transformation
Things I do to create change
These fit into four seemingly quite different categories:
being of service
transformation / activism / social change
leadership (including board membership and project management)
directing
Different as those categories may be, I find that the projects combine them often, so what you’ll read here is a chronological portfolio rather than things being grouped by type.
Edinburgh Open Workshop (EOW)
I am a proud Board Member of EOW, which is an innovative, creative co-working space, offering membership based, Pay-As-You-Go access to workshop facilities, machinery, power tools, hand tools, workbenches, fabrication space, textile bays and long-term resident maker space, studios, and office space.
A not-for-profit social enterprise that is expanding, they are Edinburgh’s only open-access workshop, supporting a community of over 300 hobbyist and professional makers, designers, and creatives. EOW are a unique business, one of a kind in Edinburgh.
People Powered
People Powered was a collective of freelancers from across the entertainment and live event industries who came together to help the NHS and other frontline services after our diaries emptied because of the coronavirus. It began in March 2020 when I wrote a letter to the NHS on behalf of our industries, offering our help. Jono Kenyon and I co-founded the organisation and it grew quickly as the requests from the NHS and other frontline services started to come in.
Our members from across the UK used their skills and ingenuity honed building festival infrastructure and producing live shows to provide communications tools, outdoor facilities and wellbeing spaces for staff. Our aim was to lighten the load so that the frontline can focus on flattening the curve.
More than 1000 freelancers signed up to People Powered. Our biggest projects were building a new temporary wing on a hospital in Buckinghamshire, and providing walkie-talkie radios to ITUs across the UK.
As the UK came out of the first Covid wave we completed the main People Powered project came to a natural close: the requests coming in were both smaller and less regular, and the majority of freelancers needed to focus on their own careers as our industries continued to be in a precarious state. People Powered has now completed, but a small team remains available to be of service if called upon.
These Hills Are Ours
These Hills Are Ours was my first show as a director! It came along at the invitation of Daniel Bye: I’ve worked with him several times as a lighting designer on his solo shows as well as shows he has directed and I was properly overjoyed to be asked to direct this project.
The show is a collaboration, in word and in song, between Dan and Boff Whalley. For me, it’s about long distant running, escaping from technology to wild places and about our right to travel this island we live on.
We were a month or so from opening when lockdown happened in March 2020 and we’ve since made the show from our three respective homes in different parts of the UK.
We opened in Devon for outdoor performances in May 2021, and since then has been touring indoors, with a break for Boff to have surgery and for Dan to attempt the Bob Graham Round. I’ll link here to Dan’s page on the show, which has confirmed dates.
ALD Lumiere Scheme
For five years, I was the project manager for the ALD Lumiere Scheme for emerging lighting designers. With the events of 2020, we reformatted the scheme to reach as many emerging lighting designers as possible. Between the enlarged Lumiere 20:20 Scheme and the bespoke Team Lumiere project, we supported 60 of them. It was a Very Good Thing.
The ALD has now become the ALPD (expanding from being the Association of Lighting Designers, to the Association for Lighting Production and Design) and this is a good thing for diversity, inclusion and unity within the production lighting field. You can find out what they are up to these days, here.
I was an Executive and Board member of the ALD for eight years.
Crew for Calais
Crew for Calais is what happens when the theatre and creative industries come together to help refugees. The project started in December 2015 when I visited the Calais Refugee camp with Daniel Bye and I knew there was something our industry could do to help. Crew for Calais began meeting the needs of refugees by mobilising individuals to create winter homes for those living in tents. We then went on to supply volunteers to work across the Calais Camp (and sometimes in Dunkirk) with some taking key roles on long term projects including aid distribution and the wood yard.
After the 2016 clearances and ultimate demolition of the camp, the most pressing needs of the refugees changed, and Crew for Calais maintained a semi-permanent presence in Calais, working partnership with L'Auberge de Migrants and Help Refugees UK. In partnership with the Arcola Theatre, we produced a week long festival to raise awareness and funds, and partnered with VAULT festival to raise money and awareness by commissioning a three week programme of work that showed a different perspective on the refugee ‘crisis’. Crew for Calais was a charitable fund under the auspices of Prism the Gift Fund, UK charity no. 1099682.
Love Letters to the Home Office
This project used art, words and theatre to raise awareness of the means-tested tiering of Human Rights that is currently in place in the UK for international families.
A book of love stories co-authored by people affected by the 2012 Family Migration Rules was published in 2014, and a play of the same name written by Katharine was performed in London and Edinburgh in 2015, and in Leeds in 2016.
