Starting Blocks offers the opportunity to create new theatre work with the support of Camden People's Theatre, as part of a peer network that encourages collaboration and engagement between participating artists.
Over ten weeks, these selected artists meet weekly to share practice, ideas and their developing works. They are also given space to develop their project and practice. The scheme runs from January to March 2018, allowing time for the participants to develop works-in-progress to be shown at CPT's prestigious Sprint festival. This event is the showcase of their work.
This year's artists and projects include:
The Colonisation of Childhood by Claire MacNeill This piece explores childhood and the hidden underworld of Britain that robs and re-authors the childhoods of the poor. Drawing on expansive real-world research, verbatim theatre and carnivalesque performance practices. The Colonisation of Childhood asks us to remember childhood and reconsider what we think we know about the realities of others.
Some Of My Best Friends Are White by Dirty Rascals Milk. Snow. Wedding dresses. Sugar. Salt. Cocaine. Lilies. Halloumi. Polar bears. Lattes. Skinheads. St George. Jacob Rees-Mogg. Eton. Tea. Burberry. The War. Houmous. We don't know how to talk about whiteness.
CHAV by Kelly Green. Kelly is sick and tired of being told that now she is a PhD student she no longer reads as working class. She has learnt to talk the talk and walk the walk of class drag for middle-class people and spaces, to be heard and to be seen. No one takes a CHAV seriously. A neon, grey, diamante and hard-hitting autobiographical journey, which playfully explores and comments on working-class female identity, and how we both lose and reclaim ourselves through our lived experience of class.
Everything I Am by Natasha Simone. I'm a bit tired. Tired of biting my tongue. I'm fed up of not calling things out. I'm bored of letting things slide. Tash is a queer black woman. She's also silenced, a lot. Things will change once she starts university though. She's taking cues from her idol - the master of speaking their mind, Kanye West. Everything I Am is an autobiographical exploration of the intersections of identity, celebrity worship and belonging.
Transient Boarders by Sebastian H-W An interactive performance installation exploring the forgotten narratives of displaced Londoners relocated out of London and living in temporary accommodation. Weaving together both their personal testimonies with archive footage and historic legislation, audiences encounter through intimate multi-sensory experiences the lives of the dispossessed. But all is not lost; amid the dread and fear, constant moving and sleepless nights in cheap beds, Sebastian unpacks their baggage - past, present and future - out of the suitcases of former lives, revealing painful home truths and memories of happier times.
“Keep up the good work producing cutting-edge theatre for everyone in London”
Councillor Jonathan Simpson, 29 January 2018
