Artist and Black Smock Band member Andy Bannister, designed our Mobile Incitement Unit. It’s on display this weekend as part of open studios at Acme, Childers Street, where Andy has a studio. The studios are in an old propeller foundry, and there around about 130 of them. Definitely worth a visit!
More info on Andy’s website.
Here’s Andy with the project’s director Paul Burgess. Photo by Martin MacFadyen.
Thanks to all of you who came to see the Mobile Incitement Unit! If you didn’t get a chance to give us any feedback after the show, please get in touch to let us know your thoughts. You can use the very quick survey form below or just send us a message here or via social media. The project hastag is #mobileincitement.
Here’s our (very short) Mobile Incitement Unit Feedback Survey.
Your opinions are hugely important to us because, after all, it’s you we’re making our work for.
As you must already know by now, we’ve brought together South London’s premier gay socialist folk band (probably) The Black Smock Band and C17th rebel Mr Gerrard Winstanley to save England’s radical history from oblivion.
And now we’re into the final week of production, making our final tweaks and getting ready to share our work with you.
The Mobile Incitement Unit will be taking over Ovalhouse Car Park on Thurs 21 with performances at 6:30pm and 8:30pm and Festivals Hub, Atlantic Road in Brixton on Friday 22 with performances at 6:30pm and 8:30pm. You can also visit Mobile Incitement Unit to make a placard, write song lyrics and share your stories of protest from 3pm on Fri 22 at the Festivals Hub.
Free Entry. No booking required.
Lots more info here on the Ovalhouse website.
And here’s the Facebook event page for Thu 21 and for Fri 22.
As Kinetika’s incredible Silk River project moves on to Greenwich, here’s a blog about yesterday’s events, for which we advised on music and facilitated the involvement of The Black Smock Band. The band supported young people from A Team Arts in their street performances as the Silk River walk passed through Tower Hamlets.
Here’s a photo of the band in action (credit Payam Torabi).
We’re excited to be part of Kinetica’s Silk River Project, linking the Thames with the Hooghly River in India in an international celebration of the silk trade. We’ll working with our regular collaborators The Black Smock Band to support young people from Tower Hamlets’ A Team Arts with street performances as the project passes through the borough tomorrow.
More info below…
With politicians across the world trying to twist history to serve their own ends, we, the people, need to tell our own stories. That’s why Daedalus Theatre Company and The Black Smock Band are working with Ovalhouse Theatre, students at Queen Mary, University of London and local residents wherever we vist, to develop an exciting new project: Gerrard Winstanley’s True and Righteous Mobile Incitement Unit.
Part gig, part theatre, part political meeting, part public participation project, it will tour the country with songs and stories of dissent and rebellion… and an invitation to speak up and get involved. There’ll also be a website where we and the public can share ideas, texts and songs, and discuss England’s radical past, present and future.
Developed over the last few years under the working title of The Radical History Project, the piece centres on the Mobile Incitement Unit, a kind of portable, interactive installation, containing an archive, props and costumes, materials for making placards and writing protest songs, a miniature field for enacting land rights issues, tea-making facilities and much more besides. But we need to crowd-fund £2,000 to build it.
Please consider making a donation. Everything helps, however small! And, unless you want to be anonymous, you’ll be credited as a funder (or a sponsor for amounts over £250).
Go on, click the button below. You know you want to.
Thank you!
We had such a great week of R&D (radicalism & dissent), working on Gerrard Winstanley’s True and Righteous Mobile Incitement Unit with The Black Smock Band and Gerrard himself, who kindly joined us from the C17th.
A massive thank you to Ovalhouse. And thanks to the team: Alex Swift, Andy Bannister, Dan Cox, Maeve O’Neill, Matt Beattie, Paul Burgess, Rhiannon Kelly and Sarah Jeanpierre.
Things are taking shape. Lots more to come…
GERRARD WINSTANLEY’S TRUE AND RIGHTEOUS MOBILE INCITEMENT UNIT is the name for the collaborations with The Black Smock Band that we were developing under the working title of The Radical History Project.
There’s a project page here, plus there’s loads more info to come as we put the project together… In the meantime, we made a little video about it.
We had a great session yesterday working in collaboration with The Black Smock Band and Rhiannon Kelly on our new project exploring England’s history of protest, radicalism and dissent.
Exciting things to come. Watch this space…!
Thanks to Ovalhouse, the Arts Council and private funders, we had our first proper development period on our collaboration with The Black Smock Band: an undertaking which emerged from our East storytelling project but which seems to be taking on a life of its own. Temporarily known as The Radical History Project, it looks at the texts, oral and musical, left behind by our radical forbears and the mythology of English radicalism they created, while also searching out contemporary and local stories of struggle. We had a very productive week – well, it’d be shameful not, given the incredible wealth of material we have to work with. Our research so far has focused on the Diggers movement, but since we were working just yards away from where the Chartists gathered, we looked at them and at the challenges facing the area today. In fact, a modern-day version of the enclosures is taking place, with social housing being replaced by private developments.
The end-of-week sharing at Ovalhouse cafe seemed to go down well. There was even some dancing. And lots of helpful feedback – thanks everyone!
The team was Alex Swift, Andy Bannister, Dan Cox, John Bryden, Rhiannon Kelly and Paul Burgess.
We’re still sorting out the documentation but, in the meantime, here’s a photo (credit: Kanatip Soonthornrak). And the project will be back for further research and development soon…