RE-IMAGINING THE NORTH THROUGH ONLINE COLLABORATION
TOURING PRODUCTION: FOUR SHORT DRAMAS Written by LUKE BARNES, ALISON CARR, MATT HARTLEY and SARAH mcdonald-hughes
NOMINATED FOR BEST STUDIO PLAY IN THE MANCHESTER THEATRE AWARDS
‘It’s grim up north.’
A Wondrous Place tells a different story.
Produced by my company Northern Spirit, in association with Sheffield Theatres, Northern Stage Newcastle, Liverpool's Unity Theatre, New Writing North and The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, dramatists, multi-disciplinary artists, theatre makers, bloggers and actors from across the North came together for A Wondrous Place – an evening of four brand new short dramas for the theatre that toured to, and were each inspired by, four amazing North of England cities: Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle.
A Wondrous Place featured original animation, film sequences and an original musical score and was about seeing the North of England with fresh eyes and in surprising, unexpected ways. The production brought to the stage an image and a story about the North which firmly belonged to a new generation, challenged stereotypes and celebrated the gritty, witty optimism of this part of the UK. The project was funded by Arts Council England.
Four short dramas with an emphatically original sense of place... Chris Meads's production has a likeable lightness of touch, with witty animated graphics, quirky music and engaging performances from a quartet of actors who demonstrate an impressive facility for sharing each other's accents.
Alfred Hickling, 4 Stars, The Guardian
A trans-Pennine voyage of regional re-discovery...this utterly compelling production certainly delivers fresh thinking about true north – and it certainly isn’t grim.
It’s a neat idea: commission four young writers, each to write a piece about her or his home city, aimed at countering that old cliché ‘it’s grim up North’, and then tour the production to the cities in question—Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle and Manchester. This commendable new writing project, produced by Northern Spirit, is given its clearest expression in Adam’s closing realisation about his home town: ‘I always felt happier arriving at the station than I ever did leaving it.’
An excellent example of collaborative working at a new and challenging level for the north area. Arts Council England
The A Wondrous Place project commissioned award-winning artists (animation, film making, sound art, music composition and digital art) who were based across the northern region. On-line technologies facilitated our collaboration, driven by our desire to generate a new artistic sensibility that reflected a more positive self image about the north of England, and in a way that was open, inclusive, outward looking and participatory. For example, the show's original musical score, composed by Caroline Churchill especially for the project, was played by musicians from across the north, collaborating and recording together on-line.
We also utilised Twitter and Facebook in an innovative and thoughtful way, to not only generate interest in the show as we moved towards production, but also to generate responses from the public that could be integrated into the performance. Moreover, the four short dramas that ultimately comprised the A Wondrous Place story sequence were inspired by, and much of the visual content within the production was curated through, a guest blogger archive on our website. Each week, from September 2012 to February 2013, a different award winning blogger, creatively active within one of the four cities, was invited to spend a week on the website. Their brief: to offer a fresh and surprising perspective on the city that they lived within and loved. Seventeen different guest bloggers participated with the project in this way, generating compelling, regularly updated content on our website long in advance of the production, raising awareness of the project among their own twitter and blog followers, and enabling visitors to our partner theatres’ websites to be introduced to different creative artists, with fresh perspectives, from across the north.
The A Wondrous Place Video Trailer
Poster design by Kate Jessop