Time for another update

Posted on by Paul Burgess

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.

Continue reading Time for another update

Letter to a Brexit Voter

Posted on by Paul Burgess

Dear friend,

I wasn’t a passionate supporter of the EU until the referendum made me stop and think. The thing I really valued highly was my European citizenship. The freedom to travel and to work in the EU. The sense of being part of of an expanding world. Of taking a small step towards that Star Trek dream of united Earth. But I could see that the Union’s democratic structures were as flawed as the UK’s, that the Euro was being torn between the very different economies of the richer and poorer nations, and that sometimes the bureaucracy could slide into absurdity. Plenty to criticise. Plenty to reform.

Then came the referendum. So I did my homework and it swiftly become evident that it was overwhelmingly in our best interests to remain. Not only because of the direct political and economic benefits to the UK but also the strategic benefits in the fight for social justice. Chief among these was that a Leave result would fuel the fanatics: not just the anti-European ones but the racists, antisemites and Islamophobes. Other forms of bigotry too, no doubt. As for the UK’s political and economic interests, the reasons have been given thousands of times in thousands of articles. The Guardian seems to be running several post-mortems a day in its opinion section. I’m not going to go over all that again.

Instead, I am going to talk about my personal experience. Why? Because I want you to know that we’re not enemies. And then I want to talk about how we can move on. Politicians and media alike have painted us as opposites in some kind of culture war. I disagree. I think we’ve fallen out over a big misunderstanding.  Continue reading Letter to a Brexit Voter

Green Panic!

Posted on by Paul Burgess

In case you missed it, some arts people on the interwebs (and presumably the real world too) are in high dudgeon, claiming it’s the end of the Green Party’s moral integrity forever and ever because, in a policy document on the website it says… well, let me copy and paste:
Continue reading Green Panic!