D&D Roadshow 2013 - LINCOLN

17 September 2013

D&D Roadshow 2013 - LINCOLN

Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln, Lincolnshire LN6 7TS

10AM - 6PM

An invitation from Craig Morrow, Artistic Director, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre:

I know that the East Midlands is a fantastically creative place, but with such a vast region to contend with – from the Fens, the Peaks and the Wolds, to Derby, Nottingham, Northampton, Leicester and Lincoln – it can feel difficult to connect with each other and share our experiences – and in the current climate of austerity Britain, I believe that opportunities to collaborate and think fresh are more important than ever.

It’s been a year since the Devoted & Disgruntled Roadshow was last in Lincoln. Since then some things have changed, some problems stay the same and some issues show no sign of being addressed at all because day to day I can feel like I have to run flat out just to stand still. I'm hungry for a chance to get together, pause for more than a second, gather our thoughts and plan ahead.

I’m therefore delighted that Lincoln Performing Arts Centre is to be hosting an East Midlands D&D Roadshow event with Improbable on Tuesday 17 September, in collaboration with Chris Heighton and the team at University of Lincoln. We’d love for you to join us for a day of Open Space.

If you’re not familiar with Open Space, it’s a way of working that harnesses the collective power of the group. It gives everyone the chance to have their say, either by proposing a starting point for discussion, taking part in a range of conversations, or setting the world to rights over a cup of coffee.

We so rarely get a chance to come together and take stock, so I urge you to attend whether you’re a performer, a director, a student, an academic, artist or audience member. Theatre is a collaborative event after all, so everyone is welcome. Nothing is off the agenda. It’s up to us to make theatre better. No one is going to do it for us.

I do hope to see you there

Invitation from Phelim McDermot and Lee Simpson:

In summer 2012 as the UK was flush with the excitement and optimism of the Olympics we toured our first Devoted and Disgruntled Roadshow to 28 venues countrywide. Throughout this time we held space for hundreds of conversations to happen: conversations about what practitioners and audiences felt were important in the Arts. Some were angry, some were practical, many were inspirational. All had a sense of immediacy to them as our agenda in each place was created by the participants who were there and no one else.

These events made it clear that this was just a beginning and that we needed to continue the conversations in order to sustain the positive connections and actions that were coming out of the roadshow.

This summer the optimism doesn’t seem so easy to find. The circus has moved on and the cuts begin to bite deep, particularly outside London. So the chance to raise concerns about culture and the arts and to take positive action is more important than ever.

In September the Roadshow will return and visit 3 locations. One we visited last time around and two will be new for us. In all three we will once again open the space to support the work that you want to do on the things that you are passionate about. Some of those issues will be obvious, some not so obvious. Every issue that is important to someone will get heard. We cannot emphasise strongly enough that Devoted and Disgruntled is a space for you to work on the theatre and performance issues that are important and urgent for you, from the personal to the global and everything in between.

There is another element to Devoted and Disgruntled, that we think might be even more important than the ideas, actions, issues and projects that grow from it. D&D is a place where the people who make up theatre and the performing arts can come together and be a community for a while. That does not mean we all speak with the same voice, just the opposite. It is a chance for us to gather in all our combative and contradictory guises to celebrate our diversity and at the same time to connect to the something bigger that we are all a part of. We are a community, and we stand a much better chance to thrive as individuals if we get the chance to understand and feel that.

The conversation continues..