Happy Xmas everyone.

It’s been a troubling year in many ways and the idea of making theatre with and in communities, investigating stories, cultures, histories and tensions and finding creative ways to represent these has never seemed more pertinent.

We began the year bringing Dale and Deirdre’s bingo back to the First Art region (along with Matt Marks) and working as co-producers on an ambitous project in Loughborough – The Night of the Zeppelin – which took place over many venues across a weekend, building on the model of our But I Know This City! project.

Over the summer we produced Breathing Spaces – ten short films and a piece of promenade theatre for four of Nottingham’s most iconic parks in an AHRC funded project with the University of Nottingham. Since then we’ve been working on In Flux, which has settled on ‘a performance lecture for three voices and a setar’ as its performance model and which will premiere early next year.

And we’ve been making plans for projects which, as usual, may or may not happen. Right now we have applications in to develop a performance based on the two hundredth anniversary of the Pentrich Rebellion, a project about the Barbeque 67 Festival in Spalding (featuring Pink Floyd, Cream and Hendrix amongst others), and a return to the Right Up Our Street region with our bingo performance.

We’re very excited to be able to announce that the National Theatre are providing some seed funding as we explore a potential collaboration with them based on a conscientious objectors community in Lincolnshire, and we’ll have more details about this in the New Year.  We’ve also been asked to suggest possible projects for Bennerley Viaduct, the crescents of Aspley, and the Boots D10 building (again).

Our Raleigh website and app has had a little bit of fine tuning following its move to a different server, and our Songs of Defiance CD still sells well at the Framework Knitters Museum. So fingers crossed for 2017. At least we know that ICAF will be on – and we will be there.

Cheers!