Belgrade Theatre collaboration
Keeping us Safe? (Jan 2024-July 2025)
This continuing collaboration with Belgrade Theatre seeks to further engage young people directly in dialogue and debate on issues relating to policing. It enriches and develops the research, ensuring a body of insight that is inclusive of young people’s ideas and lived experiences.
In the most recent project, Keeping us Safe? creative practitioners - Keiren Hamilton Amos, Corey Weekes and Jay Zorenti-Nakhid – spent several months working with groups of pupils at two secondary schools in Coventry. Through creative methods including drama, music, and spoken word, the pupils explored their experiences and perspectives on some of the key themes in our research – policing, safety, authority, power, and care.
Through the course of the project, the groups constructed creative outputs through which they could express their ideas. The project culminated with a sharing of this creative work at an event at The Belgrade Theatre for an invited audience of teachers and school staff, family, friends, and other creative practitioners. One school group aired their short film, which depicted a tense encounter with a police officer and expressed, through rap, their anxieties and distrust towards the police as an institution. The other group gave a live rap performance, their two tracks exploring complicated ideas around generational trauma and around possibilities for hope. They followed this live performance with a Q+A where they spoke about the tracks they had put together, and shared their experiences of the project.
The sharing events were an important opportunity for these young people to see their hard work come to fruition, and for a wider audience to actively engage with the perspectives and ideas of a group of people who are very seldom listened to, on their own terms, by adults.
Our work with these young people continues with an augmented reality installation as part of a Spotlight-funded collaborative project with colleagues in Design Studies.
Our creative partners @ the Belgrade
Corey Campbell, Creative Director
Adel Al-Salloum, Director of Producing and Co-creation
Claire Procter, Creative Producer for Education
Keiren Hamilton-Amos, That's a Rap
Corey Weekes, That's a Rap
Jay Zorenti-Nakhid, Associate Director
After Preston (Jan - Dec 2023)
In this collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, we worked alongside a creative team - Amahra Spence (writer), Jen Davis (director & dramaturg), and Joe Rose (producer). It features a brand new play After Preston commissioned by the University of Warwick and the Belgrade Theatre, performed to an invited audience on Friday 1st December 2023.
After Preston takes some of the themes in our research data and explores them through a dramatic performance which questions the kinds of relationships that different communities have with the police and ultimately, who or what keeps us safe. This builds on our findings around the power of arts and culture to provide a voice to the seldom heard, confronting us with sometimes uncomfortable truths; and as a collaborative endeavour with the potential to bring together groups who might otherwise be in opposition. In the context of low levels of trust in the police among young people, women and girls, and people of colour, working together through arts and culture has the potential to challenge stereotypes and build trust and confidence. This dramatic work explores the impact this can have on individual lives as both police and policed see the 'human' behind the stereotype, as well as the challenges in building new relationships and shifting entrenched cultures.
With an audience of young people, police, policymakers, community organisations, creatives and academics, the performance was followed by extensive further discussion and provocations for an agenda for change. This project partnership will continue to develop, with further work with young audiences in 2024.
In addition to the performance on 1st December 2023, there were further ways to explore these issues: through a photographic exhibition from Kay Rufai's Barriers to Bridges project, produced as artist in residence with West Midlands Police; bespoke workshops for young people in the weeks leading up to the performance; and workshops on the day of the performance, centring on themes of safety, police and criminal justice.
Our creative partners
Amahra Spence, writer, whose previous works include Abuelo (Birmingham REP); Concubine (Birmingham REP); Utopia (Theatre Absolute) and Architectures of Abolition (2022). Amahra is also founding director of MAIA, an organisation engaging culture as a strategy to build community infrastructure oriented towards liberation, and organiser of Land Black, a spatial practice and speculative design studio.
Jen Davis, director & dramaturg, who has directed new writing in a variety of contexts for the Hampstead Theatre, RSC, Birmingham REP, Belgrade Theatre, Warwick Arts Centre, Assembly Venues, Midlands Art Centre, Women & Theatre, VAULT Festival, King’s Head Theatre, BOLDtext and Streetwise Opera.
Joe Rose, producer, who is a Creative Producer from the Midlands. He is the Interim Producer at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, as well working with organisations like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Jerwood Arts as a freelance producer and changemaker. He is a Weston Jerwood Fellow, and is supported by the Stage One.
Images from the production (photographer Nicola Young).