Things have been quite challenging recently, but I haven’t disappeared. So, what’s been going on?
Last year was dominated by my father’s illness, his passing away, and funeral. This was a beautiful, woodland burial, amongst friends both human and arboreal.
I haven’t done a lot of designing, but I did design Deafinitely Theatre‘s show Barrier(s), which opened in Birmingham before touring to Manchester and London. It got some great reviews and audience responses. It was an unusual one for me, in that the set was very simple, and most of my work went into the video projections. I was also helped by a fantastic costume supervisor, Sophie Barnard, who ended up as assistant designer. That was in the autumn, and then, as every year, in February I worked on Deafinitely Youth Theatre’s half-term show.
Over at Daedalus, we continued to develop the Dysbiosis project, with workshops in Sheffield and London, and exhibitions and performances at the Omnibus Theatre, Clapham, and the Queens Theatre, Hornchurch. I’m incredibly excited about this project, and you can find a lot more about it over on the Daedalus site. We also did a storytelling performance with some new tellers performing alongside some of our original group. A really beautiful show, it was as part of a Season of Bangla Drama, the annual Eastland festival that we are often involved with. Four of the performances can be found here.
Also dominating my life, of course, are my work on sustainability and, very much relatedly, my dissertation. As you may know, I am the Society of British Theatre Designers’ sustainability lead and coordinate their Sustainable Design Working Group. That role sounds grander than it is. There’s quite a lot of admin, but the main role is, as I see it, not to be the first among equals but the facilitator among equals. As such, other people lead subgroups on training, green riders, and materials, and I to encourage people to lead meetings or talk on the topics that interest them. That said, I do end up doing quite a lot of advocacy, representing the working group at various events, including this autumn, Sustainable Theatre: A Global Challenge, organised by the Green Book and the National Theatre. The biggest event in the working group’s year, though, was probably the launch of the Guide to Sustainable Materials, which has had a really enthusiastic uptake.
I’ve also been busy as a co-director of Ecostage, and among many other projects, I’ve been the lead on the creation of the Ecostage Framework. This is a project planning tool which we’ve been workshopping at Hull and Wimbledon, and at our first Ecostage Lab. This took place at St Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green, and was really lovely. I’m pretty excited about the Framework and will post directly about it in due course.
I don’t quite know how things I’ve got so busy, but I’m constantly trying to grab any time I can find to work on my dissertation, which is looking at sustainability assessment methods. I completed the two-year taught section of my part-time Master’s at the Centre for Alternative Technology in the summer, and then, in September, started my dissertation research, though that largely went on hold through October, November and December. The dissertation started as a simple project to assess how well sustainability assessment methods were working in our sector, but has somehow developed into something a bit more ambitious. I’m now also trying to find out how designers are engaging with sustainability to explore possible interventions that could support us, and help us design in greener ways.
To this end, I’ve done a survey. If you happen to be a designer and you see this before the 16th of March, please, please complete it! You can find it here.
Finally, with Council elections so close to my dissertation deadline, I found some other Tower Hamlets Green Party members with graphic design skills, and was hoping to step back somewhat for a while. But our extraordinary growth in membership, increased polling and recent by-election success have made that rather tricky. So I still seem to be quite busy with that too. Not that I resent our success, obviously. It’s been amazing and a source of hope in a pretty bleak world.
I’m not yet sure what the second half of this year holds – what life is like beyond the MSc – but later this month, I am heading to Bangkok Book Fair with LG to promote our books. My second Din and Dan novel will be out by then. More on that when it happens.
That’s it for now. There’s more stuff I want to post about, so hopefully I’ll be here a bit more often. If you can’t wait, my Instagram is the place to be.
Photo: Yours truly in rehearsal for Dysbiosis at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch by Amy-Rose Edlyn
Paul Burgess 