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!

Continue reading Update on my sustainability work (and other things)

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.