Dr David Bullen, my colleague from the Drama department at Royal Holloway, has been on board almost from the beginning and I am very grateful to him for this. As a theatre director and dramaturg as well as an academic teacher and writer, he brings to the project his rich experience with community and action theatre. David is also a co-founder of By Jove, a collective of artists and academics keen on ‘pulling myths apart and weaving them back together for contemporary audiences’. This mission also permeates his contributions to our co-creative workshops where role play and story-telling encourage and inspire future participants to build bridges and experience belonging.

Karl Falconer is a theatre director in Liverpool and a Royal Holloway PhD student working on the arts and community engagement. Karl and I have teamed up to work up resources and a program of civic engagement around woods, wellbeing, and urban greening prompted by the myth of King Erisychthon and the felling of Demeter’s sacred Oak. As Karl is also a local authority employee, our joint project blends happily many different strands of his expertise and experience.

Myth and Voice is committed to support a wide variety of community groups, whether through isolated events or a longer-term program. It is especially exciting when, as trust develops with time, particular communities become long term partners.

Dan Fisher from Winston Churchill School at Woking in Surrey and Dr Lorna Robinson, director of the Iris project and the Rumble Museum at Cheney at East Oxford are two such much valued collaborators. Their communities and their aspirations act as forces of renewal for Myth and Voice, as we adapt our presence and our materials to suit their needs. We have worked closely with Dan to create experiences that bring different year groups together in shared spaces of reflecting and debating and motivate older students to trial models of leadership suitable to them. And Lorna’s commitment to crafting and playfulness in learning and self-expression inspired the popular Myth and Voice cafes that are now available.

Ottilie Cheetham of East Walthamstow School for Girls and of Classics for All is a valuable friend and adviser of Myth and Voice offering generously time, thoughts and ideas drawn from her experiences of many schools and classes. I always enjoy, and benefit from, our ‘blue-sky’ meetings.

It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the project thrives on the youthful exuberance, inventiveness and energy of its volunteer student co-creators who offer time and imagination so generously in amidst their very full schedules in university, at work, etc.

• Chloe, Daisy, Emma, Harriet, Sam and Zoe were the first ever student co-creators of Myth and Voice whose artful ideas gave life to the first participatory workshop of the programme that has now offered many school students the opportunity to build exciting and moving alternative lives and a voice for silent Eurydice. I will be for ever in their debt for putting trust and energy into the program in its very first hesitant steps.
• Then came Lisa, Lucy and T-J who set themselves the task to explore innovative ways to engage new audiences with the probing voice of another young girl, Arachne, and through her, with powerful movements of today.
• We followed up with resources on Phaethon, the boy who set the world on flames, inventively curated by Amber, Honor, Lucy, Rusty, and Son who worked out astute ways to motivate future audiences to debate ecology, accountability and privilege as vital conversations around climate change.
• Extending our repertory, Cameron and Jake put their heads together to workshop a myth that intrigued them both: Pentheus and the Maenads. Ideas bounced back and forth and we have now put together a resource stimulating conversation around citizenship, surveillance and civil unrest that we’re very excited about.
• Cameron and Jake returned one last time before their graduation and teamed up with Eleanor to design highly animated activities inspired by the myth of Echo and Narcissus for young audiences to reflect on and debate social media, self-perception, self-projection, even self-delusion and other such urgent contemporary issues.
• It was then Eleanor’s turn to come back once more and join Ashleigh, Hugo, Jojo, Linnie, Orlanda, Polly, Tom, and Zayneb. They explored and helped each other calibrate a multi-sensory interactive environment in which participants are invited to empathise with the war’s impact on the society’s most vulnerable through patchwork portraits giving voice to the women that the war in Troy left bereft and homeless.

Being Human is a unique annual, UK-wide, cultural environment and opportunity. For a week every November academic researchers, creative practitioners of all kinds, social partners, and local communities come together to celebrate ideas and cultures that shape our towns, our cities and our neighbourhoods.  

Myth and Voice was truly excited to have been included into the program of the 2024 Being Human festival with ‘Rebuilding Troy in Hammersmith’. For more details of that wonderful afternoon please check under Festivals.

Being part of Being Human offered to Myth and Voice invaluable experience of working with neighbourhood partners and local communities that we hope to hone and expand within the festival’s supportive buffer and beyond, in years to come.