Having spent much of the last two years working with communities in Nottinghamshire to make audio walks, exploring the changing culture of the places in which they live, we were delighted to be asked to return to Rutland – the scene of our greatest triumphs – to create a walk for the Oakham Canal Green Corridor Project, who are doing such fantastic work in maintaining and developing the landscape and paths around the section of the Melton to Oakham canal that can be walked along from Oakham.

We started by setting up a research group that delved into the archives to uncover the history of this ill fated endeavour (it kept closing for lack of water. although did manage to transform the town). Meanwhile we carried out interviews with those who have memories and stories of the canal (particularly from those who fish it), and then used this to develop a series of characters.

Working with our old friends at Arts for Rutland we assembled a cast, created a script, rehearsed the parts and then recorded the walk, at sessions in Nottingham (with the fantastic Sue Curtis who is the main narrator) and Uppingham school.

After a great deal of editing we handed over the material to Adam McCready, who – as with our Sherwood Voices project – put it all together to create the finished walk of twenty tracks.

We’re really proud of what we’ve all made together; over two hours of material to accompany a five mile walk. It’s our most ambitious audio walk to date and although we think it’s time to turn our hand to something else for the time being, we’ve clearly learnt how to do these things and hope that many people use and enjoy it, and both learn something new about the place in which they live (or visit) and also become involved in the wider work of the canal project.

The walk can be found on the Oakham Canal Green Corridor website and the map of the walk is available here

It can also be found on spotify.

Rutland Morris – getting ready to provide some sounds for ‘The Battle of Saxby Bridge’

Our final audio walk for Sherwood Voices has been completed and we are gearing up for the production of the maps and a launch event in the village to mark the end of what has been perhaps our largest ever project. In total we have produced a staggering 96 audio tracks, and worked with around 350 people in the making of these seven walks. The walk can be accessed here and will also soon be available on the Inspire website.

As we’ve been in post-production for this walk we’ve also been rehearsing for our audio guide that will take listeners on a history of the Oakham Canal. Funded by the NLHF this project has returned us to the home of two of our most successful projects (The Takeover, way back in 2003 and The Rutlanders Return in 2018). Recording takes place, with a community cast, in Nottingham and Uppingham over February, with the launch due for April.

After over 20 months of work on this project, which has involved over three hundred people in the creation of six audio walks across the heart of Nottinghamshire, Sherwood Voices is finally live.

You can access the walks through either of these websites: Sherwood Voices | Inspire – Culture, Learning, Libraries (inspireculture.org.uk) or Sherwood Voices – A walking project based on stories from the towns and villages of the Sherwood Forest area

We’re very close to finishing our Sherwood Voices project with five of the six walks having been recorded and one more (Edwinstowe) to go.  This has been a huge endeavour involving a very large amount of people and is going to result in over ten hours of material which will be made available soon.

We will have a series of small launch events with each of the communities we’ve been working with and next year both Inspire and Miner2Major will make a big public splash about the project as people head into the Spring sunshine.  The pieces are an interesting blend of storytelling, podcast, and audio drama, combining first person narrative with local voices, to explore the changing culture of the area.

Alongside this work we are part of an international network that is exploring how applied theatre techniques may be of value in addressing issues of gender-based violence in Indian basti communities, and are developing a range of creative strategies with Indian partners that will be trialled later this year.

Our international work will also be part of next year’s ICAF festival and we are busy planning how we will run this session.

We are currently waiting to hear on two potential projects – an audio based one in Rutland, and another large-scale international research project.  Fingers crossed.

Once Sherwood Voices is up and running we’ll let you know.

Well, we managed to get through 2021 in reasonable shape, and are looking forward to digging into projects that we’ve already begun as well as entering into a new stage of work with our brilliant team of new associate artists.

Last year saw us, like so many others, exploring projects that had to move away from the live encounter and into the digital space.  Our work with Loros hospice on the Thinking Ahead project will be launched publicly in February and was amongst the most challenging pieces of work we’ve ever done.  Based on a series of interviews with those in the last weeks of their life this series of audio pieces explores end of life experience from a wide range of cultural perspectives and will be used as a training resource for the NHS.

Ali Mururajani who read the story ‘Krushan’

Our other main body of work was on a series of ten short films for the MeHeLP project in partnership with three Keralan film directors and a large team of actors and technicians.  The picture at the top is of Sree Kumar Appu in The Bicycle (who was also one of the performers in the touring plays that we made with Lokadharmi). This series is now beginning to be shared widely across Kerala and although the overall project has reached its conclusion we will be working hard with our partners to find ways to disseminate the findings from the work that we’ve done and to explore ways to take it forward.  The online conferences that were held for a Keralan and then a pan-Indian audience were very well received and the impact of the work is now beginning to be felt as a number of key organisations look to help publicise, use and interrogate the material we have created.  We are also working on a chapter for a book that should be published later this year.

Filming for ‘The Boat’ by Naren Ajith and his team.

2021 also saw us receiving Arts Council funding for the first time in many years (having not applied for many years) for Sherwood Voices a walking project based on stories from the towns and villages of the Sherwood Forest area.  Last year was spent developing a wide range of partnerships with community groups across the area in which the work will be taking place and we’re looking forward now to developing the audio and visual material that will accompany the walks that have been mapped out and to launch the project at some point in the spring.

The Newstead Keep Fit/Fat group who are working with us on an audio walk in their patch

The year also saw our In Flux project being written about in War and its Aftermath book as part of the Beyond Commemoration: Community, Collaboration and Legacies of the First World War series.  We also worked with Mantle Arts and their Voices from the Coalfield project on a podcast series that was recorded with a community cast in Loughborough, and developed new partnerships with colleagues in India and the UK to explore ideas for projects that we hope to move forward this year.

At the moment the only other projects we currently have planned for 2022 are Congress, a series of workshops, salons and debates in partnership with the Theatre Royal in Nottingham, and another India based arts research project that we are again partnering on. This one will work with women in the bastis of Pune and Delhi with a range of social welfare and educational organisations, including the Swadhar Institute for the Development of Women & Children and the International Association for Performing Arts and Research.

So that’s it for now.  Plenty to look forward and dig our teeth into and also plenty of space to explore new ideas as we enter into what is surely going to be a very interesting moment where the lure of the local and the desire for embodied collective experience may become very great indeed.

Good luck with all your plans and hope to see and/or work with some of you soon.

The Sherwood Voices project is working with groups of people from towns and villages across the region, to map walks and gather memories and stories that focus on hidden histories and contemporary experience.  Together we will create a series of walking routes and audio stories that will allow people to experience and understand the area in a new way.

Over the autumn the team will continue with the work of visiting festivals, libraries and community venues in towns and villages across the area to gather people’s tales and knowledge, as well as offering them the chance to submit their own stories and insights through Sherwood Storycards and the Sherwood Voices website.   Once this material has been gathered we’ll be working with people to help shape this into a series of seven recorded stories and audio pieces that will become part of newly created or already established walking routes, ready to be launched next year.

The project is particularly interested in hearing from people who feel that their stories may not have been told, or that their understanding of the place where they live is different to that which is normally expressed.

The towns and villages that we are focussing on are Clipstone, Edwinstowe, Ollerton, Rainworth, Ravenshead, Newstead, Papplewick, Linby, Hucknall, Bestwood and Calverton.

Initiated in partnership with Inspire: Learning, Libraries and Culture and the Miner2Major Landscape Partnership scheme, and funded by Arts Council England and the Lottery Heritage Fund.

So as we move into August work has begun on two projects in two very different contexts.  First of all though we’re really pleased how two other projects have worked out and the feedback we’re getting from the audiences for these.

The work we’ve been doing for Mantle Arts and their Voices from the Coalfield project has resulted in a series of short books and this podcast series that was recorded with a community cast in Loughborough.  This work has been based on a wonderful series of oral history interviews carried out in the 1980s and we’re really pleased that we’ve been able to dig into this material to explore the life and culture of the post war community of Coalville and the surrounding villages.

Our work with Loros hospice has also come to an end with the writing and recording of a series of eight stories looking at issues around end of life care.  As well as being a really challenging subject to research and write about it’s been a project with our most diverse cast to date – Sokari Erekosima, Jim Findley, Gurpreet Grewal-Santini, Violet Hais, Mufaro Makubika, Irfhan Ali Mururajani, Dipti Patel and Ling Peng.  We’d like to thank all of the readers for their sensitive handling of these stories which will be used as a training tool for those who are engaged with end of life care.  Here’s one of the pieces, read by Irfhan:

So onto our two new projects, and the first is part of our ongoing work in India and a series of ten films set in Kerala that we’ve written the stories for.  These are for the MeHeLP project and are replacing the theatre project that has had to be cancelled because of the Covid situation in India.   Four of these are currently in production and we’re working with Lokadharmi on turning these stories into scripts.  The first of these, The Cake, was filmed this week (July 30th and 31st), and will be followed by The Friend, The Make-up and The Bicycle.

We’re waiting to find out who will be filming the other six stories but are looking forward to collaborating with them.  All of these films explore issues of mental health in Kerala.

Here in the East Midlands we’ve started work on an ACE funded project in partnership with Inspire and Miner2Major. Sherwood Voices will work with communities across the heart of Nottinghamshire to create a series of seven walks and audio stories that will explore the culture and hidden histories of the region.  We’re currently in the research phase of the project, with our Sherwood Storycards ready to land at libraries across the county and our team will be out and about talking to people and community groups and gathering stories over the next weeks.

We’ve also recruited a new team of associates and are in the process of planning our first project as a team together, so will let you know more when those plans are confirmed.

That’s it for now.  Have a good summer.

So as we start to see through to the other side we have, like many others, taken this moment to rethink our work and how we want to move forward into the future.

Over the past three years, thanks to our time in India, we have become increasingly interested in work that can be categorised as fitting into the Health Humanities agenda, and that is something that we are looking to develop.  As well as finally returning to Kerala to work on the MeHeLP project we are in discussion with an organisation to develop what will be a very challenging project around issues connected to end of life care.

Over the course of the last few months we’ve had conversations with fellow travellers from various countries, including this long established theatre company in Appalachia, and are trying to conjure up a wee project with them.  Closer to home we’re seeing if we can work again with Arts for Rutland with whom we recently produced The Rutlanders Return as well as discussing ideas for work in the north of Nottinghamshire with organisations in the county.  We’re also in conversation with two wonderful community theatre companies as we think about ways in which we can advocate and investigate the kind of work that we do; and are pondering whether political street theatre is where it might be at over the next year or so.

Perhaps our most fundamental change is going to be to shake up our team.  We want to ensure that we come up with big, bold and crazy ideas that are genuinely exciting and are looking to put together what we think of as a ‘band’, a group of people who will meet up – probably in the pub – to dream up ideas that we then try and make happen.  We’ve already recruited the keyboard player (extending the metaphor), and once we’ve got the whole crew together we’ll let you know.

Let’s hope the sun shines in September.  It’s the least it could do.

As some of you will know, for many years now we have been trying to set up a project about the Conscientious Objectors community of Holton-cum-Beckering. Back in 2014, in tandem with the Broadbent Theatre, we had grants turned down from both the Arts Council and the HLF and just as the project looked as though it had run out of steam we were contacted by somebody who had been part of the Broadbent Theatre who wanted to take the project forward.

Things soon became very exciting as Damon Albarn and then the National Theatre came on board. We became Associate Artists at the National and Rufus Norris was very interested in this being a large community based project that would tour the UK (and that Jim Broadbent, whose father was a key member of the community and who was instrumental in setting up the local theatre would be involved). We also really hoped it would initiate a national debate about what pacifism may mean today.

Three writers were approached – Lee Hall, Richard Bean and Owen Sheers – all of whom turned it down for various reasons. Our contact from the community decided to move ahead on their own with a small show which was understandable (although strategically problematic) which we helped with and, to their credit, the National Theatre team and Damon came down to Lincolnshire to see. It was a very moving occasion with many family members of the CO community being invited, and with Jim Broadbent hosting a Q&A at the end. It was clear that there was a real thirst from the audience to take this story to a national stage.

Unfortunately the National ultimately decided that they would be unable to move ahead with the project which was very disappointing for us and for Damon who had ‘so much music inside me about this!’ (his grandfather was a part of the community).

Over the last couple of years we’ve kept in discussion with Damon’s management and there was always a sense that things could still happen; but last month we decided that enough was enough and pulled the plug (which, to be honest, had been pulled when the National walked away).

Although this is obviously disappointing we have had some remarkable moments, not least interviewing a remarkable man called Donald Sutherland who was one of the community (and who, as a centenarian, was in the show that was made and which toured to a number of venues connected to the pacifist movement across the UK).

It’s also clear to us that Rufus Norris was genuinely excited about the idea of moving work outside of the building and of re-thinking what a ‘national’ theatre may mean; and was very generous with his time throughout.

Having been through this long and ultimately unsuccessful process, we can totally understand how disappointed so many theatre makers must be feeling, knowing that projects they may have worked years on are never going to see the light of day. Onwards and upwards!

Like everyone else in the world our schedule is being rethought as the situation unfolds. Our hearts go out to the organisers of ICAF who, like so many others, had to cancel something that they’d spent a huge amount of time and energy working on.  We were obviously very disappointed not to be sharing our work there but look forward to meeting up with some of those who were due to visit Rotterdam in the near future.

However it is the situation in India that is of the most concern. It’s great to see that our colleagues in Pune are doing what they can and we do hope the basti community that we worked with are managing to stay safe, even as many of them appear to have made the difficult journey back to their home villages because of the lock down. We were due to tour a new show as part of the MeHeLP project in Kerala at the end of next month but that, of course, must now be put on hold until this dreadful situation plays out.

In the meantime we are able to continue with some work; both developing ideas for a project with the Chinese community in Nottingham and working on the script for a podcast series for Mantle Arts N.W. Leicestershire Voices project which is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.  An archive of the recordings that we are working from can be found here.

Our best wishes go out to everyone at this really tough time.