it might be shown. Coming in from traffic-ridden streets, I’m instantly soothed by the space that has been created, bowls of Mehndi (commonly known as henna in the West) and turmeric paste sit on the table in front of us along with offers of tea and a glimpse of treetops through the skylight. Scripts lie on the technician’s table, ready to be used.

Captures from a movement piece which depicts live video projection of organic materials and video footage by Paul Burgess onto Yael Elisheva

We’re here to see DYSBIOSIS, a piece in development by Daedalus Theatre Company in collaboration with Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch. The project brings local artists together with a group of mostly queer, East-London-based practitioners from a wide range of creative disciplines, to explore stories of queer ecology, colonialism and the Global North’s relationship to nature. As far as I can tell, such projects are thin on the ground in London and Essex, so I’m especially excited to see what they’ve come up with. Perhaps, I hope, the show will alleviate some of the tension I feel thinking of our collective disconnect, even disregard, for nature’s processes at such a vital time. A time of biodiversity crisis, striking the creatures which hold up the basis of our existence. A recent survey led by the RSPB found that flying insects have declined by 60% in the UK in the past twenty years. One fact in a seemingly endless stream of dire warnings. I wonder, with the familiar frustration, whether I need to explain the gravity of this situation. Not only bees are pollinators- every insect lost is the loss of a vital element of the system. Trees, plants, and animals too, are immeasurably more than just a pretty luxury. 

Artist Spotlight: Yael Elisheva

We met up with the Dysbiosis team again for a second week of R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch two weeks ago. Our third spotlight is on theatremaker, physical performer, drag artist, drama facilitator and many more things Yael Elisheva. They often work in Jewish spaces and use their artistic practice as a means of examining Jewish culture and religion.

What is your relationship with nature?

In my work, I play with found objects and explore how they can be used unconventionally and with multiple purposes. I grew up observing the sabbath, which gave me a strong connection to nature and rest and play. In today’s Western society – our relationship with rest is often viewed as lazy. I’d love to challenge that and offer rest as a means of rejuvenation for our planet.

How do queerness and nature intersect?

When I first heard of different animals and plants that are constantly changing genders like oysters and mushrooms, I felt so validated in my own gender expression. 

How does your heritage influence the way you view/value nature?

As a jew, I have rituals and prayers that revolve around nature and gratitude for nature. I have been specifically interested in how the Jewish sabbath embodies an attitude of rest which allows nature to rest as well. 

Were any aspects of the project new to you (e.g. devising collaboratively, doing an R&D, working with a designer-led company) and if so, what did you expect coming in?

Dysbiosis R&D Part 2 – A Quick Glimpse!

We have lots more to say about this, along with some exciting news about how we’re working with local residents. But, in the meantime, Nabeela Zaman came along to our end-of-R&D sharing and made this lovely reel.

If you want to know more about the first part of the R&D, back in March, you can read about it here.

Artist Spotlight: Tasnim Siddiqa Amin

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. 

In case you missed it, our latest newsletter…

Welcome to this quick roundup of news from Daedalus Theatre Company.

If you’ve been stuck in London these past few weeks, there’s not been much of a summer. But with September around the corner, we’ve been busy brewing some exciting projects and plans.

Ten Years East at A Season of Bangla Drama – save the date!

We’re really thrilled to announce that East Storytelling Project has been selected for this year’s A Season of Bangla Drama, with an evening of stories and songs from across the diverse cultures of East London. In line with the festival’s theme for 2023, we’ll be exploring love in its many forms. It’s also ten years since we started East, so we have a line-up of tellers and singers from across the decade. We’ll also be performing at the venue where it all began: Rich Mix in Bethnal Green.

Here’s a summary of the festival programme and for now, please save the date! Our show, Ten Years East, is on the evening of 19th November.

Artist Spotlight: Kathryn Webb