The Company

THE FINAL TRUMPET

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.” 

Daedalus Signs up to the Theatre Green Book

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.

Daedalus Theatre announce new partnership with Havering Changing

Date: 16 January 2024

Daedalus Theatre Company has been awarded Creative Community Support by Rainham Change Makers, the local Havering Changing steering group in Rainham, to deliver creative nature workshops in Rainham and Wennington this Spring 2024.

The creative nature workshops are for local adults in Rainham and Wennington with an interest in nature and a curiosity for visual arts. Together, we will work on a collective response to probing questions about nature and local green spaces that will be showcased as a mobile installation. The project will also experiment with sustainable materials and look at ecological ways of thinking. Work with the group, along with the Queens Theatre Hornchurch young company programme, will feed into our next iteration of the DYSBIOSIS project. 

The new work-in-progress project DYSBIOSIS began with an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in April 2023. Supported by Arts Council England, we delivered an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in Autumn with a group of exciting creative practitioners such as Zia Álmos Joshua and Havering local Kathryn Webb. The project seeks to explore our relationship with nature in the global north through a queer lens. 

Daedalus October Newsletter

Dear friends,

Welcome to our October newsletter.

Ten Years East – tickets now on sale!

Join us for a relaxed evening of compelling stories and unforgettable songs from across the diverse cultures of East London.

Ten Years East is a celebration of love as a language that crosses borders and breaks boundaries, that remembers lost homelands and dreams of new frontiers. After a decade of performances, workshops and gatherings, the East storytelling project now presents an exciting lineup of musicians and storytellers in this family-friendly event.

With material spanning the globe to reflect the rich cultures of our East End, from English folklore to Bengali tales and Jewish songs, you are warmly welcomed to celebrate Ten Years East.

September Newsletter

Don’t miss out! To receive our newsletters by email, please sign up here:

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.”

In case you missed it, our latest newsletter…

Welcome to this quick roundup of news from Daedalus Theatre Company.

If you’ve been stuck in London these past few weeks, there’s not been much of a summer. But with September around the corner, we’ve been busy brewing some exciting projects and plans.

Ten Years East at A Season of Bangla Drama – save the date!

We’re really thrilled to announce that East Storytelling Project has been selected for this year’s A Season of Bangla Drama, with an evening of stories and songs from across the diverse cultures of East London. In line with the festival’s theme for 2023, we’ll be exploring love in its many forms. It’s also ten years since we started East, so we have a line-up of tellers and singers from across the decade. We’ll also be performing at the venue where it all began: Rich Mix in Bethnal Green.

Here’s a summary of the festival programme and for now, please save the date! Our show, Ten Years East, is on the evening of 19th November.

Artist Spotlight: Kathryn Webb

Can you help us?

Hi everyone,

We’ve created street theatre with local teenagers. We’ve taken our queered, musical version of English radical history to venues ranging from Latitude Festival to Tower Hamlets. We’ve created a performance with primary school kids to share their ideas for a better world. We’ve been part of Eid celebrations, the Tower Hamlets Boishaki Mela and A Season of Bangla Drama. We’ve worked with students at our local uni, Queen Mary. Our storytelling project East has brought together people from across the amazing diversity of East End heritages, including Bengali, Jewish, Somali and Vietnamese, to learn stories and songs from each other. We’ve created opportunities for deaf and hearing storytellers to collaborate and share skills. We’ve given refugees a voice, and we’ve made safe creative spaces for queer artists. We’ve given hundreds of people from all walks of life a chance to develop their creativity, and thousands of people a chance to watch, listen and participate in arts projects.

Welcome to Daedalus!

  • Saturday 05 August 2017, LBTH - Sef Townsend and Alia Alzougbi of East at Great Day Out at Victoria Park - Photo, Rehan Jamil

Could you be a Trustee?

Daedalus Theatre Company is on the lookout for new trustees. We need people who believe in the value of the performing arts to celebrate diversity, connect communities, foster understanding and explore big ideas. Might this be you?

The trustees’ role is to provide oversight and advice to the artistic director and ensure the company meets its legal requirements, such as reporting to the Charity Commission. The core part of the role is attending four meetings a year, currently via Zoom, and checking the annual report. There’s occasionally some additional paperwork, and some trustees also choose to provide advice on their areas of expertise outside of formal meetings. The role is voluntary.