End of year round up
And before anyone knew what had happened, December had arrived. The brick wall at the bottom of the hill. The cliff edge at the end of the cavalry charge. The full stop halfway through a sentence. Outside it the air is cold and brittle and on the internet everyone is making lists. Summing up the year in reverse order.
We also wanted to take this moment to reflect. To try and list some of the things we’ve done this year. A kind of seasonal gathering together of our various projects like awkward holiday relatives, unexpectedly re-united one last time before the year is over and we all move on to new things.
NEWS NEWS NEWS
We began the year in Bedford, working with Bedford Creative Arts and Priory Primary school to create the first new version of our show News News News for over two years. The project involves a group of children becoming local TV news reporters – spending three weeks investigating stories, conducting interviews and then hosting their own TV news broadcast onstage in front of a live audience. In Bedford they interrogated the Mayor about noise pollution in the town centre, interviewed the police about antisocial behaviour and spoke to two wild swimmers about all the things you can find in the river Ouse – from snakes and otters to love letters and unexploded bombs.
After two years of remote projects and online workshops, it was a delirious thrill to see everyone arriving at the theatre, to feel the prickle of anticipation, to remember how laughter fills a room, and to see the children’s incredulous joy at actually making it all happen.
We were lucky enough to get to do three versions of News News News this year. After Bedford, we went to Contact Theatre in Manchester where the children interviewed MP Lucy Powell, shadow secretary of state for culture, as well as meeting one of the rarest tree frogs in the world. Then, in October we travelled to Tauranga in Aotearoa New Zealand to present the long-delayed international premiere of the show in the beautiful Baycourt Theatre for Tauranga Arts Festival, in front of an audience of several hundred people.
Hidden in the wings we watched our young performers absolutely tear the roof of the building and then afterwards we stood outside chatting whilst children rolled down the little green hill in front of the theatre and the sky glowed orange and pink behind us.
You can watch the recorded livestreams from all three of the versions of News News News we made this year on our YouTube channel.
LOOKOUT
The other big project we were working on this year was a return to the UK for our earlier piece Lookout, in which we ask children to imagine new futures for their home town. Since 2016 we’ve presented versions of this project everywhere from Beijing to Vancouver, not mention making a radio version in Japan at the end of last year, learning much in the process about how it can be used to initiate interesting conversations about community, responsibility, hope and despair.
This year we started by creating a new version of Lookout on the top floor of a windswept multistorey carpark in Crawley, after which the children’s visions of the future were transformed into a permanent mural on the wall of the town library, designed by the incredible Karl Singporewala. Then we travelled to St Helens to take up residence on the top floor of the city centre’s tallest building, from where the children told us stories about five-decker buses, juice pubs and friend-detecting robots to cure the town of its loneliness.
In the Summer we went to Newcastle-Under-Lyme and Hackney, performing the show first on a balcony at Keele University and then on an old tower block in the centre of Hackney, overlooking skeletons of old gasworks and the steel and glass spectacle of the city of London in the distance.
Finally, in September, just as Autumn was arriving, we went to Dublin to create a version of the show for Dublin Fringe and the Ark, where we had perhaps the most incredible view of almost any venue where we’ve ever performed the show, the whole city arranged far below us like some vast living circuit board.
Now, for the first time since 2017 we have no future dates in the diary for Lookout. Which is not to say it won’t return again. We would love it to. It is a project we never get bored of remaking.
OTHER PROJECTS
In May we were thrilled to get to create the second version of our newest project The Book of Your Town - a kind of brutally honest rough guide to a city created by up to 250 local children, full of made-up facts, real and imagined monuments and tiny stories from the lives of the children we work with.
This version of the project was made for Brighton Festival and caravan with the incredible support of producers Louise Blackwell and Charlotte Vivian who enabled us to work with 270 children from four schools across the city to create the guidebook and then present it themselves to a room full of adults at two live book launch events as part of the festival. There was no purer joy this year for us than watching a queue of some hundred international festival delegates queuing up politely at the signing table to have their copies of The Book of Brighton & Hove signed by our group of 10-year-old editors.
If you want to read the book you can do so here.
Finally, in Stockton we worked with ARC and children from Billingham South primary school to create a short film – In The Year 2072 - a kind of fictional documentary set in the future, in which a group of elderly residents of the town reflect back on how life has changed since they were little. You can watch the film here.
SOME OTHER BRIEF JOYS FROM AN UNRELENTING YEAR
Getting to finally meet in person the wonderful Rosabel Tan, our collaborator in Aotearoa on News News News and hopefully on many more projects to come. We have outlandish, audacious plans to make some new projects together, at least some of which we hope will start to come to fruition next year.
Seeing Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please at Edinburgh International Film Festival – a profoundly extra film in the best possible way. An unreal neon daydream, as sexy and wonderful and absurd as cinema itself.
Our ongoing collaboration with Heart of Glass in St Helens, and with the supremely excellent Kate Houlton in particular, who continue to be the most supportive and ambitious collaborators we could ever hope for.
Seeing Tanz at Battersea Arts Centre and then seeing the reaction to Tanz everywhere online. The thrill of seeing weird experimental work on an outrageous scale and feeling briefly more connected to the rest of the continent again.
Sausage the dog, our most high-maintenance collaborator, a nightmare dressed as a daydream, without whom nothing would be possible.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us this year in whatever way. We look forward to seeing you again next year.
(Images from: Lookout in Crawley, News News News in Manchester, Lookout in Crawley (again), Rhi Moxon’s beautiful illustration from The Book of Brighton & Hove, In Year 2072 in Stockon and Sausage the dog taking a break in the park. All images by us.)
