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In the meantime, here’s the September issue.
Dear friends,
Welcome to our September newsletter.
Firstly, we’d like to share our next spotlight on a member of the fantastic Dysbiosis team. This month we’re featuring Daedalus’s Assistant Producer/Director Tasnim Siddiqa Amin, a queer Bangladeshi-British visual artist, theatremaker and writer from East London. In her spotlight, Tasnim talks about the project and its relationship to her creative journey.
“I found it interesting how all of us with our different backgrounds came back to mythology, folklore or fantasy to creatively express that huge word “nature”. In an age of science where spirituality has largely been confined to organised religions it is interesting to me that when we think of nature we oppose it with science still which is a binary way of thinking, and so associate the unexplained and intangible with nature.”
There’ll be a reading of a new script by Tasnim at this year’s A Season of Bangla Drama. We’ll be sharing details of that nearer the time.
Speaking of A Season of Bangla Drama, have you saved the date for East yet? We’ll be sharing stories and songs at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green at 5pm on 19th November. Details will be announced soon, so watch this space!
A Season of Bangla Drama is a flagship event for the performing arts in our corner of the world, so we’re excited to have been selected. Have a look here if you want to see what else is in store.
As Paul, our artistic director, has been busy promoting greener practices in the theatre design sector, we thought we should tell you about our commitments in this area. We adopted a sustainability policy many years ago. More recently, however, we signed up to Culture Declares and Ecostage.
Culture Declares describes itself as ‘a growing movement of people in arts and culture declaring a climate and ecological emergency‘. Daedalus has always been committed to the idea that theatre can help us better understand our world, hence our strapline: ‘theatre can go where politics and the media cannot.’ By adding our voice to the declaration, we commit to speaking truth to power and taking action. It is also a public statement that we believe the arts have a role in building a greener and fairer future.
Ecostage is a community, a website and a framework for ‘placing ecological thinking at the heart of creative practice’. (Full disclosure: Paul is one of its directors). We’ve pledged to work by its seven interconnecting principles. We’ll be exploring green theatre practices alongside environmental justice as part of our Dysbiosis project. One thing that makes Ecostage stand out is that its principles show how being eco-minded is not just about environmental sustainability. Wellbeing and creativity also have an essential role to play.
Finally, we rely on donations. We receive no core funding and do a lot of unpaid work to keep things going and raise money between projects. Even a small donation makes a difference, and regular small donations would give us the security we don’t currently have. Please consider making a one-off or a monthly donation.
Kind regards,
Paul and the team
