Daedalus Theatre Company – Theatre can go where politics and the media cannot

Welcome to Daedalus!

By DaedalusAdmin on Sunday, February 26, 2023

London, United Kingdom – Friday 05 November 2021, LBTH, FITF – Daedalus Theatre Company, Gerrard Winstanley’s Mobile Incitement Unit.
East at Rich Mix – Photo: Simon Daw
Mobile Incitement at the Freedom and Independence Festival
A Place at the Table: Jennifer Muteteli and Anna-Maria Nabriye
Selfish at The Arches, Glasgow: Graeme Mackay, Susan Worsfold and Onur Orkut
APATT at AIUK – Photo: Harriet Stewart
Mobile Incitement at Brixton City Festival
East at Boi-Lit 16 – photo by Shoayeeb Chamak for BSK
The Black Smock Band – part of the Silk River project
Mobile Incitement at Brixton City Festival
Saturday 05 August 2017, LBTH – Sef Townsend and Alia Alzougbi of East at Great Day Out at Victoria Park – Photo, Rehan Jamil
Mobile Incitement at Latitude Festival – Photos: Andy Bannister/Payam Torabi
East 3 at the Boishaki Mela
Jennifer Muteteli and Anna-Maria Nabriye in A Place at the Table, CPT
Woodland Walk pilot – Photo: Tan Nidhivir
Mobile Incitement at Brixton City Festival
East at Boi-Lit 16 – photo by Shoayeeb Chamak for BSK
Mobile Incitement at Ovalhouse
East at Boi-Lit 16 – photo by Shoayeeb Chamak for BSK
East at Boi-Lit 16 – photo by Shoayeeb Chamak for BSK
An East Storytelling holiday workshop
Mobile Incitement at the Freedom and Independence Festival
Woodland Walk pilot – Photo: Tan Nidhivir
East Storytelling at The Big Day Out, Victoria Park
Mobile Incitement at Latitude Festival – Photos: Andy Bannister/Payam Torabi
Onur Orkut in Selfish, The Arches, Glasgow
East at Rich Mix – Photo: Simon Daw
An East Storytelling holiday workshop
Graeme Mackay in Selfish, the Arches, Glasgow
Grace Nyandoro and Seboelo Majozi
Mobile Incitement at Latitude Festival – Photos: Andy Bannister/Payam Torabi
APATT at AIUK – Photo: Harriet Stewart
East at Rich Mix – Photo: Simon Daw
Susan Worsfold in A Place at the Table, CPT
Sef, Shamim and Paul at Boishakhi Mela
London, United Kingdom – Friday 05 November 2021, LBTH, FITF – Daedalus Theatre Company, Gerrard Winstanley’s Mobile Incitement Unit.
Susan Worsfold in Selfish
Some of the East Storytelling community
A Place at the Table at Amnesty International
Some of the East Storytelling community
Selfish at CPT – the set

Dysbiosis Creative Nature Workshop

By DaedalusAdmin on Monday, October 21, 2024

Come along to a relaxed, creative workshop exploring our relationship with nature, part of A Season of Bangla Drama 2024. The theme for this year’s festival is hope. Nature has long been a source of endless inspiration for creativity. It inspires a lot of emotions and brings hope to many of us; something we look forward to exploring in this iteration of DYSBIOSIS.

Discover unknown pockets of nature within Tower Hamlets’ cityscape. This can unlock stories old and new about our multifaceted relationship with nature. Hosted at Mile End Park’s Ecology Pavilion, this workshop offers a chance to explore your creativity. Interdisciplinary artists Paul Burgess and Tasnim Siddiqa Amin will guide the session. There will also be a discussion around how local issues such as air pollution connect with global challenges like climate change. You’ll create a personal artistic response and collaborate on a group piece. A light lunch is included.

Join us to be guided through a creative process that explores your own responses to the themes. No experience necessary!

We are a cross-disciplinary, queer-led theatre company that explores big ideas. We manage intergenerational, cross-cultural projects and activities in Tower Hamlets and beyond. This workshop is part of the larger Dysbiosis project exploring our social and personal relationships with nature and has mainly been developed with the support of Queens Theatre Hornchurch and the Havering Changing.

The Company

THE FINAL TRUMPET

By DaedalusAdmin on Sunday, October 20, 2024

Daedalus Assistant Director and Producer Tasnim Siddiqa Amin is joining with theatre-maker Yael Elisheva to present her new play, The Final Trumpet, at this year’s A Season of Bangla Drama. Yael, who will be directing, is also part of the team creating our Dysbiosis project, and it’s always extremely rewarding to see creative relationships from our own work blossoming in other projects by other companies.

The Final Trumpet is a story about a mother and daughter who are homeless as a result of flooding. They join millions of other present-day Bengalis in a search for refuge in their own country. From village to village, they hear stories which come from folklore and Islamic legends. These revolve around the reasons for so much disturbance in the natural world. Follow them on their journey in one woman’s mission to find refuge. Her inquisitive ten-year-old daughter is intent on finding out why this has happened. The unfortunate circumstances highlighted in these folk tales also allude to “global warming.”

Artist Spotlight Major Projects

Artist Spotlight: Shakira Stellar

By DaedalusAdmin on Tuesday, October 8, 2024

For our seventh DYSBIOSIS artist spotlight we turn to the exciting, socially engaged work of multidisciplinary musician, composer, theatremaker and poet Shakira Stellar. In the first DYSBIOSIS R&D, Shakira crafted an ambient soundscape using lichen as a musical score, imitating its structures and textures using a synthesiser. During the second R&D, Shakira delved deeper into the symbiosis between the drummer and the earth, treating music as a dialogue of vibrations and frequencies. Through this exploration, Shakira sought to subvert the ancient notion of the “Great Chain of Being,” reimagining rocks and minerals not as the lowest, but as vital, resonant voices in the cosmic symphony.

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice

I’m a multidisciplinary artist, primarily working as a drummer and composer, but I’m also a poet and theatremaker. I fuse these mediums and approaches all the time and love doing so. I follow what sparks my interest and love to try new things so my practice is always developing and growing, which leads me to meet and work with new people, which is so wonderful. I love to learn new things, I’m so happy when I am, so who knows where my artistry will go!

How does your heritage influence the way you view/value nature?

The Company

Daedalus Signs up to the Theatre Green Book

By DaedalusAdmin on Thursday, September 19, 2024

In recent years, there has been a significant push for environmental responsibility in the UK’s theatre sector. A particular game-changer was the launch of the Theatre Green Book, a simple and easy-to-use framework based on maximising reuse backed up by detailed guidance and a range of tools.

Although we are not a company that uses a massive amount of resources, we have signed up. This is partly because we want to uphold good practice and improve our environmental impact. It’s also because thinking ecologically is core to our artistic project. We make our work in a social and environmental context and take responsibility for our role within that.

A while back, we signed up to Ecostage, which provides a great framework for this more holistic approach. Signing up to the Theatre Green Book provides us with a more specifically quantitative, resources-orientated way of measuring the impact of our projects.

There’s another connection too. Our artistic director is the coordinator of the Society of British Theatre Designers’s working group on sustainability and a co-director of Ecostage. As such, he has been involved with the Theatre Green Book in various ways, not least in compiling feedback from the UK theatre design community to create a report that formed part of its initial research phase.

We’re excited to see where this leads us in our journey towards an ecologically engaged practice, starting with our Dysbiosis project, which is already exploring this approach.

Associate Artists Events

Mud Stories at the Rum Factory

By DaedalusAdmin on Friday, August 16, 2024

We’ll be at The Old Rum Factory Festival, at Bow Arts’s Wapping studios, this Saturday, 17th August, with Mud Stories – a performance of stories and music from banks of the Thames.

Come down to the River Thames at low tide and join the mudlarks’ hunt for some very valuable objects that will tell us something unique about London’s history. But there is so much here, how do we know where to look? All we can see are mud, shells, stones, and rubbish! Maybe we can ask someone for help? Who’s this?

Here to guide us are East lead artists Shamim Azad and Sef Townsend, Daedalus assistant producer/director Tasnim Siddiqa Amin and Daedalus director/musician Paul Burgess.

Suitable for all ages but recommended ages 8+, it can be seen at 2pm and 4pm. And it’s free!

The Old Rum Factory Festival is centred on open studios, so you can see the work of the many incredible artists who are based there. But there’s lots else to see as well, including a whole programme of workshops. You can get all the details here.

We’ll leave you with a snap from rehearsals. Hope to see you there!

Events Participation

Dysbiosis: Creative Nature Exhibition

By DaedalusAdmin on Sunday, June 30, 2024

“Such beautiful conversations, and lasting connections made” – Exhibition Launch Attendee

Last month we launched the DYSBIOSIS: CREATIVE NATURE EXHIBITION in Rainham. Over four workshops, Rainham and Wennington locals of all ages came together to observe the nature around us and express their thoughts creatively and together. A selection of these artworks are now available to view as you ascend the stairs at the Royals Youth Centre.

Here is an extract of a poem written by Wennington resident and Change Maker Laurence:

Events Participation

Call Out for East Music 2

By DaedalusAdmin on Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Musicians! You’re invited to East Music: Song and Tune Exchange Session at Poplar Union on Saturday 6 July

Reserve your free space here

After an incredible pilot session, we are thrilled to be back at Poplar Union for a Summer Edition this July.

Bring your instruments and voices along with songs or tunes from across the world to play, sing and share. There may be an opportunity to play to a live audience later in the evening.

This is a free, friendly and inclusive session for players of all levels of experience. Global Majority* and LGBTQ+ music makers are particularly welcome. The session will be led by one of our East musicians.

Date: Saturday 6th July 2024

Time: 4-6.30PM

Duration: 2.5 hours including a 30 minute break

Location: Poplar Union

Ages: 18+

Guest blog Major Projects Participation

Cultural Dysbiosis: A Personal Essay by Ruth Kettle-Frisby

By DaedalusAdmin on Thursday, March 28, 2024

Above photo: Ruth, far left, looking out at the view from Wennington Church.

We invited Havering local, environmental activist and writer Ruth Kettle-Frisby to write a guest blog article on DYSBIOSIS after attending some of our DYSBIOSIS Creative Nature Workshops in Havering this month.

What is nature to me?

When I first saw the term Dysbiosis – the title of the creative workshops here in Havering by Daedalus Theatre Company – my mind began to juxtapose discordant thoughts that seemed nevertheless to harmonise. Funnily enough, it is this very paradox that encapsulates nature.

Nature functions to such a finely tuned degree that the earth spins on its axis around the precise gravitational force to sustain life; and this mechanical harmony extends to our localised experiences here on earth, which can be beautiful to behold.

There are few things I enjoy more than an enchanted stroll around Warley Place when it’s sprinkled with clumps of dewy snowdrops glistening in the morning sun, sporadically dissected by ancient trees, some even thriving in supine slumber after great storms…or treating fluffy ducklings, flapping feral pigeons, and tame grey squirrels to veritable feasts at Langtons Gardens on a crisp Spring afternoon: scenes of comical unrest annually reverberate from the resident cob, angrily chasing persistent Canada geese from the lake; loss and sadness rippling in the still air as it becomes apparent on returning children’s fingers, that numbers no longer add up, and he’s attacked some of his own cygnets.

Nature continues to inspire artists, photographers and musicians; it provides us with sustenance, shelter, oxygen and medicine; it grinds our remains deep into its geology, and it contains coded messages of hope, regeneration and resilience, much like the Gingko trees that survived after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nature also has the ability to overwhelm with its might, brutality and caprice; blithely indifferent to some of our deepest instincts and desires.

Artist Spotlight

Artist Spotlight: Paul Burgess

By DaedalusAdmin on Thursday, March 28, 2024

This month’s spotlight is on DYSBIOSIS designer-director and director of Daedalus Theatre Company Paul Burgess, who conceived the project back in 2020 before recruiting a team of creative practitioners last year to delve deeper into social constructions of Nature using a queer and interdisciplinary lens.

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

I’m a set and costume designer by training and self-taught in video and interactive digital, which I use in both performance and visual art contexts. I teach on the side, mainly English as a second language, at my partner’s tutorial school, Angkriz, though I’ve also taught on theatre and theatre design courses at various universities. Both feed my creative practice by challenging me in different ways. I also have various voluntary roles, mainly in the area of sustainability. These also feed into my creative work, and include being the coordinator of the Society of British Theatre Designers’s working group on sustainability and a co-director of Ecostage. I’m also on the Environmental Responsibility Subcommittee at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch, where we’re working on DYSBIOSIS. For fun, I play the violin, most often with The Black Smock Band, which connects with the music and storytelling we do as part of our EAST project. It all adds up to one interconnected creative practice.

What does ‘dysbiosis’ mean to you?

I suggested this as a working title for the project, and it seems to have stuck, so I suppose I need to explain myself!

It came initially from I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong. Having defined dysbiosis as ‘breakdowns in communication between different species – host and symbiont – that live together, ‘ Yong goes on to say:

Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, the loss of wild species, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. On coral reefs or in human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years.

I had already been thinking about the way we use Nature to talk about society, often in ways that are divorced from the reality of the natural world, such as the notion of the body politic, or economic competitiveness being described as Darwinian, or the absurd claim that LGBTQ+ people are unnatural. But what if the metaphorical body politic is suffering from metaphorical dysbiosis?

Artist Spotlight Major Projects

Artist Spotlight: Fran Olivares

By DaedalusAdmin on Thursday, February 22, 2024

Our latest Dysbiosis team spotlight is on Chilean performer, director, translator, tutor and theatremaker Fran Olivares. When Fran isn’t busy bringing thought-provoking theatre to life, she is also a proud mother to a 2-year-old who keeps her on her toes and gives her a whole new appreciation for the power of imagination and play!

Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

I’m Fran, a theatre person from Chile, now based in SE London. My work spans directing, performing, translating, writing, and facilitating, all focused on themes around identity, marginality, and the female experience. Dysbiosis addresses the urgent and dreadful impacts of global warming and neo-capitalist exploitation. Personally, these issues are not abstract for me; they’re part of the reality currently affecting South America, and as a mother, the future of our planet weighs heavily on my mind.

I’m driven by the belief that making even a small difference in our corners of the world can lead to a brighter future. So, for me, my work is more than just putting on a show for entertainment; it’s also about using my body/voice as a tool for communication, a way to build community, and a platform to shine a light on the issues that matter.

What does ‘dysbiosis’ mean to you?

To me, ‘dysbiosis’ is about imbalance, and not just in nature, but in how we interact within our communities. It’s as if everything from the ecosystems to our social structures have fallen out of harmony because of the way we treat each other and our planet.