“What does this look like?” “Is this standard?” “What is the point of this?”

Happily, our day-long workshop with Hannah Ringham of Shunt threw up more questions than answers. Our focus was on the audience, on drawing them in, implicating them, leaving space for their imaginative engagement. On practising what might usefully be termed a dramaturgy of generosity.

Hannah’s work, she told us, has been informed in a big way by her collaborations with Tim Crouch – not least in clarifying her desire to pick over, prod and probe the unwritten contract between performer and audience. Talking about Dance Bear Dance, the show that first made a name for Shunt when they performed it in a railway arch in Bethnal Green in 2002/03, Hannah recalled moments during the show in during which the audience was asked open questions to which no response, including no response, could be wrong. This sense of an invitation, of the certain validity of everything and anything an audience might bring on any given night, inspired us.

Inspiring, too, was Hannah’s playfulness, her trickery. The image of her standing at the front of the stage with a look of sheer abhorrence painted across her face, pinching a dirty napkin at arm’s length and demanding of us “who left this piece of shit here?” is etched in my mind. Likewise, a GIF-like clip of her stamping on an apple, smashing it to smithereens. “Objects,” Hannah insisted, “can break, be moved, be handled, be played with, modified, changed, mended, cleaned, examined. They are always in motion, in a state of constant arrangement.” Like any good teacher, Hannah nurtured in us a sense of exploration, of discovery, of unruliness. Without these qualities, after all, what is the point of anything?

Gwilym Lawrence
@its_me_gwilym
 

We have a metaphor. We’ve gotten lost inside a few, and several were simply swept up and blew away. But we have one now, and we’re getting to hold it and watch it burble. Hopefully soon it’ll begin speaking, though it’s first words might be, ‘neutrality’.

For me, metaphors are vital because they describe a thing as well as how you feel about the thing. And that’s important in the creative process. We think in - and with - feeling. To use another metaphor: thinking and feeling dance together. Sometimes one leads; sometimes the other.

Metaphors aren’t always great dancers though. Sometimes they don’t like the music, or the music doesn’t like them. Sometimes a metaphor can just shrug, pulls out a bag of monster munch and walk off.

A good metaphor is one that will dances with you all night. In the rehearsal room they’re an extra person full of curiosity, ideas and emotion. A good metaphor doesn’t judge. A good metaphor vibes.

And over the course of ten days, we’ve imagined ours into existence. It’s taken playing, story telling, collecting, discussing, talking, and chatting. We’ve had to make a language together, and our metaphor is fluent in it.

But no matter how satisfied we are with it, it won’t make our play for us. But it is going to tell us about it, even if it has to use a metaphor.

Andy Owen Cook
​@andyowencook

​There’s a bit in the opening pages of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” where the narrator begins in earnest to talk about his life in the city, in his case the Paris of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and he says, “I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing […] To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”


I’m on the ground floor of a student house in Sheffield, near the university, and I can hear one of my house-mates singing along to some old-fashioned Italian music while he hangs out his washing. I feel a bit lost and worn-out because I’ve just moved house, try and walk around the streets and old houses to work out what my impression of Sheffield is, but it’s all fragments, cigarette-ends and door-frames and street-names and house-numbers and cooking, cooking to reassure myself in one of those pans you know has lived in a house for years and years, through years and years of occupants.


On Saturday, collecting stories from the people of Sheffield we’d managed to persuade into the theatre for a tea and a chat, I was - and still am - desperate not to be awful, not to be condescending, not to be someone who starts an essay with something quoted from Henry Miller, not to try and be impressive, but to be generous, and good, and almost invisible. I wanted to reassure people that it wasn’t necessary to know what they were doing, and that I didn’t know what I was doing either, I was only offering something, only offering a space to talk about something.


When I listen back to the recordings that we made, I feel alright, partly because I like it when people laugh. The low notes of people talking about their mothers, about handwritten letters, the high notes of “you know what else we’ve got …!” I spent all day talking to people whose voices fall into a rhythm, a sort of song. I can’t work out yet if it’s a song of Sheffield, but it’s a song I think of coffee-cups and talking, the song of remembering.

Lauren Stone
​@lstone345

“How did it feel to you? This morning?"
 
Gwilym asks me.
 
He’s standing at the sink washing the dishes from last night. I think about all the other people who have washed dishes at that sink. I imagine the people who rented this flat before us. And the people before them and before them. I wonder what their plates looked like. What they ate. What were they washing away down the sink? What conversations did they have in this kitchen? The traces they left behind. I think about this space when it was a complete house, not divided into three flats as it is now.
 
 What does it mean to live in a place? What does it mean to belong to a place? Our starting point for our project is objects: dormant objects in a home which people do not think about that much, do not use, perhaps do not look at very often, but crucially, would never throw away. What do these objects say about a person, about their relationship to others, to themselves? How do people construct selfhood and relationships from these seemingly everyday, nothingy things?
 
I feel exhilarated. I feel tearful. I feel frustrated. 
 
Who’s on the other side of the door?
 
A picture in our family album. Aged one, on the drive of my Nan’s house on Norfolk Road, S2.  Learning to walk. Lots of photos of that birthday, partly because it was my first and partly taken to send to my father who wasn’t there. My mother’s documentation of me. 
 
Not our drive anymore. 
 
What does it mean to make theatre in a city that you have roots in? That is coloured by family histories, mythologies. But also to be discovering it anew:
 
Going back there, aged 25, posting an invitation through the letterbox.
 
Taking flowers to City Road cemetery. The bloodline of my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother.
 
Mum was born on Manor Lane. Hope Villas. Round the corner from Sky Edge.
 
Strangely quiet. Peace.

​The man with his pigeons. The woman leaning on her windowsill, dressing gown and hair done up in a towel from a shower, looking out.
 
The three friends. Those friendships of threes. 
 
“No cold callers. No free newspapers. No takeaway menus. No leaflets. No nothing.”
 
Soraya Nabipour
@Snabipour

Sad Siren Theatre is delighted to announce that this Spring, with support from Theatre Delicatessen and Arts Council England, we will be presenting our new show I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME in Sheffield and London.

Having been selected by Theatre Delicatessen to take part in Forge North, an eight-week programme of tailored development and support, we will be taking the show to Camden People’s Theatre as part of the inaugural A Nations Theatre festival run by Battersea Arts Centre and The Guardian.
 
We’re particularly proud to be part of this initiative as it means we’ll be representing Sheffield’s vibrant alternative artistic landscape, alongside some wonderful Sheffield-based artists: The Bare Project, Epiphany VR, Heather Morgan and Joe Bunce.
 
We’ll also be working for the first time with poet and performer Andrew Owen Cook and resuming our collaboration with comedian and storyteller Lauren Stone, who took such great photographs of our previous show The Gods of Pick ‘N’ Mix.
 
Finally, we’ll be updating our blog much more regularly with details and reflections on making the show, and on mentorship sessions with a range of fantastic and inspiring artists (all will be revealed!).
 
In the meantime, if you’d like to sign up to our newsletter just click here. 

Last month, the European court of justice ruled that 3200 former Woolworth's employees will receive no redundancy pay or compensation for the loss of their jobs, due to a loophole which exempts workers in stores which employed fewer than 20 people. Watching the video above from 2008 in light of this verdict, it's hard not to feel the dull ache of inevitability; despite the protester's hopes and the support of passers-by, a far more powerful organising hand would ensure it got its way.

It's funny watching this video now; it's full of hope. It presents a Sheffield utopia - the biggest and best shops; a thriving industry providing enough jobs for all; a vibrant nightlife; the most open, public spaces of any UK city; the best culture; plentiful social housing. In common with every child in Sheffield in the 1970s my mum watched this video in school, and the phrase 'A City on the Move' always stuck in her mind. It brought with it a sense of positivity, of pride, of passion for where she was from. As the video announces: "A city is people - a place for them to live in, to use."