New Writing South announces Celebrating Our Stories

24 April 2018

 

The region-wide verbatim theatre festival in 2020 will celebrate the lives of older LGBTQ+ people in southeast England.

Thanks to support from Arts Council England and The Baring Foundation’s Celebrating Age fund, New Writing South is proud to announce exciting plans for a major new project that will reach audiences and participants across southeast England over the next two years.

Celebrating our Stories is an exciting festival of new verbatim theatre made with and by older LGBTQ+ people, whose stories and conversations form the heart of this project.

The project will see the production of live performances touring to community spaces, a video installation, podcasts, and a series of ‘salons’, occasions of provocation, conversation and performance – all created by older LGBTQ+ participants.

Celebrating our Stories will be led by Dinos Aristidou, a writer and theatre-maker who specialises in working with educators, communities and young people.

“Verbatim theatre, using interviews and conversations and shaping these into performance pieces, will be at the heart of this festival. Celebrating our Stories will give audiences an insight into the lives of those older LGBTQ people we will be celebrating. And we really do want this to be a celebration, a bringing together of stories and experiences that is joyful and authentic.”

Read more from Dinos about the project’s ambitions and the verbatim technique in his guest blog here.