The Beautiful Journey

The Beautiful Journey is part of my ongoing practice-led research, in collaboration with Wildworks, exploring theatre-making as a site for community engagement, democratic articipation and collective identity creation. It deals politically with critical issues of our time: How do we face up to an uncertain future and how do communities make the transition from inactive nostalgia and sentimentality to courageous action in the face of the unknown and unpredictable? My role in The Beautiful Journey was primarily as Writer and Community Director, working as part of the Wildworks team and the wider community effort. The work was part of Wildworks's research and performance journey to create and exchange narratives that belong to local communities and are performed in the locations where community identity and narrative are forged. The method involved eclectic ethnographic research using a variety of sources: archives, artifacts, local historians, old photographs and community conversations, observing the process of memory and its effect on the value that people place on their environments. Within my wider role for Wildworks, I create and maintain relationships with host communities, exploring their relationships with place and memory to create narrative to fit each new location. This work addressed and unearthed the issues, affections and lives around the declining Devonport shipyard., The Beautiful Journey was a site specific project, a partnership between WildWorks, Plymouth Theatre Royal and Culture 10, commissioned in 2009 to work with the Royal Navy Dockyard, Devonport and Oceana Business Park on the North Bank of the Tyne.