Coming up this year:
- New Dysbiosis workshop programme – through 2025
- Dysbiosis (pilot) and exhibition – 96 Festival, Omnibus Theatre, 25th June 2025
- Dysbiosis performances and exhibition – Queens Theatre Hornchurch, September 2025
Details following soon.
What is Dysbiosis?
Dysbiosis is an exciting and experimental project that blends storytelling, visual theatre, and community collaboration to explore the relationship between the Global North and the more-than-human world. Guided by a lens of queer ecology, the project challenges traditional Western worldviews as well as some of the binary and heteronormative assumptions in mainstream environmental movements.
Dysbiosis began in 2022 and, since then, we have delivered two research and development (R&D) phases with Queens Theatre Hornchurch, a creative nature workshop programme in collaboration with Havering Changing, and a workshop at Mile End Eco Pavilion as part of Season of Bangla Drama.
Dysbiosis in more detail
Drawing on the storytelling methods of our East Storytelling Project, along with the creative direction of Paul (visual theatre and ecoscenography) and Tasnim (art and theatre), the project brings together diverse voices and perspectives, both from the Dysbiosis Collective – the project’s core team of professional creatives – and our wider catchment of young people and adults from global majority, workinging class and LGBTQ+ communities. Over the course of the research and development phase, we explored the role of folk stories and myths in shaping our connection to nature, cultural ideas about what counts as natural, and how the narratives of imperialism and capitalism shape our human-environment relationships.
Our process involved experimenting with various artistic mediums, ranging from lichen-inspired music and poetry-driven movement to microscopic video and post-colonial analysis. By juxtaposing different forms of expression, we created a wealth of material that will shape the future of the project.
At the heart of Dysbiosis is the question of how to bring together multiple voices to create a truly co-created set of performances, digital works, physical artworks and writing, which can then be combined, recombined and added to in order to create a series of site-responsive events for different locations. A key part of developing the project engages the wider Havering community, fostering a two-way exchange of ideas and creativity that will help shape the project. We will repeat that pattern with other communities as we visit other venues, using participation to shape new, site-responsive versions of the work.
Dysbiosis is a journey of discovery—one that reflects Daedalus’s mission to experiment with new methods and approaches to performance-making.
The core team
Fran Olivares (creative practitioner)
Kathryn Webb (creative practitioner)
Maeve O’Neill (associate producer)
Nuke Lagranje (creative practitioner)
Paul Burgess (director-designer)
Shakira Malkani (creative practitioner)
Tasnim Siddiqa Amin (assistant director and producer)
Yael Elisheva (creative practitioner)
Zia Álmos Joshua (creative practitioner)
Links and further info
R&D Part 1
R&D Part 2
- A summary of R&D Part 2 (Dec 2023)
- A glimpse of the sharing (YouTube) from a reel by Nabeela Zaman
- Reflections on the sharing by Olivia Catchpole
CREATIVE NATURE WORKSHOPS
Havering
- Announcing a new partnership with Havering Changing
- Creative Nature Exhibition at the Royals, Rainham
- Cultural Dysbiosis: an essay by Ruth Kettle Frisby
- The call for participants
Tower Hamlets
- Announcement of workshop for A Season of Bangla Drama
- Booking info for the Dysbiosis Creative Nature workshop at A Season of Bangla Drama 2024
Thanks to all our partners and funders so far: Arts Council England, Havering Changing, Queens Theatre Hornchurch, Tower Hamlets Council and Rua Arts.
