Open Studio 2016: photos

Posted on by Paul Burgess

My main occupation is scenography. I design sets, costumes and video for performance; mainly new writing and devised work. I love the collaborative nature of theatre but I think it’s important to maintain a personal fine art practice alongside it, not necessarily for public exhibition or sale but in order to keep asking myself who I am as an artist and what I have to offer my collaborators. So when it came to finding something to show at Bow Arts Open Studios 2016, I decided to share some of this work. Continue reading Open Studio 2016: photos

The East Archive

Posted on by Paul Burgess

This is something I’ve been working on for a while. It has come out of the East storytelling project, which brings together a fantastic group of people from all sorts of backgrounds to share stories and songs. We decided to create an online archive of our material and then open it up to others who might like to add to it (get in touch if you’d like to contribute).

Anyway, we’re still adding to it and improving it (the tagging system will be more detailed for one thing) but it’s live now and we had an official launch last night to celebrate. So come and have a look! Continue reading The East Archive

SLICE: London-Lahore

Posted on by Paul Burgess

(Originally published in Blue Pages, the journal of The Society of British Theatre Designers)

Slice: London-Lahore is in an experimental project in a very real sense. As well as providing a framework to allow artists from two cities to respond to their built environment, it tests methods for long-distance collaboration. As has been reported in Blue Pages, I have previously visited the now defunct Theatre Department of the Pakistani National College of Arts to share ideas about teaching design, run workshops and seminars and, on my second trip, to design a show. But travelling is expensive, time-consuming, polluting and often fraught with red tape. Slice: London-Lahore offers an alternative approach.

Continue reading SLICE: London-Lahore

The Big Interview … Paul Burgess

Posted on by Paul Burgess

What’s On Stage, 14 April 2009: The Big Interview … Paul Burgess

Daedalus Theatre Company’s A Place at the Table, looking at the repercussions of the assassination of Burundi’s President Ndadaye in 1993, opens this week at the Camden People’s Theatre (15 April to 2 May). Katie Blemler recently caught up with the show’s director/designer/producer Paul Burgess to find out more.

Could you give us a brief history of the events that occurred directly following President Ndadaye’s assassination? 

President Ndadaye won the 1993 election. He represented the Hutu majority. But he was killed by the Tutsi military elite who wanted to hold on to power. This led to reprisals against Tutsis and a cycle of violence which evolved into civil war. Our play looks mainly at the coup and its immediate aftermath, including the Kimiba massacre where many school children were burned to death.

Continue reading The Big Interview … Paul Burgess