It’s been an interesting year as we’ve moved from Hanby and Barrett to Excavate. We’ve lost a Hanby but gained a number of new faces to join our team of associate artists, many of whom will be working with us on projects next year. And, amongst all this restructuring, we’ve managed to do a fair amount of work as well.

We launched the I Worked At Raleigh website and smartphone app, receiving a lot of national press attention in doing so. And we also launched Songs of Defiance, by The Army of Redressers and The Rise Choir, and An Act of Defiance, a film about the Luddite uprisings in Ashfield. And our investigation into the Luddite movement culminated in a reworking of our show The Hammer of Defiance for performances at the Galleries of Justice as part of the Subversion and Rebellion Conference in Nottingham this November.

We did some development and dramaturgical work with Arletty Theatre for their Swan Canaries show, which has been on a very successful tour; did a talk for the East Midlands Oral History Society and for the Transported programme on creating heritage based and site specific performance; gathered stories from people in Lincolnshire who remember living next to the Bomber Command airfields during the war; interviewed some of those connected with the conscientious objectors movement in Holton cum Beckering; and created The Old Dogg at The Mint with the Grantham Dramatic Society, a new script about Sir Isaac Newton’s work as Warden and Master of the Royal Mint which we held a rehearsed reading of for the Gravity Fields Festival. We also began working with Charnwood Arts on developing a new performance based on the Zeppelin attack there in 1916 which killed ten people and wounded many others.

We moved into a new office in Hockley run by City Arts. Our work around Raleigh was the basis for a chapter in the Routledge International Handbook on the Arts and Education. And finally our increasing work on developing international partnerships lead to us travelling across the Netherlands as part of the Caravan of Dreams project for the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam; submitting a large application to Creative Europe for a project with the University of Lincoln and four community arts companies in the Netherlands and Germany; and returning to Rotterdam to take part in the TANDEM cultural managers exchange.

We are very close to announcing three or possibly four new projects for next year, but we can’t quite do that yet. So watch this space. Thanks for your continued support. Have a good festive season.