Blog

I am a Year 2 teacher and Arts Lead at Hotspur Primary School, an inner-city comprehensive school in Newcastle upon Tyne. The school is nationally recognised for its innovative arts projects and high-quality pastoral care for all pupils.

I am also a trustee for Cap-a-Pie theatre company, having enjoyed their work both as a collaborator and audience member since 2016. Cap-a-Pie create child-led theatre based on academic rigour. They play an important role in Newcastle’s cultural landscape. As a theatre company they are excellent at redistributing power for young people; providing a safe space and platform for children to express themselves. This is particularly evident in their most recent project ‘Climate Change Catastrophe!’

“We use stories to help us understand the world and therefore the best way to create a better future is to first imagine one.”

‘Climate Change Catastrophe!’ saw Cap-a-Pie work with hundreds of children across the North of England as well as scientists and engineers at Newcastle University to create a free six-part online series about climate change. By collaborating with KS2 children, Cap-a-Pie were able to create an emotional narrative that was underpinned by engineering, climate science and academic rigour. We use stories to help us understand the world and therefore the best way to create a better future is to first imagine one. A project like ‘Climate Change Catastrophe!’ transforms the challenges of the environmental changes ahead into something that is playful, inquisitive and investigative for children. Consequently, those involved feel empowered about dealing with a subject that could have been overwhelming and intimidating.

The project was rolled out during the second lockdown in which children were accessing the content either online through the school’s platform or, for a small number of children, in the classroom. Some of the feedback from teachers who delivered the content created by Cap-a-Pie included:

“Cap-a-Pie really went above and beyond with the materials that they provided for the online learning because they gave different options.  So you could either get your kids to watch the video that they’d recorded or you could go through the slides yourself.”
– Christ Church School

“Climate Change Catastrophe project was delivered fantastically under current circumstances. The children were able to engage fully with the videos/tasks delivered as they were clear, effective and enjoyable. This was a brilliant little unit of work to do on climate change. The thing that I took from it was really positive.”
– Hotspur Primary School

“The material in the activities was really age appropriate and they were fun activities. I could see from the amount of work that the kids had done that they were interested in it. For example, designing your own microbe and the diary entry – you could tell they were interested in it.”
– Cragside Primary School

We had high levels of engagement with the project from those who were home learning which is a testimony to Cap-a-Pie’s ability to inspire young people as home-learning engagement was one of the biggest challenges we faced during the second lockdown.

For those taking part, seeing their suggestions made into a series of films gives them confidence in their ideas and actions. For the audience, the end product gives you hope that this mobilising, mega-modern young generation, who are able to orchestrate political activism on previously unimaginable scale within less than 48 hours, may just be able to succeed where previous generations have failed.

As of 12 of May 2021 episodes will be available to watch on Cap-a-Pie’s YouTube channel. Find out more here. Enjoy!

Cap-a-Pie is so pleased to have been awarded funding from the Culture Recovery Fund. It’s really critical support for us to enable us to continue engaging with schools, communities and audiences.

It will allow us, and our freelancers, to get back into classrooms engaging with schools in our local area. We will be delivering fun and creative theatre workshops for children and teachers. We know schools and teachers have been working exceptionally hard during the past year and this support will allow us to start working with them as soon as possible. Our school partners are particularly keen to start inviting arts organisations into classrooms as soon as safely possible. They recognise the value of these experiences, particularly for children facing disadvantage, and those who might otherwise miss out on cultural activities.

Support from Cultural Recovery Fund will also support Cap-a-Pie’s running costs over the next few months. It will mean we have a bit of space and time to invest in planning future projects with our communities and partners.

We’ve been working hard all through the pandemic to continue creating theatre and engaging with schools digitally and remotely. It’s been fantastic to be able to continue to be useful to our community as well as employ freelancers to work on projects. We’ve been really grateful to our funders and partners for enabling us to change things up and respond to Covid-19. However, planning and delivering all of this changed activity has had a big impact on our ability to plan and fundraise for the future – essential as a project by project funded organisation.

We’d love to hear from you as we plan our next moves. Please do get in touch with us. 

• If you’re a local primary school who would like us to come in and deliver a fun theatre project with your students, please do get in touch.
• If you’re a community or organisation who has an idea about working with a theatre company let us know. We’d love to have a chat.

Like for so many people, this pandemic has been a lesson in how to pivot. From the middle of last year we had three schools projects on the horizon. In ‘normal’ times we would be in the classroom for all three projects, working with students and using drama to help them explore big ideas.

The first two, one about the 1831 cholera outbreak in Newcastle and Gateshead and one about the English Civil War, have relied on teachers delivering lesson plans on our behalf. We’ve been exceptionally grateful for the teachers’ willingness to do this and there have been many positives coming out of delivering work in this way.

The third project, a continuation of our 2019 show ‘Climate Change Catastrophe!’, was meant to go the same way. We were crafting lesson plans for teachers to deliver that would give students a foundation in climate change science as well as introducing them to cutting edge research being done right now by engineers at Newcastle University. From there the students would complete creative exercises related to the research and send them back to us – the material that we got back would be used to make the show that would be filmed and distributed later in the year.

But with school closures coming into effect in January, we knew we needed to pivot once more. It was a case of offering the original lesson plans to teachers to deliver to any students still coming into school, as well as repurposing them for students learning at home.

It was an obvious solution and one we were up for, but it did cause a collective intake of breath when thinking about the extra work involved. There were originally 9 traditionally structured lesson plans, in an instant we had to create 9 more – the content would broadly be the same between school and home learning versions but the plans for schools had to become scripts to be filmed by the actors. Some exercises that would work in the classroom had to be rethought for the home versions.

We’d become relatively familiar with setting out lesson plans for classroom learning, but home learning was new to us. What will work in a home lesson plan? How much is too much? Have we adequately explained the science of carbon capture to an 8 year old?

It was pretty challenging and time-consuming to put it all together.

At time of writing, the plans went out to teachers earlier this week and they’ll be delivered in school or completed at home in the fortnight before the February half-term.

In the pilot version of this project in 2019, we were in the classroom for several weeks and were able to tap into the brilliant imaginations of 60 year 4 students. Their input as writers, directors, devisers and dramaturgs was invaluable and brought the show to life. Although this iteration is being delivered remotely, we’re hopeful many students will engage with it, not just for the sake of the show but for their own learning and knowledge of climate change and how they can help to make a difference.

We all want to say a big thank you to the teachers who have talked through our changing plans with us. We’re very grateful they’ve taken the time to speak with us at a time when they are facing so many challenges. Thank you!

By Professor Suzanne Moffatt, Population & Health Sciences, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University UK

The early stages of lockdown were chaotic.  All of us making major adjustments to our lives, frontline workers struggling to get the equipment needed to do their jobs safely, millions working from home, our entire way of life disintegrating.  With the millions forced to move onto Universal Credit, came the wider realisation that this social security system is not fit for purpose.

Research in North East England published in 2019 led by Dr Mandy Cheetham of Teesside and Northumbria Universities (available to read on BMJ Open) demonstrated the ways in which Universal Credit undermines health and wellbeing and offers neither support nor adequate income.  Getting research findings to a wider audience is a key part of our work as academics. Partnering with theatre company Cap-a-Pie and award winning writer Laura Lindow was an ideal way to do this.  Supported by a series of grants from Newcastle University’s Institute of Social Science, Population & Health Sciences Institute and Catherine Cookson Fund, we developed the project into a fully fledged theatre piece.  Further funding from The National Lottery via Arts Council England and Gateshead Council meant the creative team could go ahead with a week’s further research, produce a script, rehearse the play and four live performances of ‘Credit’ were planned in April 2020.  Each performance had a brilliant post-show expert panel lined up for a discussion with the audience.  The shows sold out in days.

Dismantling our efforts at the start of lockdown was heartbreaking.  Not least because of the impact on the creative team and uncertainties about their future, but also because as a result of COVID-19, Universal Credit impacts on many more individuals and families.  Giving a voice to those affected is needed now more than ever.

Salvaging ‘Credit’ has been an incredible team effort and a huge accomplishment by the creative team. It’s been tricky at times to work out what could be safely achieved, but we’re going ahead in an altered format.  A slightly reduced, but nonetheless hard-hitting and moving script has been completed.  Actors Christina Dawson and Cooper McDonough are being directed by Brad McCormick, produced by Katy Vanden and will be filmed in the theatre performing a rehearsed reading.  Credit will be livestreamed on 16th September at 2pm and 7pm, each performance followed by a virtual live Q & A with an amazing expert panel including Patrick Butler Guardian Newspaper social affairs editor, Alice Wiseman Gateshead Council Director of Public Health, Alison Dunn Chief Executive Gateshead Citizens Advice Bureau, Clive Davis Welfare Rights Officer, Newcastle Council and Laura Lindow, writer.

Credit is an honest look at how Universal Credit can impact on people’s lives, told through the story of ‘Lisa’.  The play is based on the experiences of many people claiming Universal Credit as well as those supporting people caught up in the system, who helped shape the script.

I wasn’t surprised that the original theatre performances sold out in a matter of days.  There is now no limit to the number of people who can view the play.  I urge you to share information about Credit, view the performance and take part in the Q&A.  Help us to inspire people to think about the current state of our social security system, how it affects individuals, families, communities and diminishes our society as a whole and how it could be improved.  If the recent months have taught us anything, it’s that things can change, and change quickly.

Sign up to hear about future screenings.

In April 2020, theatre company Cap-a-Pie was scheduled to begin rehearsals on their brand new production named ‘Credit’, a show about Universal Credit and how that welfare reform was affecting residents of Gateshead and Newcastle. The show aims to ask questions around how we see the benefits system and to lay bare the situation for many people who claim Universal Credit.

With lockdown and social distancing brought about by Covid-19, in-person rehearsals were cancelled and our scheduled performances at Alphabetti Theatre were postponed until further notice.

However, the creative team of Katy Vanden (producer), Brad McCormick (director), Laura Lindow (writer), Cooper McDonough and Christina Dawson (actors), Anna Reid (designer), Roma Yagnik (composer), Rachel Glover (production manager), Mandy Cheetham (Teeside University & Gateshead Council) and Suzanne Moffatt (Newcastle University) resolved to continue working on the production virtually and to do as much work as possible to get us ready for the time that we are able to be in a room together again.

The project received funding from several sources obtained over a period of four months in 2019 – starting with Newcastle University’s Institute for Social Science, then Newcastle University’s Population & Health Sciences Institute, a further grant was obtained from the Catherine Cookson Foundation, Gateshead Council awarded a sum and we then received funds from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

As the amount of funding increased, so did the scope and ambition of the creative work and the collaboration between the creative team, the researchers and experts in Universal Credit. When the lockdown occurred, only six weeks before the scheduled performances, it was heartbreaking to ‘un-invite’ the audience and panel members and postpone the performance.

We’re so grateful to our funders and partners for supporting us at this time. With their support we have been able to use our time in lockdown productively and support our freelance artists.

The following report is a summary of our activities that we were able to complete in that time in regards to the text itself; the sound design and music; and the set design. What has occurred have been some incredibly useful conversations, exercises and explorations that will be invaluable to us when we come to rehearse the play in full (and in person).

---

Next Steps

We’re so excited to get back to working on Credit as soon as possible.

One 16th September you can watch our actors read a section Credit online. We’ll then host 2 live events with some of the most interesting thinkers on welfare reform.

Find out more

---

Text Work

Read-throughs
The process began as many rehearsals do, with a read-through of the play. To begin with it was just the director and the actors on Zoom to get used to reading it aloud over the internet.

The following day a read-through was done for the rest of the creative team.

What was immediately apparent was the challenge of connection between actors when they are not in the same room and how much of a person-to-person medium theatre is. That is not to say that the read-through did not work as the actors did a superb job and it was fantastic to hear the text aloud for the first time.

It also allowed writer Laura Lindow to hear the text aloud in relation to where there may need to be changes and tweaks to the script.

The play is essentially narrated by the two performers playing versions of themselves. When there are no named characters as such, the team talked about who these narrators are, why they are telling this story and because there is a significant amount of direct address, what is their relationship to the audience?

Part of the rehearsal process was an ‘interview’ with the writer, Laura, where the director and actors could ask questions about the script, the reasons and motivations for making certain choices and clarifying story points. This kind of exercise is invaluable to get further insights into the script from the person who conceived it.

Music
Initial conversations about music were around something that had the flavour of the 80s New Romantics – it has drive and energy and a sharpness to it; there is also a connection to politics as it was primarily around during the Thatcher years.

Composer Roma Yagnik asked Brad McCormick (director) to source some images related to the movement of the piece that would help her with the compositions.

From the read-through Roma was able to start making sketches of possible compositions as well as some sound design ideas. Based on that excellent work there is now a musical palette to work from in rehearsals. Everything that was made felt like it had a place somewhere in the piece.

One of the forms that is considered is ‘live foley’, that is where sound effects will be created live on-stage by the performers. During rehearsals with the actors sections were identified where foley might come into play.

There have been discussions about having two microphones on-stage to assist in the live foley but to also be used by the actors to deliver text when appropriate.

Design
The design process began with conversations between Brad McCormick and designer Anna Reid a few months ago to get a sense of a starting point.

Anna and Brad found themselves drawn to images which spoke to the larger scale of an urban environment, but could also provide a smaller frame for the more personal aspects of the story.

The initial sketches that Anna has done have all included a backdrop with vertical slats – it’s very corporate and generic but also has the feel of cheap rented accommodation that a lot of claimants are forced into. The structure also has the potential to have light shone through it from behind to create a really strong image. There will be a delineated floor of some kind to mark out the story-telling space and some small box-like structures to create levels and help us to create different environments.

It’s become a pretty regular occurrence in the past few days for my friends and I to swap pop culture recommendations. Everyone is looking for something new to read, watch and listen to that will get them through a lockdown at home. I’m going to give you a recommendation of my own, but it’s one that has a lot of parallels to our next scheduled production.

‘Credit’, about Universal Credit and the effects it’s having on people in the North East of England, was going to be performed at the end of April. We’ve had to postpone it due to recent events but we’re committed to having people see it at some point in the future.

In the meantime, the book I’d like to recommend is ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold which tells the story of the five women killed by ‘Jack the Ripper’. Rubenhold has undertaken pain-staking research into the lives of these women to paint an incredibly detailed and very sad portrait of who they were as people with only small mention how they each came to be in Whitechapel in the late 1880s.

Although set in Victorian times, there are so many connections to be made with today and how people are being treated by the DWP under Universal Credit. One of the main takeaways from ‘The Five’ is that in 19th Century Britain it was a challenging life (to say the least) to be a member of the working poor. And we’re confident that the researchers we have been working with on the show would argue that not a great deal has changed.

There’s one particular section in the book that really struck me. In the early 1860s an American financier named George Peabody resolved to make a gift to his adopted city of London to ‘promote the comfort and happiness’ of the ‘poor and needy’. He ended up giving away the equivalent of £45 million in today’s money for a social housing project that lifted thousands of Londoners out of the slums. It’s something to be applauded but what was interesting was that families had to apply to get a flat in these ‘Peabody Buildings’, it was not something decided by need or even through a lottery:

“The Peabody Trustees took pains to ensure that only the ‘most deserving of the working poor’ who displayed an appropriate moral character and means to meet their rent were admitted as residents”.

The idea of the ‘deserving poor’ is something that has come up repeatedly in our conversations around Universal Credit, especially in relation to the government’s attitude to welfare. It’s one of the big questions we’re trying to ask in the show: what do we want the welfare system to be? Who should be ‘entitled’ to welfare?

As I said earlier, we’re hopeful that you’ll be able to see us asking that and many other questions in ‘Credit’ sometime soon. In the meantime, ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold is available in hardback and paperback now and is a fantastic read.

And on a related note, Cap-a-Pie have started a book club and any recommendations would be much appreciated. Any genre accepted, 400 page limit.

Cap-a-Pie has made ‘Credit’ in collaboration with Newcastle University, Teesside University, Gateshead Council, Newcastle Council, Citizens Advice Gateshead, Your Voice Counts, Oasis Community Housing, Women’s Health in South Tyneside, Changing Lives, Larkspur House and Fuse.

This show has been funded by Newcastle University via the Population and Health Sciences Institute, Institute for Social Science and Catherine Cookson Foundation; Using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England; and Gateshead Council. 

Dr Matt Davies worked with Cap-a-Pie to create a new audio show The Other City.

Rio has famously, though misleadingly, been described as two cities, as asfalto and favela: pavement and slum. This description is misleading. While you might have the feeling of being in an entirely different world depending on where you find yourself in Rio, these two cities are closely tied together and part of each other. In fact, Rio is multiple cities but also one city.

Further, its many sides cannot be reduced to these terms. There are over one thousand favelas in Rio, each different to all of the others. Rio’s multiple cities express themselves in all kinds of ways: music and traffic; improvised houses next to airy modernist architecture next to weighty colonial buildings; armoured personnel carriers on the streets and tiny swimming costumes on the beach. Rio is also a city where delicate dreams of the future are inscribed on sometimes vibrant and sometimes decaying constructions of the present, from under which emerge scars of the past.

My research is about people’s everyday lives and international political economy. I’m interested in finding out how these topics, which at seem at first glance to be very different, are related. We tend to think about our everyday life as “in here”, as we go about our daily business. In contrast our usual perception of international things is that they are remote and distant, “out there”.

It’s clear that decisions or processes that take place in the international political economy have effects on people’s daily lives. However, for me it has been difficult to say how the everyday and the international affect each other.

In 2015 I was working at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the city was preparing to host the Olympics. It was plainly clear that this international mega-event was having very concrete consequences for people’s everyday lives – for better and for worse. Walking around the city of Rio I saw how encounters and confrontations between the local and the international were all around me. I realised that I could put aside the question of how the international and the local relate, and instead ask where they meet.

In preparation for the Olympics, the city undertook to renovate the port area. They built the noted “Museum of Tomorrow” designed by Santiago Calatrava. They forcefully removed residents of one of Rio’s oldest favelas. And during construction in the port area, they dug up human remains – Rio’s port was the point of entry for more African slaves than had been taken to all of the United States during the slave trade and many of the pretos novos– “new blacks” – who had died in the transit were simply dumped in unmarked mass graves. The old port facilities where slave ships had been offloaded, Valongo Wharf, was also excavated by archaeologists and is now preserved and recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Rio taught me this: when the plans or designs or fantasies of international investors or planners or bureaucrats come into contact with people in their daily lives, these many cities play themselves out in the streets, in houses, in kitchens and restaurants, in taxis and offices. And there’s no reason to think that these don’t play out in any other city: research is a matter of walking around attentively.

Gwilym Lawrence, Director of The Other City

“Human beings have not significantly evolved, biologically, in the last 30,000 years. We are prehistoric hardware trying to run the software of 21st century life. No wonder we crash now and again.”

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) February 8, 2019

We’ve just launched The Other City, a new piece of audio theatre that audience members can listen to via headphones at any time they choose, in any city in the world.

We worked on the show on and off for around two years, and during the testing stages many audience members said they found the experience to be very mindful. This response really pleased us. The Other City, we hope,opens up an invitation to explore urban spaces in unfamiliar ways, to stop and notice things you wouldn’t normally and to think about the global forces that shape our immediate surroundings.

One recurring idea in the show is that we aren’t, as human beings, meant to live in cities. As Matt Haig sums up in the tweet above, our bodies and brains aren’t kitted out to cope with the enormous amount of stimuli we subject them to every day, just by walking down a busy high street. Without even noticing we’re doing it, we develop techniques to shut out a lot of what’s going on around us. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of noticing a substantial change near where we live – a building gets demolished or changes colour – and we seem to have no recollection of what was there before. Where I live in Sheffield, there have been huge architectural changes recently; the city’s silhouette feels like it’s constantly shifting, with new flats and tower-blocks appearing like mushrooms overnight. Just recently, the iconic Grosvenor House Hotel was demolished, leaving the sky looking starkly naked.

One thing I’m particularly excited about with this show is the way it plays with scale, inviting you to notice the minutiae of your city as well as the big, sweeping changes: a small fissure in a stretch of tarmac, the way the light catches a particular tree, the reflection of the sky in a tower-block window. One audience member said that whilst experiencing the show, they had the pleasurable sensation of being a tourist on their own doorstep, seeing it in strange new ways. Through this kind of interaction with our lived environments, we can come to see and understand them differently. More broadly, the show is being released as the Brexit drama appears to be reaching its endgame; a time at which we’re all thinking out loud about the movement of people and ideas, and ultimately about our place in the world. In the midst of all this, I hope audience members for The Other City in Newcastle, Sheffield and beyond enjoy this opportunity to experience their city afresh, and to consider the ways in which it might be an arena in which both local and global forces play out.

Check out Matt Haig’s excellent book Notes on a Nervous Planet

What is ‘The Other City?
The Other City is a piece of audio theatre in the form of a podcast. You listen to it through headphones while moving around a city.

Can I listen to it at home, in the car or on the bus/train/ferry?
Technically, yes. But ideally you should listen to it outside in an urban environment.

So not in a rural or suburban area?
Members of the creative team have experienced the show while walking in quiet streets and it still works, but somewhere busier is better. We made the show in collaboration with a researcher who looks at how global and local things come together specifically in cities, so it’s designed to be experienced in a city.

Any particular city you had in mind?
Not at all. You can experience the show anywhere in the world. And we’d love to know where The Other City has been listened to, so please get in touch afterwards and tell us where you are using #TheOtherCity on social media.

Where do I have to go?
The show can be started absolutely anywhere you like. During the podcast itself, where you go is totally up to you.

What sort of experience is The Other City?
The show is quite relaxed and asks you to think and reflect. You won’t need to run anywhere! Some people have said they found it mindful.

How long will it take me?
From start to finish it should take you between 45 and 60 minutes.

Do I have to do it by myself?
Again, that’s up to you but we’d recommend it as in individual experience. That said, we have held events where groups of people start in the same place and then come back together again at the end to share their experience, which worked very well.

Where can I download ‘The Other City’?
‘The Other City’ is available on our website.

On 2nd April we launched our brand new show The Other City. Rather than being live theatre the show is a podcast that you can listen to while walking around any city.

Photos by: www.phyllischristopher.com

Cap-a-Pie has never done a show that’s purely audio before. However, something that was solely listened to rather than watched really fit the themes of what we, and our collaborator Dr Matt Davies were exploring.

Matt works at Newcastle University and looks at how the global and the local come together in urban environments. Primarily Matt is researching Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the effects that world events like the Football World Cup and the Olympics have on local communities. In Rio the effects are quite stark, eg. an entire favela is bulldozed to make way for an Olympic village.

The aim of our project was for people to think about their own city and how the world outside influences and shapes it. We decided that if we wanted to provoke people to think about that, it would be best for them to experience the show while being outside in the city.

One of the brilliant things about this piece is that is available for download, for free, anywhere by anyone at anytime.

We also love the intimacy that the show has. In The Other City you’ll be walking around by yourself, headphones on, and being spoken to directly by our main character. It’s a show that asks you to think (but in a fun way) and the intimate experience really helps this along.

So while The Other City is a slight departure from what you might expect from us, it’s one we’re really excited about having people listen to all over the world.

Find out more about The Other City.

Sign up to be one of the first the visit The Other City.