New Diorama announces The Knot: a week of fearless conversations about the future of independent theatre, 18-24 June at NDT Broadgate and online.
A year since theatres reopened, independent artists face daunting questions, some seemingly unanswerable. The Knot dares us all to come together: to leave the WhatsApp group, get out of the DMs, save the subtweets to draft – and have the big conversations we need, face-to-face.
Headline panels include Social Media Activism: the future of institutional accountability? with Royal Court’s Vicky Featherstone, artist-campaigner Adam Lenson and Barbican’s Tom Sleigh, chaired by playwright Vinay Patel.
Elsewhere, ThisEgg’s Josie Dale Jones joins to discuss censorship and reactionary responses to The Family Sex Show. And London’s hottest playwright Ryan Calais Cameron (For Black Boys) features in a panel about Black-led work targeting success amidst a white critical and audience gaze.
The workshop programme tackles the stuff they don’t teach on the average artist development course, from How To Fire People (And Other Interpersonal Skills) to Creative Mental Health and Financial Planning for Freelancers.
A speaker programme provokes artists’ curiosity with insights from the wider world – that have nothing to do with art, but everything to do with the world in which art is made. Speakers range from UN climate change negotiation expert Brianna Craft to venture capitalist Fabio La Franca on future-shaping metaverse technologies.
Co-presented with Culture Mile and partner theatre companies Uproot and Bunny, all events are available free with online and streaming options. The programme is hosted at NDT Broadgate, NDT’s vast rehearsal complex in City of London which has already blazed a trail for post-Covid artist support, offering over 100,000 artist-hours of space completely free for independent theatre-makers.
NDT Executive Director Will Young said: ‘It’s been the most amazing year for New Diorama, supporting literally thousands of theatre-makers at NDT Broadgate. We’ve done our best to listen and figure out what’s next: the big unspoken questions, fears and obstacles for artists making brilliant, bold theatre. The Knot represents where we’ve got to so far – and the conversations we think it begins with. Dive in with us.”
Full programme now available online at: WWW.THE-KNOT.CO.UK
