Update on my sustainability work (and other things)

Posted on by Paul Burgess

As many of you will know, I’ve been prioritising my work on sustainability recently. Building on the voluntary work for Ecostage and the Society of British Theatre Designers that I’ve been doing since before the pandemic, I’m now nearly halfway through a part-time MSc at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

I look forward to having more availability for design work next year, and applying the sustainability principles and practices I’ve been learning and developing. In the meantime, as some of you haven’t heard from me in a while, I’d like to share an update.

Working with the SBTD and Footprint Scenery, I co-organised and co-facilitated Makers and Designers Assemble! at the National Theatre. As the title suggests, this event brought theatre designers and makers together to talk about how better to support each other’s efforts to work in a more environmentally responsible way. There was a particular emphasis on circular economy; in fact, the event was part of Circular Economy Week. It started some exciting conversations beyond the event itself… which was precisely the aim!

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Plot 17 x Hello Stranger

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Every four years The Society of British Theatre Designers celebrates UK theatre design with a combination of books, exhibitions and events. This also feeds into the UK display at the Prague Quadrennial.

Last time round, we had an exhibition at the V&A, which included my design for Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis. This time round, it’s a three-part publication series including a catalogue representing the breadth and diversity of UK theatre design, and a programme of regional events and exhibitions.

My entry this time round is the set – a converted horsebox, in fact – that I designed for Plot17. One of my favourite projects, it’s a mobile hip-hop block party for ages 7+, travelling the world raising awareness, inspiring action and spreading the message of “making things green”. The lead artist on the project, Kenny Baraka, is himself a force of nature, producing amazing lyrics and inspiring the youth up and down the land. It’s a great show, made a brilliant team, but it’s also a doing something really important by making the business of caring about nature and the environment accessible and cool for thousands of kids. And it’s out touring again this year.

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Dysbiosis in development

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I was incredibly pleased with how this went. I had the idea just before Covid but then decided to step up and focus on promoting environmentally sustainable design in the theatre sector. Between the Society of British Theatre Designers working group, Ecostage and everything else, this has rather taken over my life! However, the reason I stick with a career in this precarious and often badly-paid sector – and the reason I want it to be sustainable in all senses of the word – is the creativity. Dysbiosis sits right on the overlap between ecology and art. Thanks to Queens generously giving us space, we did a week of experimentation with some really wonderful creative practitioners. Such a privilege!

Here’s a summary from the Daedalus website:

Dysbiosis R&D at Queens Theatre, Hornchurch

A call for collaborators

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Queens Theatre Hornchurch, where I’m on the Environmental Responsibility Subcommittee, is committed to the idea that its journey towards environmental sustainability should be reflected in its creative output. As part of this, David Shearing led This Story is True for Most of Us as part last summer’s the Blueprint Festival. I was a creative associate on the project, which took a vegan meal on the theatre’s roof as a basis for an exploration of time, locality, ecology and – of course – our relationship with food.

Now QTH has given me space to start developing a new piece of theatre. I don’t know what the end result will be, except that it will be open, accessible and connected to the community. But I do know where we’re starting; by looking at our relationship with Nature through the lenses of language, culture and queer ecology. This is how I like to work, starting with research and, by applying my design process to the directing process, working collaboratively to find a logic and a shape to the piece.

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Ecological Values

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Given some of the awkward conversations I’ve had over the course of my career, I’ve added something to my website about my values, my expectations, and what I bring to the proverbial table. It’s very much a work-in-progress which I’ll doubtless keep refining. Do please feel free to let me know your thoughts!

Ecological Values

Environmental ethics and artistic practice: can they speak the same language? What does environmentally careful design look like?

Posted on by Paul Burgess

This is the text I prepared for the above-named panel, at Making Theatre Green, at the National Theatre, London, 6th June 2022. What I actually said was inevitably a little different, but this version is clearer to read than a transcript with all my ums, errs, omissions and mistakes!

When I was around 12 or 13, I dug out my old Playmobil figures and made scale model sets for them. They’re quite close to 1:25, actually! I first painted the back wall of the school hall for a show when I was about 15. An early starter, you might think?

Well. According to a newspaper clipping, my mum found the other day, I got a brief write-up in the Harlow Star, aged 10, for saving up my pocket money to plant trees. 

And, frankly, it escalated from there.

So… I’ve been involved in environmental campaigning longer than I’ve been designing shows. But the crazy thing is how, until a few years ago, I totally compartmentalised the two.

Why did it take so long for me to bring these two obsessions together?

Continue reading Environmental ethics and artistic practice: can they speak the same language? What does environmentally careful design look like?

Lockdown update

Posted on by Paul Burgess

(Top photo: Kenny Baraka with DJ Conrad Kira in Plot 17. Photo: Suzi Corker)

I was asked to summarise, briefly, what I got up to during lockdown. But I couldn’t. It was too varied, and lots of things required some explanation. I guess everyone knows that the theatre sector has been hit very hard by the pandemic. Many workers have left to get sensible, less precarious, less stressful jobs. I haven’t. But I have, as they say, diversified. Perhaps, I thought to myself, that’s worth a blogpost. So here goes.

Myself, Andrea Carr and Mona Kastell at the Ecostage Launch, CCA Glasgow, during COP26. (Photo: Kanatip Soonthornrak)

To start with, I used the opportunity afforded by the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme to help set up the Society of British Theatre Designers’s first working group on sustainability, taking on the role of co-ordinator. I also become one of the directors of Ecostage, an initiative for supporting ecological thinking in the performing arts. Along with Andrea Carr, Mona Kastell, Ruth Stringer and some volunteers, I helped rebuild the project from the ground up as a go-to platform for green-minded performing arts professionals. The new website, ecostage.online, was launched at COP26 last month. Various other advisory roles then followed, including helping gather material for The Green Book, joining the advisory panel on sustainability for the Queens Theatre Hornchurch and informally helping co-ordinate knowledge-sharing with other sustainable performing arts groups around the world. 

In the past I’ve joked that, because of the huge disconnect between workload and pay in the sector, my ideal working model would be to get some kind of stipend, then offer my services for free as I see fit. SEISS felt a bit like that, and for a while I was almost a full-time volunteer.

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Latest blogpost for the SBTD: The Green Book

Posted on by Paul Burgess

I’ve been on the committee of the Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD) for quite a few years now, and just before the pandemic I was one of a small team of designers that, as a result of a roundtable we organised at the V&A during our Staging Places exhibition, set up a new working group for the SBTD to focus on sustainability. Now called the Sustainable Design Group (SDG), it has nearly 60 members and regular four-weekly meetings, with various subgroups (materials, costume, training etc.).

Through the SDG, I also got involved with Ecostage and am now part of core team re-imagining the Ecostage principles and pledge, along with creating a new website. I’ll be sure to tell you a lot more about all this once the website has launched.

Being part of these two projects has led to me being stupidly busy while many of my theatre colleagues were getting into baking and houseplants, and I do feel as though maybe I should have taken more of a chance to breath. But it has also been deeply rewarding and has led to all sorts of interesting connections in the UK and internationally.

One particularly interesting thing over the last few months has been contributing to the creation of The Green Book. This is a project to create an authoritative guide to sustainable theatre for the UK sector. Part One is out in beta form for you to download and trial. Led by the theatre architect Paddy Dillon, working with Buro Happold, it was initiated by the Theatres Trust and the ABTT. I’ve written about it in more detail in my latest post for the SBTD.

The cover image for the SBTD blogpost, which is in the background of the cover image for this post, is from a project by SDG member and amazing designer Alison Neighbour: the original image with an explanation and full credits can be found in the post itself.

If you do have feedback on Part One, I’ve offered to compile any feedback that comes in through the SDG, so feel free to contact me and I’ll add it to our group’s feedback document, which I’ll pass on to Paddy and his team.

Meanwhile there’s lots of other stuff in the pipeline from the various things I’m involved with, ranging from the Ecostage website launch to new design-focused carbon literacy training. Plus some actual design work is creeping hesitantly back… Fingers crossed for that.

In the meantime, if you work in theatre, please have a read of my SBTD blogpost, then download The Green Book and give it a test run.

Crowdfunding Awkwardness

Posted on by Paul Burgess

So… this is tricky.

It’s not often I do any crowdfunding for things I’m working on. But now two crowdfunding drives have come along at once. Oops.

One is for the theatre company I run, Daedalus. We need some funds to move our community storytelling project East online. If you follow me on social media, you’ll know about that because I’ve been posting about quite a lot.

And now there’s Ecostage, an initiative led by a group of theatre designers to foster sustainable practice in the performing arts. I’ll be telling my social media followers more about that over the coming days, and doubtless post something here too.

But for now, I want to say why I think crowdfunding is the right thing to do.

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