Dramaturgy

From 2014-23 I was Project Dramaturg with the Crossing The Line partnership of 6 European theatre companies who make professional touring performance with learning disabled and autistic theatre makers: Mind The Gap (UK), Compagnie de l’Oiseau-Mouche (France), Moomsteatern (Sweden), Blue Teapot (Ireland), Theatr 21 (Poland) and Theater Babel (Netherlands), with support from 3 EU Creative Europe and Erasmus+ programme grants. You can read about some of this work as part of my chapter on Crossing The Line in Diversity, Inclusion and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy (Ed Philippa Kelly, Routledge, 2020).

Across 2021 and 2022 - as part of The Fence - I used a dramturgical approach to creative evaluation as part of the EU Erasmus+ funded CRE-Actors project; with Border Crossings, Teatro Dell’ Argine and Theatre du Soleil. 

Since November 2018 I have been working as dramaturg with playwright Yves Baigneres on Chair - his first stage play. Yves is a screenwriter and theatrical translator who has worked with, amongst others: Claude Berri, Trevor Nunn, John Boorman, John Madden, Alistair Reid, Joel Schumacher and Andrew Lloyd Weber. CHAIR was originally given a stage reading as part of Arcola’s PlayWROUGHT festival in February 2016, directed by Richard Speir. It was then reworked and given a subsequent reading directed by Giles Croft at The Clapham Omnibus in September 2019.

In 2019 I was Guest Dramaturg for Blue Teapot in Galway, working with playwright Charlene Kelly and Lead Dramaturg Eileen Gibbons on Charlene’s New Play Into The Dark Woods. In 2018-19 I also worked with writer Pauline Heath to support her development of Never Never Land, with Little Cog and the Arc in Stockton and with writer and director Vici Wreford-Sinnott on her new play Useless Fucker, also at the Arc in Stockton.

The Festival du Mort was a two-day Halloween 2018 Bazar Cafe production in La Charité- sur-Loire, which showcased excerpts from plays by a number of Fence writers in a walkabout evening of Halloween theatre. As well as directing, I worked with the playwrights on editing their script excerpts. Also in 2018, with support from Erasmus +, I worked with Event Production students at the Creative Industries Department of the Vilnius Gediminas University on the last 24 hours of preparation of their production.

As part of the Plays for Young People in Hong Kong in 2016 I curated 2 Swedish playwrights, 2 UK playwrights with myself and Edward Bromberg as dramaturgs, to Hong Kong for a translation workshop of new plays for young people, for AFTEC. This project has had 2 further iterations with myself as dramaturg and playwrights from Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Turkey and China in 2018 and Moldova, Malaysia, UK and China in 2021.

From 2013-2015 I convened the MA in Writing for Performance & Dramaturgy at Goldsmiths. In 2013 I also undertook a very full 4 days of dramaturgical work alongside playwright Peter Arnott with 35 Malaysian playwrights from across the country in Petalling Jaya, as part of a nationwide competition set up by the Ministry and delivered by Kakiseni, with the support of The British Council.