One month, two shows: Beyond the Negatives and COMPLEX
- Info At
- Nov 30
- 3 min read
It's been a busy start to autumn for us and we've loved every second of it. Much as we can't get enough of the time we spend with our post-traumatic community planning, experimenting, sharing, and just being together, it's utterly thrilling when we get to bring what we do to the wider public. It helps us to step back, notice reactions, and see how unique what we are doing really is.
For the first of our outings, our Founder and Creative Lead Nell Hardy took us along on the ride for Beyond the Negatives, part of Old Diorama Arts Centre's Blueprints: A Festival of Community Powered Housing Ideas. The festival was the culmination of research done by ODAC on behalf of Camden Council's Euston Housing Delivery Group, set up by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, looking into what people around the Euston area want to see happening in the next phase of housing regeneration. ODAC's One Roof programme for artists with lived experience of homelessness, which Nell runs through RAT, was asked to contribute something that got Council staff and locals considering what working in partnership on community-led housing could look like.
We co-created a participatory immersive experience in which selected audience members were assigned new identities to become a committee deciding how to approach some key homelessness-related issues in Camden. Once decisions were made, a 20-second snapshot of what the future might look like as a result of that decision was sparked, followed by a poem outlining the pros and cons as imagined by our homelessness-experienced community.
The idea was to create a format - a blueprint, if you will - for how roleplaying and abstracted frameworks could support various stakeholders in housing regeneration projects to see beyond their own perspectives, understand other needs alongside their own, and genuinely seek solutions that work reasonably for everyone. Roles played by participants ranged from housing officers to street sleepers to second homeowners!
Though the topics covered were heavy, and there was acknowledgment of that in the space, the energy was light and the conversation free-flowing. Thanks to all who came on the journey with us.
Just two weeks later, we performed a very nearly sold out (fewer than 10 unsold seats!) three-night run of COMPLEX, our first full-length co-created production. This project had been cooking for a year, our core group having first raised wanting to put on a show exploring how complex trauma survivors are treated by services since October 2024: seeing it come to completion was as emotional an experience for us as it was for the audience.
As well as our own experiences, COMPLEX was inspired by survivor-led research based at Kings College London on routes into complex trauma care. We performed at the Anatomy Theatre & Museum, on KCL's Strand campus: a site historically used for performing and watching animal dissections, it felt like a fitting place for a play showing how survivors' minds are dissected to find fault, when the true faults lie in the systems that traumatise us.
Our post-show discussions ranged from considered explorations of where the solutions could lie, to held space for survivor and mental health professional audience members to unpack the experience and its resonances for them, to Q&As on the co-creation process we undertook that found our narrative through shapes, textures and sounds to find the essence of the experiences we were presenting without unnecessary retraumatisation of us or our audiences.
Bringing audiences to two pieces of our work in quick succession really affirmed to us some of the crucial things that mark us out. Most significantly, perhaps, it's that we refuse to simplify societal issues affecting us to simple rights and wrongs, or to present pure rage without compassion to the people behind structures, cultures and systems that cause harm. It means we aren't as popular clickbait as a lot of other work exploring trauma - but it prevents us from being extractive, limiting ourselves to an echo chamber, and avoiding the crucial stage after the emotional impact of seeking out solutions with all affected by the topics, even if on the surface they approach them from totally opposing sides.
Oh, yeah. And we're also pretty darn good at making trauma fun.
Missed either or both of the shows? Have a look at our website pages for Beyond the Negatives and for COMPLEX for some more information about them and to read what audiences thought. They were both woefully short runs, and we're doing our best to bring one or both of them back out to you all sometime!
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