After spending 18 months creating our Colwick Woods Audio Guide we’re delighted that Nottingham City Council have agreed to produce leaflets to advertise the walk and to fund and install a series of large metal maps across all of the entrances to the site, along with QR codes that link to the audio, as below …
The council have also given us a small grant through their Cultural Investment Fund to adapt the script into a storytelling show to take out to residential homes and community centres in Sneinton and St. Ann’s, for those who can no longer get over to the woods. Working with around 8 community performers we’ll be looking to create an atmospheric little show combining soundscape, projections, music and stories to evoke the landscape and tell of the social and ecological history of Nottingham’s wildest and most important green space. We’re aiming to start work on that in late October to tour around the end of the year and in early 2027.
At the same time we’ll be working on another small project with the ChalleNGe Nottingham, Nature Connections project and are currently in discussion with them to work out what that will be. It looks like whatever we make – and this will be a schools based project – will take place next February.
2027 will see us create another audio guide, this time for one of Nottingham’s most iconic buildings. We’re not allowed to say any more about that at this stage but it’s something we’re very much looking forward to and which we will start around June for completion by the end of the year.
And throughout next year we will be working on a major community play project with Creative Burntwood and the Lichfield Garrick Theatre, embarking on several months of community engagement work and creating a script for a show that will be performed in 2028 and will be the largest we’ve been involved in since Night of the Zeppelin in 2016 (and possibly the largest ever).
We’re also waiting to hear about a potential small project around the story of Frankenstein, are working with a host of organisations on an application for another major project in India, and are starting conversations that may lead to a radical reshaping of the company sometime next year.
So plenty to look forward to. And if you’re interested in the history and practice of the community play form then do read Andy’s The Community Playwright’s Substack | Substack.