at The Ponderosa, Netherthorpe, Sheffield. Hosted by The Community Stage as part of Peace in the Park Festival. More details to follow.

@ 8pm – Croydon, St Peter’s Church, St Peter’s Rd, South Croydon, CR0 1HG. In collaboration with Croydon Amnesty. FREE event with retiring collection for Amnesty International.

We have just completed phase two of the research and development work on our new piece, The Art of Dying. The process was frenetic, challenging and stimulating and full of important discoveries about the future shape and content of the piece. I’m happy to report that whilst working on a play about the rise of paupers’ funerals, and about poverty and death in this country, that the rehearsal room at Clean Break Studios was also marked by lively and creative conversation. The project writers, Chris Redmond, Anna Hope and Hannah Davies had produced some arresting and proactive material – beautiful and disconcerting in turns. The sum of their work produced the breadth of perspective, the shifting form and multi-vocal effect that we had hoped for, and over the two week period we worked with the writers to unlock their pieces and to experiment with where and how they might sit within the final piece. Now, the next phase begins – taking the findings and knowledge from the R&D into redrafting and remodelling the script.

Of course, none of these important discoveries would have been possible without the rest of creative team, who took risks and accompanied us on some of our more experimental adventures! From the designer, Hayley Grindle, to the sound designer, Emma Laxton and the projection designer, Will Duke, all of the team made the seemingly impossible, possible. Including travelling below ground and back through time! We certainly challenged ourselves during this R&D process and we made some valuable mistakes as well as making significant creative choices; and we must send huge thanks to all those people who kindly came to the sharing of the work and who provided the necessary feedback that is already being used to shape the full piece. Critically, we all go forward excited about the potential of this project, and keen to start the next chapter.

iceandfire are collaborating with a team of exciting theatre-makers to create a new production for 2012. With this new play we are bringing together a group of artists from various creative discipline to help us explore why it is that some people die alone, and why some deaths go unoticed.

Inspired by the rise in ‘paupers’ funerals’ in our cities, we wanted to find out more about the stories of those who end their lives in such an anonymous way, often with no friends or family to mark their passing.  Our new play will excavate the cycles of poverty and deprivation that define the lives of many urban citizens, but it will also celebrate their lives and their contribution to society.

Iceandfire will be working with a collective of writers, film-makers, poets, designers and performers to make a visually stunning multimedia work developed for non-conventional theatre spaces. The inspiration for the play has been real-life stories from the communities where we work. From this starting point we have invited our artists to bring their unique talents to make a piece of theatre that looks at this complex and troubling issue from multiple perspectives.

On a journey around the churchyards and secret spaces of London, we want to uncover how our recent history has shaped our attitude to burial and commemoration. Our fractured and partial knowledge of these peoples’ stories will be reflected in the construction of the piece, where no two performances will ever be the same, subtly drawing on the unique contribution of each person who attends.

With this play we want to record the lives and restore the voices to the men, women and children of all ages, races and backgrounds who die alone. We ask our audiences to join with us in an act of recognition and remembrance that will be both demanding and beautiful to watch.

With a generous grant from Arts Council England, we will go into an intensive research and development phase for this project early in the New Year, before the full production is created later in 2012. If you have any stories you think we might find interesting for this project, or if you can help in other ways, then please do get in touch at annecy@iceandfire.co.uk

iceandfire are making a new documentary theatre play which examines the impact of the government spending cuts on public services, income and social support.

We are looking for personal stories about how the public sector cuts are affecting people’s lives. How will these cuts affect some of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities? How will the cuts alter the lives of working people? How will our communities change under the planned cuts yet to be rolled out? How do we prevent more people from falling into the poverty trap?

If you would like to share your story with us, or know of someone who would, then you can contact us in the strictest confidence. No names or details are revealed without permission.

People that we are looking to intervew might come from one of these groups:

• Public sector workers who have lost their jobs, faced a change in pension terms or been forced to accept new working conditions

• Working families paying more for child-care or those loosing Home Start or Sure Start Services
• Those affected by the loss of community centres, drop-in facilities  or services for the elderly – including cuts to public transport
• Disabled people respite care or support payments for care assistance or equipment
• Mental Health service users who have experienced cuts to support services or who are being moved to JSA
• Housing benefits claimants at risk from the proposed payment cap
• Students who have lost the EMA, or those dissuaded from Higher Education because of fee payments
• Students who require specialist teaching in mainstream schools
• Those impacted by cuts in Legal Aid
• Refugees and Asylum Seekers who have lost advisory or advocacy services
• Those using or working in advice centres – e.g. debt counselling, Citizens Advice Bureau
• Charities and voluntary groups who have had to downsize or merge

Interviewees are offered £45 expenses in cash in return for their time.

To participate or get any further information on this project, please contact:

Annecy Hayes || annecy@iceandfire.co.uk || 07980 775347

by Christine Bacon, Artistic Director of iceandfire

One of the interviewees I spoke with when researching our new Actors for Human Rights script, launching on October 4 at the Southbank Centre, put it this way:

Don’t see Afghanistan as a problem.  Afghanistan is a place full of people.  More than 30 million souls, with hopes, aspirations, lives, fears. Afghans are so generous, so respectful and so accommodating.  To hear Gordon Brown saying: “But if we don’t have our soldiers in Helmand, they will come and attack us in the streets of London”.  What?! No Helmandi or Kandahari will bother to come all the way to attack in England.  He will probably come and seek a better life here.  Afghans are not going to come and kill you in London.  They will probably come and share a pizza or a pint with you.

At iceandfire, we decided ten years after the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, we wanted to share with the British public the views of some of the people who have been living and working in Afghanistan while a war is being waged there in our names. To hear from them about what they have seen and heard and experienced. We wanted to give a platform to some of the individuals who have been on the ground, in order to counter the overwhelming volume of accounts that have been fed to us by the governments who have troops stationed there. Only recently did I fully understand just how difficult it was to get real information out of war zones and how the media in general reports little other than the ‘news’ which is given to them from official sources. This was something we highlighted in our recent production On the Record, through the ‘character’ of Zoriah Miller, a photojournalist who embedded with the US marines in Iraq and found himself dis-embedded for taking and publishing photos of the war which he went there to document.

We hope that Afghan Monologues will go some way to serving the crucial function of challenging and questioning the official version of this decade-long war. Once launched, the script will be available to be performed upon request through our Actors for Human Rights network. If you’re even a bit bothered about a war that your taxes have been funding since 2001, we recommend you come down to the Southbank centre on October 4. Cast to be announced and it’s looking like an amazing line up – watch this space and BOOK NOW

by Clea Langton and Christine Bacon

How did Actors for Human Rights go from one script, ten lovely actors and a couple of organisations willing to host a reading into the project it is today? Loads of bloody-minded determination and the endless goodwill of thousands of people.

Although it’s now a much larger project – AFHR remains essentially the same – free events performed by professional actors of first-hand accounts from some of the most courageous and inspiring – but most misrepresented people in the UK and beyond. The scores of individuals who have shared their stories with us continue to be the driving inspiration of the project.

But, how do you sum up five years, 50,000 audience members and over 350 events? Rather than reminiscing about the glam events, we’ve decided to tell you some of our more amusing and inspiring stories from over the years.

Smallest audience

There we were, fully rehearsed, ready to go, sitting in a hall big enough for 500 – but with an audience of  …. 5 – in the middle of a Middlesbrough winter with the heating system not actually providing heat but instead providing a soundscape which was reminiscent of jet engines – not quite appropriate for a rehearsed reading about abuses in the UK asylum system. But, remembering that old mantra – if just one person is affected…. we soldiered on. And that one person was affected – and proceeded to bring us back to Middlesbrough a few weeks later to perform to an entirely new audience of 100 who had only really heard about refugees from the headlines in the Daily Mail and finished up discussing how they could start a campaign to stop people being deported back to the Congo!

Largest number of shows in a day

The first moment AFHR as a national network seemed a reality was probably the 14 shows in one day event in June 2007. It seemed a bonkers idea at first: recruiting 14 directors, 40 odd actors, 14 musos and scores of other people to stage 14 events across the UK – all on volunteer time and with almost no funding. But individual after individual committed themselves to making it happen – proving that AFHR as a national network was possible. From there interest grew for hundreds more events, the development of over 10 more scripts and for funders to support two bases – London and North of England.

Closest calls

• Scott Brooksbank racing towards the train to York, while Christine stood with one leg on the platform and one on the train as the doors were closing.
• After a long day, where we’d travelled from London to Middlesbrough for a performance, hopping on the last train, only for it to stop just after York and then proceeded to go backwards! After being informed that there would not be a train to London until the next morning, we called the person in Middlesbrough who had arranged the gig. Turned out she knew the local priest in York, who happened to have five spare bedrooms (!) and served us lemon drizzle cake and tea before tucking us into bed and waking us the next morning to take us to the station.
• Asylum Dialogues tour 2009. At St Pancras station on the way to the Leicester Curve theatre, one of the actors calls saying she can’t make the gig. On the one hour journey, we all pull out our mobile phones and quickly find a willing actress who lives in Nottingham which will have her there in 30 minutess – enough time for us to have a quick run through together. We did not bank on the traffic being the worst in the region’s recorded history … and said actress arrives five minutes before we go on. Not having read the script. All we could say was ‘Breathe deeply. Take your time reading. Oh, and please speak in a Jamaican accent.’
• Asylum Dialogues Bristol 2008. Actor pulls out on the morning of the gig. Spend the rest of the day and train journey trying to get someone over to Bristol in time for rehearsals. No joy. Christine ends up reading the part of a Congolese man while wearing a fetching purple dress and accompanied by a hacking cough. The show must go on!

Lovely moments

Broke- our script about poverty and homelessness in London contains the testimony of Laura, a single mother of two who has been driven into crippling debt. When we asked her what she thought a happy life would be like, she said’ I’d love to get to a point where I can say, you know what – I’ve paid my bills last week and this week I can go out for the day or go out with my mates and have a good night.’ After an audience member had heard her story, they got in touch with her and offered to pay off her debt. Just before Christmas too. Ah … warms the cockles of me heart!

The launch of The Illegals at the Soho Theatre in November 2008 was attended by most of the people whose stories were told in the script. Made up of first-hand accounts of undocumented migrants living and working in London, it was a rare opportunity to hear the stories of some of the capital’s most hidden voices. Standing at the side of the theatre during the performance, we watched as the individuals who had shared their stories with us responded to their own stories being re-enacted in a full theatre.

A moment to shed a tear

The inimitable Clea Langton, who has worked her lovely butt off for over three years travelling all over the north of England with this project is leaving us at the end of the month to move to Australia and have a baby boy! While we are very excited for her and wish her the very, very best – it is with  heavy hearts and multiple tears and runny noses that we bid her farewell. Clea – you’re a star and you will be sorely missed.

HAPPY FIFTH BIRTHDAY ACTORS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS! HUGE, HUGE THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS HELPED MAKE IT WHAT IT IS TODAY.

Since I joined iceandfire nearly eighteen months ago, I’ve been absolutely amazed and inspired by the commitment to grassroots events, workshops and projects. From the hugely successful Participation project, Young People Together to the prolific coverage of Actors for Human Rights and its scripts, this is no fair-weather company that simply believes in the glory of fluffy productions that have technical merit but a lack of soul. This is a company that fights for the stories to be heard; the global community to be engaged; and to inspire both good art and depth of feeling through a powerful experiential process.

Later this summer our two worlds of ‘Message’ and ‘Theatre’ will combine beautifully in the formidable and compelling On the Record, but I would like to talk a little more about one of our more elementary projects. One that trickles on in the background of our work, but one that ironically introduces more people to iceandfire than perhaps any other. One that we feel incredibly proud of, because against the behemoths of the National, The Royal Court, Soho Theatre and The Bush, we are inundated with submissions. I am of course, talking about Everyone Has the Right.

Starting life as Protect the Human our aim is to provide a natural home for writers exploring human rights stories to create surprising and entertaining theatre. In essence we are trying to find that story that is as yet untold; that playwright who is as yet unheard; the talent that is as yet unrecognised and to provide a platform and an opportunity to bring all three to fruition.

So who better to write about the scheme, and it’s potential, than the winner of 2008 Protect the Human competition, Julian Armistead, whose entry to the competition, After the Accident has now been published and will be playing at Soho Theatre from 6th – 18th June.

If you are interested in submitting your script to the rolling-scheme (there are no deadlines for entry), and setting free your story, then please visit www.iceandfire.co.uk/participation/everyonehastheright

By Julian Armistead

My play ‘After the Accident’ is shortly beginning the London leg of a tour that began in Oxford in April, and has seen it play to theatres and prisons, young offenders and schools.  It’s also recently been published by Methuen, which for me marks a different kind of milestone, partly because it’s the first of my plays to make it into print, but also because it’s the point at which one has to the draw a line under its development, or to shift metaphors, to snip the umbilical cord.  You hope that what began as a series of conversations on a computer screen, will grow up to have a coherent personality and a life of its own.

I describe ‘After the Accident’ as an imaginative – rather than documentary- exploration of the Restorative Justice process.  I felt, and still feel, very strongly about the subject matter, which has a contemporary relevance and appeal that no doubt helped it get started. It was certainly this that brought it to the attention of the 2008 Amnesty International ‘Protect the Human’ playwriting competition, which it subsequently won.  This recognition was a tremendous break for me, since it gave the play exposure, and accorded me a profile of sorts – though no guarantee of production. However, shortly afterwards, the BBC commissioned an adaptation for the R4 Friday Night Play.  Another first for me, and a wonderful learning experience in itself.

The fact is, that as much as I feel driven by a lifelong passion for the theatre and what it can achieve, I find the process of writing for it incredibly difficult. Unlike a novel a play has to be born twice: the first time onto a page, and the second time onto a stage. Without the goodwill of a theatre and a group of actors, your private vision may be doomed to remain just that – private. You need every endorsement you can get to be taken seriously, and still the hurdles that face any new script actually getting produced can seem monumental.  In fact it’s best not to think about the odds. The only sane approach is develop a mindset appropriate to the task: in the immortal words of Winston Churchill, to ‘Keep Buggering On.’  Three years after winning the award, and now with the support of an agent, I’m really grateful to be doing just that.

After the Accident will be playing at the Soho Theatre Upstairs from June 6^th-18^th

020 7478 0100  www.sohotheatre.com

For further information about After The Accident please contact Rachel Rachel@remprojects.com www.remprojects.com

By Clea Langton, Regional Director and Christine Bacon, Artistic Director.

March saw the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of international women’s day across the globe and here at iceandfire we have been busy with three new script commissions that explore the experiences of three very different but equally extraordinary women. These women’s stories represent common struggles, albeit often hidden ones, that women across the globe face every day. A domestic slave attempting to find freedom, a refugee woman becoming a mother alone and a sex worker looking for a way out.

‘Miriam’ is from Eritrea, where she fled 40 years ago and now finds herself stranded in the UK, in her sixties after years being kept as a domestic slave by a wealthy Jordanian family. When I first met her for the interview I was struck by how small and frail she was. My own mother is the same age, but there seemed to be generations between them. She told me of how she had lost her whole family in a massacre in her village when she was 24, fled to a refugee camp in Sudan where after six years she was granted refugee status and so left the camp to become a domestic servant in Jordan. She thought she was one of the ‘lucky ones’ as many left behind in the refugee camps in Sudan languished there for generations. But after years of working as a servant for a meagre wage and a place to sleep, Miriam had an accident which left her disabled so the family stopped paying her – but forced her to continue working. In Miriam’s words, ‘for seven years I lived in hell’. I pressed her a little to explain – she just looked at the ground and couldn’t bring herself to recount her experiences during that time.  Then, whilst with the family during one of their holidays to the UK, they deserted her in a market in London. Alone, unable to speak English and without any money she found herself thrust into the world of seeking asylum in the UK. But regardless of her refugee experience, Miriam has been deemed by the UK authorities to be at best a domestic servant and at worst an illegal immigrant and neither afford her the rights to stay in the UK and receive protection or support. Instead, like many thousands of refused asylum seekers she has been cut off from any financial support, was left to sleep in a bus station, detained in the infamous Yarls Wood detention centre and constantly threatened with being deported to Ethiopia – despite the fact she is from Eritrea. But what struck me most about Miriam when I interviewed her, is that despite all of this, she still has so much vitality and warmth. She told me about going to conversation clubs to learn English, and about the many friends she has made in the town where she lives (over 300 people turned up to protest her detention, including our esteemed deputy prime minister).

At 24 years old, ‘Thelma’ was, like many Zimbabweans, fed up with Mugabe’s ruthless regime and became a supporter of the opposing Movement for Democratic Change and soon found herself being hunted down by the authorities. She fled to the UK to find safety but was forced to leave her  daughter behind:

It was dangerous. You know she was 8 years old. The thought of carrying her on my back and running. It made me really scared. But I really regret it. If only I could turn back the time … I thought, it was gonna be 3 months or maybe 6 months and then everything will be O.K for me. I didn’t know it was gonna be ten years…..

In those ten years Thelma was in the asylum system, but like thousands of other asylum seekers, her case was part of a UK Border Agency backlog, so for all of those years she was ‘stuck in the system’ she was not allowed to work, was forced to survive on £35 a week of vouchers, live in substandard crowded accommodation and most of all, prevented from being reunited with her daughter. Yes she could have voluntarily returned to Zimbabwe, but she would have voluntarily returned to her death. Thelma has finally been granted refugee status, is living in a house she rents herself and has a beautiful 14 month old girl. But the experience of being pregnant and giving birth was a far from happy time for her because of her situation. The experiences she had are well documented and very common among asylum-seeking mothers. They include including being frequently relocated in the dispersal system – losing contact with health services, community support and away from the friends or family they had established, discrimination from health professionals because of their immigration status or English language skills, and the extreme isolation from giving birth with few, if anyone to support them. We were commissioned to develop this new testimony by The National Childbirth Trust and Yorkshire and Humberside LSA, who hosted the first ever national conference for community midwives and felt the needs of asylum seeking women should be placed high on the agenda. We performed Thelma’s story at the conference and it caught the 200 delegates by surprise – having thought they were being treated to a bit of a play at the end of the day…..but instead found themselves moved to tears by Thelma’s story of courage, and moved to action to find out how they can support asylum seeking women in the future.

‘Laura’, 33, has been a sex worker on and off for 15 years. We met her through Safe Exit, a project which aims to reduce harm to sex workers; to support them to change their lifestyles and to prevent vulnerable people entering prostitution. Safe Exit commissioned us to interview Laura and create a script and film of her story, which they will be able to use when training their staff and volunteers and which can be distributed more widely to raise awareness. Laura’s story highlights the complexity of the issues involved and why exiting prostitution is often a lengthy and difficult process. Most striking in Laura’s story was her desire for what she considered ‘normality’:

I’m trying to stay away from the regular circle a bit more. I just want a normal life really. I think, just um, just a quiet life. To meet a nice quiet guy, get a nice quiet job, just perhaps learn to drive and that’s it really.

See the film of Laura’s story we made with Bleeding Heart Films here