Future Makers Collaborations //
The Paper Birds
Real-life Stories, Society and Politics
Over the past three years, we have collaborated with The Paper Birds on two empathy-focused projects.
The Paper Birds is a theatre company that focuses on creating original productions based on real-life stories and issues related to society and politics.
School of Hope
What do you hope for the future?
In the summer of 2021, The Paper Birds and Theatre Centre invited young people and artists from South London to join the School of Hope to explore what hope and empathy meant to them. In the first week, the groups creatively unpacked what ‘hope’ and ‘empathy’ looked, sounded, and felt like. Week two saw them collaborating to create a piece of devised performance.
The School of Hope Documentary by Kee Lewis
Feel Me
Our Future Makers process has been key to the collaborative partnership between The Paper Birds and Theatre Centre, as part of the artist development underpinning the making of The Paper Birds’ new show Feel Me. Using Theatre Centre’s experience of nurturing young artists, we have supported and mentored the multi-disciplinary team through a combination of 1 to 1 sessions and collaborative mentorship, and through supporting the artists as a peer group and in professional conversation with each other.
A stunning mixture of live performance, film, projection, dance, and music, Feel Me explores the different lenses through which we are told and connected to stories in the modern digital world. An interrogation of empathy, Feel Me asks what makes us ‘feel’ for another person, as we journey through landscapes and across borders, through weather storms and paperwork, changing seasons, endless queues, and interviews.
Feel Me previewed at the New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, in June 2023 and tours throughout the UK and internationally from autumn 2023.
“I had the opportunity to meet an inspiring and wonderful group of people”