CULTURE SANCTUARY ON THE STAGE

John Tomlinson, executive director at Stand and Be Counted Theatre, gives us the lowdown on the Sheffield-based organisation which makes bold, innovative live and digital art for and with people seeking sanctuary.

First of all, can you tell us what Stand and Be Counted Theatre is all about?

SBC is a Theatre Company of Sanctuary, meaning that all of our work is created with and for people seeking sanctuary (refugees, asylum seekers, migrants) in our communities. We use theatre as a tool for inspiring creativity, confidence and skill-building. It can also be a really useful tool for learning English, but more than that, it’s about people feeling safe in an environment and their place. The theatre we make is sometimes in a theatre, sometimes in a park, sometimes it’s not theatre at all – it becomes a film, or a music video or a video game. The work we make is always led by people with lived experience, and therefore the ideas and form of our work responds to that. Our core team is Rosie MacPherson (Artistic Director, Joint CEO and co-founder), John Tomlinson (Executive Director, Joint CEO and co-founder), Firas Chihi (Community Director) and Smart Banda (Digital Director).

How does SBC Theatre contribute to the local community and support emerging artists?

We run regular, long-term creative empowerment programmes. In Sheffield, we have Young People Together, our young adult group (18-30yrs); and our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary (5-17yrs). In

Bradford and Leeds, we have Soap Box, our adult group (18+). The regularity of our sessions means that we really get to know people and can offer long-term support and development from being a Participant, to becoming an Artist, before emerging as Leaders (PALs, as we call it!).

We make between 8-12 productions a year, at varying scales, which means that we also work with lots of brilliant freelance creatives across our programme. As an indicator, in 2022, we employed 39 artists from our region to work with nearly 1,300 participants. We have a flat company rate, which means that everyone we work with, as core staff or freelance, is paid the same. We think this supports a really collaborative, non-hierarchical way of working, and have definitely recognised this as a key contribution to supporting talented artists to develop. We see the challenges in our sectors, and we are actively looking at how we can make things more equitable for artists, participants and our audiences, who can see any of our work for free (or pay-whatyou-can).

Can you share some notable productions or projects that SBC Theatre has been involved in, and what impact did they have?

We have been lucky to work on so many productions that we’re proud of, and they all have their beauty – particularly when we know the journeys that people have been on to go from their first introduction to being in front of an audience. We loved making Have Your Passport Ready, which is a virtual experience that puts the audience directly in the world of the UK’s hostile environment. Led by brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad from Syria, now based in Sheffield, it explores an unknown city without an interpreter as audiences become players collecting evidence to prove their right to remain in the UK. The response was really something, with the Guardian likening it to the Netflix/Black Mirror ‘Bandersnatch’ episode.

Our touring theatre production of TANJA will always be close to our hearts, the first project that connected our work as activists and campaigners to our theatre work, and it led to us becoming the UK’s first Theatre Company of Sanctuary. The play was an impassioned call to arms and a campaign to end immigration detention in the UK. We worked with the incredible Emily Ntshangase – a former Yarl’s Wood detainee, and now one of our Trustees. We toured that show twice around the UK, and also did a sharing of it at The Houses of Parliament, as part of a special ‘Sanctuary in Parliament’ event to cross- party MPs. Secret Summer, an app-based binaural audio adventure, was co-created with our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary and is the first project of its kind to develop the skills of children seeking sanctuary in game and app design.

What steps does SBC Theatre take to promote diversity and inclusivity within the organisation and its productions?

Everything we do – and it’s written in our reason for being – is about promoting the positivity of diversity, sharing and creating space with amazing people from around the globe. We have an experienced board and core team, more than 50% of whom have lived experience of seeking sanctuary/migration. The artists that we work with and the participants we serve have many different backgrounds, cultures, languages, and experiences, so this makes everything we do so much richer. We always work with interpreters but there is a beautiful collaboration and peer support generated in these rooms as we work together to explore all the ways we can communicate and understand each other. Arts and culture are the perfect home for creating that all-important feeling of welcome and we see the difference creativity makes on people’s lives every day.

How does SBC Theatre navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age in terms of production and audience engagement?

We love it. We’ve only been encouraged by the engagement in our work that connects digital and live. We make work in many forms, so if it’s a piece of theatre, the narrative is absolutely focused on that audience experience in that moment. If anyone leaves thinking that work could have been better served in a different way, then we have failed. We made so much work during the pandemic, and maybe we were more prepared than other companies because we work across different geographic places and our team therefore have always had a digital connection to us. There is a big challenge across our society with people’s access to digital: equipment and data is expensive. We used reserves and support from partners o provide for people who wanted to engage with us, and that really matters. Our work is multilingual, so we hope that supports our connection with audiences. We see it as our purpose to make high-quality productions accessible for people in our communities. If we can use digital to enhance our productions, we always will. Where it becomes a barrier, we will do it differently. We talk a lot about theatre being our process but not necessarily the output. We want our participants and artists to explore and pursue all their creative ideas so most of the work tends to result in live, digital and exhibition hybrids.

Can you share any upcoming projects or initiatives that SBC Theatre is currently working on?

We’ve just been part of the brilliant Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield, with our Youth Theatre of Sanctuary group programming work they wanted to see – Mini MigMat. We produced Together for Change with Young People Together group, which is a partnership with The University of Sheffield, and we also presented Secret Summer, an audio adventure for families at Heeley People’s Park.

We’re thrilled to be the Theatre Company in Residence at this year’s Deer Shed Festival at the end of July. We’ll present Secret Summer, Have Your Passport Ready, a range of exhibitions and sound installations, Soap Box Cinema and be part of the Sanctuary Zone to help audiences understand the work of City of Sanctuary.

For more information, head to sbctheatre.co.uk.