First of all, can you tell us what Stand and Be Counted Theatre is all about?
SBC is a Theatre Company of Sanctuary – meaning that all of our work is created with and for people seeking Sanctuary (refugees, asylum seekers, migrants) in our communities. We use theatre as a tool for inspiring creativity, confidence and skill building. It can also be a really useful tool for learning English, but more than that – it’s about people feeling safe in an environment and their place. The theatre we make is sometimes in a theatre, sometimes in a park, sometimes it’s not theatre at all – and it becomes a film, or a music video or a video game. The work we make is always led by people with lived experience, and therefore the ideas and form of our work responds to that. Our core team is Rosie MacPherson (Artistic Director, Joint CEO and co-founder), John Tomlinson (Executive Director, Joint CEO and co-founder), Firas Chihi (Community Director) and Smart Banda (Digital Director). We work with dozens of other amazing artists across our projects and programmes all over the region and beyond.
How does SBC Theatre contribute to the local community and support emerging artists?
We run regular, long term creative empowerment programmes – in Sheffield we have Young people Together, ouryoung adult group (18-30yrs) and our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary(5-17yrs), and in Bradford and Leeds we have Soap Box, our adult group (18+). The regularity of our sessions means that we really get to know people and can offer longterm support and development from being a Participant, to becoming an Artist, emerging as Leaders (PAL’s as we call it!). We make between 8-12 productions a year, at varying scales – which means that we also work with lots of brilliant freelance creatives across our programme. As an indicator, in 2022 we employed 39 artists from our region to work with nearly 1,300 participants. We have a flat company rate, which means that everyone we work with, as core staff or freelance, is paid the same. We think this supports a really collaborative, non-hierarchical way of working, and have definitely recognised this as a key contribution to supporting talented artists to develop. We see the challenges in our sectors, and we are actively looking at how we can make things more equitable for artists, participants and our audiences – who can see any of our work for free (or pay-what-you-can).
Can you share some notable productions or projects that SBC Theatre has been involved in, and what impact did they have?
We have been lucky to work on so many productions that we’re proud of, and they all have their beauty – particularly when we know the journeys that people have been on to go from their first introduction to this field of work, to the result in front of an audience. We loved making Have Your Passport Ready, which is a virtual experience that puts the audience directly in the world of the UK’s hostile environment. Led by brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad from Syria, now based in Sheffield, it explores an unknown city without an interpreter as audiences become players collecting evidence to prove their right to remain in the UK. The response was really something, with the Guardian likening it to the Netflix/Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode. Our touring theatre production of ‘TANJA’ will always be close to our hearts, as it was the first project that connected our work as activists and campaigners, to our theatre work – and led to us becoming the UK’s first Theatre Company of Sanctuary. The play was an impassioned call to arms and a campaign: to end immigration detention in the UK. We worked with the incredible Emily Ntshangase – a former Yarl’s Wood detainee, who is now one of our Trustees. We toured that show twice around the UK, and also did a sharing of it at The Houses of Parliament, as part of a special Sanctuary in Parliament event to cross-party MP’s. Secret Summer, an app-based binaural audio adventure, was co-created with our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary and is the first project of it’s kind to develop the skills of children seeking sanctuary in game and app design.
What steps does SBC Theatre take to promote diversity and inclusivity within the organisation and its productions?
Everything we do, and it’s written in our reason for being now as an arts charity – is about promoting the positivity of diversity and sharing and creating space with amazing people from around the globe, who now have Yorkshire as their home. We have an experienced board and core team, more than 50% of whom have lived experience of seeking sanctuary/migration. The artists that we work with, and the participants we serve have many different backgrounds, cultures, languages and experiences and this makes everything we do so much richer . 14+ languages in our workshop sessions. We always work with interpreters but there is a beautiful collaboration and peer support generated in these rooms as we work together to explore all the ways we can communicate and understand each other. Arts and culture are the perfect home for creating that all important feeling of welcome and we see the difference creativity makes on people’s lives every day.
How do you select the themes or topics for your productions?
Our regular participants in the groups are always telling us what they want to do next. It’s our job as a company to be working with partners to support our groups and have the platforms to create, and share their work. The groups push us creatively, and take us out of our comfort zone. If they want to make a music video, or a dance project – we will talk to commissioners, our trusted network and brilliant creatives to form projects that will expand all of our imaginations. We take our groups to see lots of work, particularly theatre – at The Montgomery, Crucible and Theatre in the Mill – so that they are constantly being inspired and seeing how stories can be told. We want our programmes to be full of hope and expression, so often the themes are connected to that – but the organic nature of what we do means that the presentation of any SBC production will change right up until the last seconds. It has to be that way, because the context of what we are doing means that it has to be relevant for that audience at that exact moment. We know that we live in an ever changing world, especially with the constant conversations around policies in this area – so we have to be fully aware of that.
How does SBC Theatre navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age in terms of production and audience engagement?
We love it – and we’ve only been encouraged by the engagement in our work that connects digital and live. We make work in many forms, so if it’s a piece of theatre – the narrative is absolutely focused on that audience experience in that moment. If anyone leaves thinking that work could have been better served in a different way, then we have failed. We made so much work during the pandemic – and maybe we were more prepared than other companies, because we work across different geographic places and our team and participants therefore have always had a digital connection to us – that it didn’t feel like a stretch for us to continue doing everything we were doing. There is a big challenge across our society with people’s access to digital – equipment and data is expensive. We used reserves, and support from partners straight away to provide for people who wanted to engage with us, and that really matters. Our work is multilingual, so we hope that supports our connection with audiences. We see it as our purpose to make high-quality productions accessible for people in our communities. If we can use digital to enhance our productions, we always will. Where it becomes a barrier, we will do it differently. We talk a lot about theatre being our process but not necessarily the output. We want our participants and artists to explore and pursue all their creative ideas so most of the work tends to result in live, digital and exhibition hybrids which is exciting.
Can you share any upcoming projects or initiatives that SBC Theatre is currently working on?
Yes, absolutely. We’ve just been part of the brilliant Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield, with our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary group programming work they wanted to see – Mini MigMat. We produced Together for Change with Young People Together group, which is a partnership with The University of Sheffield. We also presented Secret Summer, an audio adventure for families at Heeley People’s Park.
We’re also thrilled to be the Theatre Company in Residence at this year’s Deer Shed Festival at the end of July. We’ll present Secret Summer, Have Your Passport Ready, a range of exhibitions and sound installations, Soap Box Cinema and be part of the Sanctuary Zone to help audiences understand the work of City of Sanctuary.
How does SBC Theatre collaborate with other organisations to create meaningful artistic experiences?
We’re currently working with Biome Collective and the National Videogame Museum on a project called Playing with Power – supporting our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary to make a video game for an upcoming exhibition later in the year. This is super exciting – for us, as we want to make new artistic adventures and genuinely share skills with other organisations, and give our young people the best cultural experiences which they absolutely deserve. Collaborations like this really work as we’re finding, because each partner has a really clear expertise in their field, and they are caring and respectful about how things might need to work to serve each objective and the specific needs of our participants. Collaboration is often about compromise – but if those compromises make for a better process for people, the results are always more fulfilling.
What are some of the biggest achievements or milestones that SBC Theatre has reached since its establishment?
I think still existing as an independent organisation in the current climate has to be one! We set up in 2010, and have had to navigate huge challenges throughout that time like many. Becoming the first Theatre Company of Sanctuary was huge for us – and we are incredibly proud of that, and love the responsibility that comes with that. We became a charity in autumn 2022, and have recently had funding support from Paul Hamlyn Foundation for core-costs, which is the first time we’ve had any support for our business long-term. From a production perspective, the work we are making we think is evolving, and getting better and better. We have presented our work at some of the best festivals in the world – Edinburgh Fringe, Latitude Festival, Brighton Festival and toured to places that we could have only dreamt of when we set SBC up. To be running long term participatory programmes that open the doors of this industry to so many brilliant artists will never not be an honour, we exist to shift who gets to make work and platform the voices we need more of. We work with countless incredible charities like City of Sanctuary, Asylum Matters and Refugee Council and are so proud to be part of a movement of organisations and individuals actively making our communities more welcoming and undermining the hostile environment.
Looking to the future, what are your aspirations for the organisation in the coming years?
We’re excited for our groups of brilliant people from around the world to lead the way, and create our next productions, so who knows? We are always proud of what we’ve done, but forever excited about the next production and programme. We’re excited to continue doing our work, day-to-day to create new platforms and projects for people and work with our networks to generate better conditions for people seeking sanctuary in our communities and industry. We also really hope that arts and culture finds more of a leading role in bigger conversations, to support and shape our understanding of the world and our sense of place. We hope more people engage with our work, and who knows which park Secret Summer might pop up in next? There’s plenty of them around the world!
