We’ve set up a very short questionnaire on Survey Monkey so if you would like to tell us what you thought we’d be super grateful.

Click here to take survey

I took part last year with a mission to “hack my way into space” which went pretty well, even if everyone did start the weekend thinking I was a total nut.

For 2013, I’m leading two missions (challenges) that I hope you’ll be able to help me with.

MISSION 1
#spacegame

To design a “data-inspired space adventure to inspire the next generation of scientists and space explorers”. I’ll be using the ethos of co-design and hack events to co-create, with whoever wants to participate, a story/adventure that will ultimately lead to me (actually) going to space.

The broad ambition for #spacegame is to create an episodic adventure that an astronaut will play over the duration of their mission to the ISS that will include:

• science and engineering based puzzles that need solving with participation from co-players on Earth
• objects that need designing on Earth and then 3D printed in space to (literally) unlock next levels
• a prize for successful completion that includes unlocking a new musical composition by David Bowie, performed in space.

To help us complete this challenge we will need:

• people to drop in to our hack space at the Met Office and contribute to the creation of the story (we’ll also be inviting contributions virtually – follow us on twitter @unspaceagency over the weekend for live info on how to take part)
• graphic designers, illustrators, animators to create prototype visuals for the story
• technologists specialising in 3D printing to advise on technical possibilities and limitations
• to persuade an astronaut flying to the ISS and their space agency to take part
• an introduction to David Bowie

MISSION 2
#launchjon

Last year the We Love Data team 3D printed Mini Jon with the intention of then launching me on a high altitude weather balloon. Unfortunately time (and red tape) meant that we were unable to get Mini Jon on a launch. However!

Never one to give up, Mini Jon is back for Space Apps 2013 fully intending to take his mission to get to space to the next level as training for his eventual launch beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

To help us complete this challenge we will need:

• technologists specialising in 3D printing or space hardware to design and print/build a capsule for Mini Jon that can be carried by a high altitude
• technologists specialising in video, GPS, 3G broadcast and tracking systems so we can record Mini Jon’s journey (ideally streaming live footage) and retrieve him after his flight
• a high altitude weather balloon and permission to get Mini Jon on it.

If you have the skills, desire and ambition to help us successfully complete these challenges then we’d love for you to join us. While the approach will be very playful, we’re taking the missions very seriously and fully intend to get me to space.

I’ll be speaking by video with various experts (including ESA astronaut Tim Peake who is a patron of the Unlimited Space Agency) over the weekend and uploading our conversations to UNSA’s Youtube channel.

Welcome to the missions. I hope you can join us.

It all kicks off at 7pm. Tickets are £7 and can be booked through the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Welcome to the first of what we hope will be many events like this. Come and play!

This summer we’re running an exciting, new project and we’re inviting you to be a big part of it.

Working with technology company Storythings and the University of Dundee’s Product Research Studio, Unlimited are exploring new ways of publishing plays and stories using digital devices such as iPads, Kindles and Galaxies. You can read more about the project here.

Join Our Community Lab
We are inviting interested people who can commit to a series of workshops to make up our ‘Community Lab’, based at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, and become part of the team that will research, design and test a range of new storytelling experiences.

With your help we are aiming to create a brand new, take home experience for mobile devices. A sort of digital bottle that recreates the unique sound, lighting and atmosphere produced through live theatre performance, but handcrafted using technology for people to open at home.

The ‘Community Lab’ will be made up of people from all walks of life including (but not limited to):

• theatre goers, film buffs, bloggers, bookworms, tech-geeks, music lovers, long-time fans of Unlimited’s work and members of the deaf and blind communities
as well as
• people who’ve never been to the theatre, never heard of Unlimited, don’t use “technology” or think that “this sort of thing isn’t for me”.
• Anyone else with skills or interests you think can help us make a brilliant new way of reading plays.

We want to work with as many different people as possible – all we ask is that you’re based in West Yorkshire, can commit to the four sessions between May and October and are up for working as part of a team.

Using Unlimited’s latest show The Noise as the test bed, the Community Lab will investigate how emerging behaviours around mobile reading devices and technologies can help create new forms of digital storytelling that reflect the live experience.

In return for your time and commitment, we will offer:
• travel expenses for each workshop
• refreshments during each workshop
• access support for those with access requirements
• credited recognition as one of the co-creators of this new platform

How To Get Involved

The Community Lab workshops will take place from May-October 2013 over four dates at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on Quarry Hill, Leeds. The size of the Community Lab is limited so we’re asking you to complete a short Note of Interest below so that we can contact you with more information.

To take part in this unique opportunity and to become part of a group that creates something truly innovative, you will need to be available on all of the following dates. We are offering two sessions on each day so that we are as accessible as possible. You are only required to attend one session per day.

To be part of our Community Lab, we’re asking for the following commitment: 

Attendance at 4x 3-hour workshop sessions where we’ll co-design and test whatever we make together. The sessions are currently scheduled for:
• Thursday 2nd May 2013
• Thursday 13th June 2013
• Wednesday 24th July 2013
• Plus one other in October tbc

These workshops will take place at West Yorkshire Playhouse, with a choice of morning or early evening sessions on each day.

Also, we’d value your participation in feedback and evaluation – which will mostly take place within the workshops, but may involve sending us additional thoughts or filling out questionnaires.

We think this project is going to be VERY exciting and A LOT of fun. We’d love for you to join us on this adventure and hope you’ll take a few minutes to fill out the form below.

If you have any questions or need any further information then please contact:
Joanne Wain, Associate Producer
joanne at unlimited dot org dot uk
or on 07736 381856

Welcome to the show. We hope you can make it.

NOTE OF INTEREST

Mark is currently Senior Manager of Funding Programmes at ACE Yorkshire and is also a writer and (lapsed) actor. When he was first at Arts Council, he was our Drama Officer for several years through a crucial time in the company’s development. We’re enormously lucky to have him on board and are massively excited about working with through the next stage Unlimited’s development.

‘If I was going to leave the Arts Council and return to work directly back in the arts, I had promised myself that it had to be with a company I valued and believed in. Unlimited is just that and more – they create such an open, democratic and invigorating environment for artists and practitioners that there is no question; you just want to bring the best of yourself to working with them.

Though I am aware of and take very seriously the challenges that face the company and all arts organisations over the next few years, I’m also very excited and just a little bit childlike in anticipation of starting with the company and supporting the great projects they have lined up for the coming year.’

Which means, on a sadder note, that Emma will be leaving the company.

Emma has been a brilliant colleague, friend and a dedicated member of the company over the last four years. She is hard working, passionate, committed, loyal, funny and great company both professionally and socially. All of us at Unlimited have huge admiration for her talent and resilience, and unlimited gratitude for the serious care she has brought to her work and relationships with all of us.

“I’ve had four incredible years working with Unlimited and with some of the most talented, passionate, caring, dedicated and brilliant people. The Unlimited alchemy dissolves the boundaries between work and play so we have a serious amount of fun making important things happen – never “safe” and always inspiring. It’s been a total privilege and I will really miss everyone. Thank you in particular Jon, Clare, Chris and Ric. It’s wonderful to be handing over to someone as amazing as Mark and I know he is going to do the most incredible job.”

Emma is taking up a new role as Senior London Theatre Consortium. We wish her all the best in her new job and hope that we’ll continue to cross paths frequently in the future.

We’re very excited to be one of the first projects to be supported by the Digital R&D fund for the Arts. The scheme is part funded by the National Lottery to support collaboration between organisations with arts projects, technology providers, and researchers. The full list of supported projects can be viewed/downloaded here.

We’ll be working with outstanding partners Storythings (led by our long term collaborator Matt Locke) and Jon Rogers of the Product Research Studio at the University of Dundee, primarily with his Small Society Lab hat on.

Unlimited is the lead organisation for the project through which we’ll test how emerging behaviours around mobile reading devices and technologies can help the performing/live arts to create new forms of digital storytelling based on the live experience, that will (we hope) simultaneously develop and broaden  audiences for our work and facilitate artists and organisations to produce desirable, commercial products.

There were several starting points for this project:

• an ongoing excitement around the possibilities that digital technologies can offer the arts sector – and particularly theatre as a live medium – to find new ways of telling and sharing our stories/work
• a long term ambition to work with new technologies and emerging audience behaviours to find new ways of distributing our stories more widely and (potentially) significantly develop audiences for our work
• and in the particular case of this research project, a dissatisfaction with the existing form of published playscripts as one of the main ways of sharing the theatre we make and write, beyond the moment of live performance.

There is a fascinating and long established relationship between theatre as a live form and a literary form. My bookshelf is lined with playscripts by writers living and dead but, for the most part, I’ve only ever read them for work, not pleasure. I’ve turned to them as a set of instructions for how to stage a performance or as the only archive resource available to me – rather than as a way of experiencing the story. I also find the formatting of traditional script publishing (e.g. character names appearing at the start of each “line”, jargon heavy “stage directions”) make them difficult to read for pleasure.

<As a related side note, Chris Goode wrote a very beautiful (and resonant, for me) critique of the limitations of live streaming  a few years ago. If interested, you can read that here.>

However, there is a fascinating and long established relationship between theatre as a live form and a literary form that we want to explore and reimagine, with theatre and reading both offering audiences a personal and immersive experience in the worlds we create as artists. I’m excited by the potential to allow existing audiences to deepen their experience of the work we make and also, importantly, to increase access and open our and our sector’s work up to a much wider range of audiences.

So this project is a sincere, rigorous wondering about how we can better transpose the stories we’re telling as theatre makers to (an)other medium(s). We’ll be creating a test ‘product’ to be launched alongside the show we’re co-producing with Northern Stage and Warwick Arts Centre in autumn 2013 The Noise. But that will only be a result of the process and, as always for us, the process is key to this project’s success and outcomes…

The resulting prototype, digital iteration of The Noise will test audiences response to the product and gather hard data on its success against clearly set goals.

Further to that prototype testing we will then launch the ‘tool’ – a customisable template for other artists and organisations to use and develop in order to create their own products. That tool will be free to use, with any code resulting being open source and free to use or develop.

OUTCOMES…

The result of this process will, we hope, be of significant benefit to others in our sector producing:

• an open source, customisable ‘drag and drop’ platform for interactive, digital ‘playscripts’
• new formats for publishing plays/performance
• new products for audience engagement/merchandising for the performing arts
• new tracking/metrics tools for performing arts venues

All that said, we’re right at the start of a journey with this project and there is always the potential for transformation. So watch this space…

If you’re based in Leeds or West Yorkshire and are interested in joining the Community Research Lab, then we’d love to hear from you. Please email our administrator Alison and we’ll be in touch soon.

At 0800 this morning, an Initial Public Offering of 10,000 shares in Money the game show was made available to the general public.

Each share costs £1. Maximum ONE share per investor. Shares are available for purchase until end of trading on 13 April 2013. Which is, coincidentally, the last day of the tour for Money the game show.

By buying a share you own absolutely nothing but you will get to vote at the AGM (scheduled for 23 August 2013) on what to do with the money raised from the sale.

To get the full details go here.

To BUY A SHARE go here.

PLEASE NOTE: this is just a game. It’s a game that wants to start a serious conversation about money (What is money? What is it worth? What happens if we stop believing in it?), but a game nonetheless. You won’t *actually* own a share in anything. But we will play the game with utter integrity and everyone will get to vote on what happens to the money at the end and then, we’ll do it. Unless it’s illegal. We won’t do anything illegal.

pic: Simon Kane 

 This scheme is generously supported by Eventbrite who have waived their fees in hosting the share sale for this event

As part of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s ‘Furnace’ weekend, Unlimited Theatre delivered a workshop aimed at developing ideas, meeting new people, and learning new ways to work collaboratively. Having lived in Leeds for five years and now living in London, I was interested to return to my beloved Yorkshire and (having been told about the event by my mother!) was intrigued to see what was happening outside of London, where I struggle to ‘meet new people’ a lot – even though there are 8 million of them.

Standing in the Playhouse café waiting for the UNinspire workshop to start, felt reminiscent of my first day at secondary school. I tried hard to remind myself that at the ripe old age of 26, I should be nonchalant and breezy about the prospect of spending the afternoon with around 40 people I’d never met before.

Despite my caffeine-fuelled nerves however, upon entering the room and being greeted by Jon of Unlimited Theatre, the heart palpitations waned a little. Jon set out a sort of manifesto – three very wise pieces of advice for the afternoon ahead; be generous, don’t be too precious about your ideas, and say ‘yes and’ instead of ‘no but’.

We were then asked to write down an idea on a postcard – it could be big, small, developed, spur of the moment, an observation, or something which might have been niggling at the neurons on the bus. What followed was a sort of ‘idea speed dating’, where we mingled in the room, introduced ourselves, and swapped our postcards. It was a relief to see the postcards pass multiple hands: first manifesto rule acknowledged – at least I couldn’t possibly be precious about that idea any more, and even better, nobody knew it was mine…

In groups of four we knuckled down to achieve the next stage of Jon’s brief – to unfold our cards, and based on what was written, come up with an ‘event’ – something which had a beginning and an end, lasted 30-90 seconds, and could be taught to someone else.

Part of the momentum of this period of generating was the fact we had strict time limitations imposed on us – just a few minutes for each ‘event. The age-old mantra that restrictions can liberate your creativity rang true. A quick glance around the room showed a hub of surreal activity, and an almost tangible creative electricity. We worked eagerly to share ideas, test them, embellish them, dismiss them, turn them upside down and look at them sideways. It felt refreshing to be in a group of strangers, and the energy was exciting, supportive, safe, and all about the task at hand – to take other individual’s ideas, and realize them in some way or another, as a group.

As part of the afternoon, four performances took place in the space, and broke up the pace of the afternoon with a chance to see some diverse and exciting pieces of work. Dug Out theatre performed an improvised scene based on Hamlet, Manic Chord performed a witty analysis of language combining a fast-paced cooking demonstration with physical story-telling, Uncanny Theatre dissected our thirst for superstitions with innovative use of torches, whilst the Flanagan Collective employed beautiful folk harmonies to accompany a narrative.

The final part of the afternoon was the culmination of our group work – for half an hour the centre of the theatre became a playing space which groups and individuals entered and performed the physical and vocal manifestations of the afternoon. We could sit or stand in amongst the action, or we could watch from the edge. It was a living, breathing, spontaneous performance, where surreal and bizarre moments emerged in which you could infer narratives (think flu ridden commuters crossing herd of emotionally unstable cows) or simply watch the beauty of different bodies in space. At times ambient music played, and we all occupied the space, staring up towards the ceiling. We had, as Jon had promised at the start, ‘made a performance’, in the space of only 3 hours – go us!

More than anything, this workshop impressed upon me how great it is to work with new people – and as well as being a good opportunity to network, see ideas flourish, and have fun, it also felt incredibly cathartic. I really appreciated working with other people’s sources of inspiration. If I had been asked to work with my original idea, I think I would have been paralysed. It was a safe space – at times nerve racking, but without the overbearing responsibility to ‘perform’. Instead, it was about collaboration, meeting new people, and the chance to see some, more developed work, which by the way, made me feel quietly miffed that I don’t still live in Leeds now…

Jessica Brooks is a theatre-maker from Yorkshire, currently living in London. She is a member of Mayday Theatre, who will perform their devised show ‘This is a Reconstruction’ at Camden People’s Theatre on 1st and 2nd Dec.

Panel Topic: Why Write and Who to Write For?

What do We Risk When We Play Safe? Clare Duffy

The question ‘why write and who to write for?’ is obviously in two parts and I have two responses. One is very personal and the other much more political. If I don’t write, I believe, I risk my mental health, but I’m proposing that we need a lot of different people writing or we all risk losing everything.

I hate writing. I would much rather have a great meal with my family and friends. I’d much rather be swimming in the cool Agean sea, watching the last rays of a blazing hot day disappear behind the blackening mountains. I’d rather read someone else’s writing than write. I’d rather float away or be charged forward by someone else’s hard work, imagination and knowledge. Of course I would. So. Why write?

It all started when I was a child and people told me stories. Stories from their heads. Stories from their past. Of when they were a child. Or when their parents were kids. Then there were books and people read me stories from them. And I have to say that they were better…on the whole…although they didn’t change from one day to the next and I liked the way the stories from people’s heads could change, depending on what kind of mood the teller was in.

Then I was forced to read these books myself and then I had to learn how to hold a pen and write my own name, which only led to writing other things like sentences and so on, until finally at the age of 22 I learned how to type and started to write stories myself.

And why did I start to write stories? Because I had problems. Massive problems. It turned out that I was a human being in the world. I’d been so busy growing up and learning things like reading and writing and being bounced round by all the stories, that I hadn’t particularly noticed I was also one of those creatures I read about. But I had no clue what that meant. So…there’s the world…all around and everywhere and here’s ‘me’ inside it. Totally unable to make what’s inside make a really satisfying connection with what is outside.

I invested quite a bit of time in going out, dancing, having sex and that was all pretty good. Great in fact.

But in the long run it didn’t change that feeling of confusion much.

And so I started writing. I wrote about what was outside my window and why I was arguing with my friends and about the young people at the youth group I ran, who were hurting themselves and terrifying me. I wrote about the things around me. Just for me. Just to help me understand the world I was in. And then I was ill for a year and wrote nearly everyday only about what was going on outside my window. But I started to notice that those sentences were somehow growing into things that I wanted to read again. It wasn’t just that I needed to write them as therapy for being a confused human being. There was something else. I felt I recognised a growing agency in the words on the page. I was beginning to tell stories that had their own agency separate from me, that maybe, I could give to a stranger, who didn’t need to know me to get the story. I eventually started to get paid to write and so writing helped me understand where I was but also became how I made my way in the world. It became a significant part of the way I was identified by the world.

I recently finished a long-term project where I made performances about writing on a public bench for 24 hours of the day and night in different cities around the UK. It takes about a week to do this in 5-6 hour long slots and through this practice I discovered that I might think I’m writing about the world, but ‘I’ am also authored by where I happen to be in the world.

All of which is to say that when I first started thinking about the title for this panel ‘why write and who to write for’ my first thought was context is everything.

I write because I need to for my own health, so that I can function reasonable well in the world. I still do this, but much less ferociously than when I was in my 20s. I also write because I wanted to be ‘a writer’ and that means that I have to sell my writing to institutions like theatres, arts funding bodies and publishers. But ultimately I am selling my work to a public audience. Again, context is everything. I write with and for a wide range of audiences: children, young adults, local communities, bi-lingual audiences, audiences that expect to sit and watch and audiences that are excited by the experience of getting immersed in the world of the drama. That is, of being able not only to touch that world, but also change it.

What I am most interested in at the moment is looking for ways to forge a connection between the world of the arts and the world of politics. I think I am prone to creating a false separation between the arts and politics. This reminds me of that strong sense of separation I felt between myself and the world when I was younger and which I have for the most part left behind. I need to remind myself constantly to stop thinking about it like that. Of course art is political and politics can be artful. I’m wondering about how art and politics can be more radically integrated so that we can ask what kind of a world we really want to live in and how to make it so.

So…We’ve been asked to share a dangerous idea or experience, a question that you’d never dared to ask, a project that will force us to think beyond the status quo.

This phrase ‘status quo’ is quite interesting. We use it to mean ‘the state of things’ or ‘the way things are’. My status quo is that I live in Tolcross, in Edinburgh, with my partner. We voted SNP last time, but we don’t know how to vote in the referendum for independence. Really we don’t. We talk about it a lot. We just don’t know. We are small business owners. I am a playwright and we also have a shop. We rely on our neighbours for our safety and happiness. I might not ‘be’ Scottish but I do feel now that Tollcross is the place that gives me identity more than any other place in the world…with the possible exception of my parents’ back garden in London and certain views of the Thames.

It seems that the phrase ‘status quo’ is particularly about political power. It comes from a practice of treatise writing, of arranging the relationship between states, typically states that have been engaged in war. I find this interesting because at home we might talk about the pros and cons of Scottish independence but my thoughts about war are taboo. I’ve been told to stop going on about it. So, I thought this must be a dangerous idea that I can offer here at Radar. It might not feel very dangerous at all here. It might seem obvious. It might seem ridiculous. I don’t know. I know that in 2007 for many people it seemed absolutely ridiculous that there could be an economic crisis that would threaten to bring down the whole banking system. If that had happened, wouldn’t war be a very possible consequence?

I thought in 2008 that after governments shored up the banks, that civilians and their governments would have a bit of a chat. I don’t just mean a general election or demonstrations, although those are important things. But I mean a huge, creative re-think or re-make of the questions we want to answer. The way we wind down global debt could be a creative-political event at least on the scale of the Olympics. The risks of what we have to lose if we don’t start imagining other ways to live feel after 2008 very plain. But I didn’t notice that happening. Things just sort of carried on here, more or less, yes of course getting worse, but gradually.

I believe that the context I am in today is that there must be huge changes to our lives if we want to continue in relative peace. This is, or could be, a fantastic opportunity. I’m doing some research at the moment about people working in financial services and I was struck when talking to the CEO of a private equity firm when he told me just a week ago he thought we have now a chance to “re-evaluate the fundamentals.” He’s generally optimistic about the future. He thinks that Greece and Portugal can leave the Euro but if any of the others did “all bets would be off.” A left wing economist told me more pessimistically the day before that if Greece leaves the Euro zone the trouble would “go out into the streets.”

I started by saying that I hate writing. But I know now that on a personal level if I don’t write I risk not connecting with the world, which would make me a lesser person. But if no one writes imaginatively about the world and the way they experience it, what they fear and hope it could be then I believe we all risk losing everything we care about.

Earlier this year, I was invited to speak at the Bush Theatre’s RADAR Festival “Signals from the new writing world” for one of the platform events titled: “The process is god: new ways to develop new plays”. And last night I joined academic James Wilson, poet and writer Sabrina Mahfouz, Head of Programme & Audiences at Warwick Arts Centre Matt Burman, co-artistic director of Theatre Ad Infinitum George Mann and Literary Manager and Dramaturg at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Suzanne Bell. Smart and talented people all so do check out those links if you have ten minutes.

The premise we were asked to respond to was:
A new generation of artist that defies definition is knocking at our doors; how are we inspired to imagine a new way of theatre making and how can literary departments adapt to new ways of developing new plays?

I was (very flatteringly) asked by a lot of people there last night if I could post the “Manifesto” online, so following are my notes. As is always the way I went off piste from the notes a bit, particularly at the beginning but Theatre Voice recorded the event and will apparently be publishing the audio at some stage. Will update links here when they do.

I’m not claiming that there’s anything particularly ‘radical’ or new in the following, though it will of course be new to some people hearing/reading these things for the first time. And saying this stuff is easy. Actually doing these things and pursuing them, consistently, as ideals throughout everything we do is the difficult part. So the real value (for me) in re-stating them is to remind myself so they continue to be more than just words.

Notes from RADAR 2012 – Monday 12th November 2012

Hello.

I’m Jon and I’m one of the founder members and the artistic director of Unlimited who are the co-producers with The Bush of Money: the Game Show which is on here in February next year.

We’re a group of artists who, when we make work as Unlimited, create new plays, stories, adventures, experiences through collaborative processes. The work we make together is always co-authored with equal partnership in the creative process and in collaboration with an ever expanding pool of associate artists, scientists, technologists and educators.

And the process, to us, is the most important part of what we do. We’re fascinated not only with the ‘artistic’ processes by which we create that work but also the social and political processes of how we create the most brilliant environment possible to work in.

There’s a designer, Bruce Mau, who’s most famous for a manifesto he wrote in 1998 that contains 43 ‘laws’ for achieving good and meaningful design, titled “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth“. And I like it, mostly.

No 35 is…
Imitate.
Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable.

And inspired by that and the opportunity of this event I’ve had a go at writing my own Incomplete Manifesto for How To Imagine New Ways for Making New Plays.

Some of the following are principles that we already apply in our own processes and some are ambitions that we strive towards. I’d like to emphasise that these are our preferences for process. There are, of course, many ways of doing things and I’m not closed to those or wanting to impose my preferences on anyone who doesn’t like or agree with them… but they are pretty good ones. I think.

In the spirit of Mau’s No 35 about imitation, my No 1 is the same as Mau’s No 1 – because I wholeheartedly agree with it and it is immaculately expressed.

1. Process is more important than outcome.
When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

2. Start
Just start. Begin. Come together. Do something. Go somewhere. Don’t talk too much. If you talk for more than an hour before you actually then do something, you’ll start talking yourself out of doing anything.

My wife, who is a brilliant woman and accomplished occupational psychologist, told me that the next 13 points in my incomplete manifesto were good and useful but a bit boring and that it didn’t feel like I really got into my stride until No 16. Also, it was much more than ten minutes so I’m going to skip straight to no 16 via 2b

 2b. Always listen to your wife

16. Have fun…
After all the work you’ve put in to achieving all of the above (boring stuff that we’re skipping over here), you might as well. It is more… well, fun.

 17. (Retreat and) Eat Together
If you can, go away, live together – even for a short while. At the very least eat together. Break bread. And ideally cook your own meals and take it in turns to do that. It is the oldest and most intimate way of being together. Apart from sex, and that may not always be the most appropriate way of being together in your process.

 18. Be serious, but not too much…
Take your work seriously, be rigorous. But try not to take yourself too seriously. More often than not, no-one’s dying in the process of making new plays. Of course, if they are, get serious.

 19. Change the world
We used to say “We’re not trying to change the world”. One of our early collaborators asked us “Why not?”. Good question. Worth a try, at least…

 20. Let Go…
…of “your” ideas. Pass them on, invite development. The longer you hold on to them, the less they’ll grow and the more defensive you’ll become of them. Pass them on as a gift and entrust them to your partners in the process. They will look after them in the same way you will theirs.

21. Be a gang
Stand shoulder to shoulder with your partners, colleagues, collaborators – in public at least. Rigorous conversations, disagreements and even arguments are to be embraced in the process. But when you need to, to the outside world who are not yet part of your process, stand up with and stand by the people you’ve chosen to travel with.

22. Difficult, Not Bad
About 12 years ago when there were still 6 of us in Unlimited, in a company meeting that had collapsed into an argument and had started getting personal, Chris said “Just because this is difficult, doesn’t mean it has to be bad”. This was a wise thing to say and a great piece of advice. Making things is difficult. That’s OK. Don’t let the process become bad because of that difficulty.

23. Relax. Don’t Do It…
Have patience. Don’t panic. Take a break. Go for a walk. Listen to music. It’ll come.

 24. Audiences 1
Be clear about who you are making work for. Be specific. Allow the knowledge of who you are making the work for to infect the process and the work you make.

 25. Audiences 2
Remember that your audiences can be a beautiful part of your process and its outcomes, if you want and choose for them to be. Make your work with audiences as well as for them.

 26. Audiences 3
<left blank to insert your own thought/s about audiences and how they might affect your process>

27. Iterate
Show your process workings regularly and invite people (your collaborating partners, family, friends, lovers, audiences …) in to experience them. It’s the best way to set a goal/target, test your process and find out what’s working and what’s not. Reward those people for their generosity in joining you in the process – invite them to actively take part, enjoy each other’s company, feed them, water them, listen to them.

28. Listen
Really listen. Be sincerely open to the potential for change and that someone you’ve never met or don’t like might have insight that you don’t (or can’t).

29. Fail (like a scientist)
Scientists love to fail. Only when we fail, when our assumptions or hypotheses are proved wrong, can we learn anything new. Everyone knows this these days but still, few of us are happy to genuinely put ourselves in a position where we might. But by iterating often, the failure is only momentary and full of learning.

30. Iterate again…
Keep showing your workings!

31. Don’t…
…be ambitious. Be inquisitive. That needs to be attributed to the director Katie Mitchell. It’s a good one.

32. Do…
…explore “other” ways of telling your story. There’s a huge amount of work that goes into imagining, dreaming, structuring, creating, producing our stories and it seems… a shame, to only tell that story with an audience in its “theatre” form? For example, in the process of writing the script for the stage version of a new show we’re making with Northern Stage in Newcastle we’re also, concurrently, writing a version to be read and listened to and interacted with on digital tablets and mobile devices.

33. Formalise
Write the detail of your processes into contracts. It’s always easy to let some of your more “idealistic” elements drop away because of time or money or fear. If… every Thursday during rehearsals you want to invite everyone in the building you’re working in for a home made bun and a chat, write it down, sign the document, cook a bun, share it.

34. There is Always the Potential for Transformation
This is my favourite. If you get to rehearsals on a Thursday and you find that you’re rubbish at making buns and actually this is counter-productive, that’s OK. Make sausage rolls instead. Or buy some carrots. Or whatever. The important thing is to embrace the potential for transformation and not be annoyed by it.

35. The best thing about a plan is…
… that you’ve always got something to come back to when you’ve deviated from the plan and can’t remember where you started.

36. Money
Find it. Work with it. Don’t be scared of it. Don’t trust it but also don’t make assumptions about it. Have a sincere, meaningful conversation with it. Make positive choices about it.

37. Fuck The System
When the existing systems and structures don’t allow or support you to achieve the thing that you want to achieve, fuck them. Create your own, find the people who will support you, go around or over or under or through the walls, be brilliant, do it.

38. Thankyou
Always say thank you and tell people when they’ve been brilliant.

Thank you. For listening. For inviting me to be here and to say these words. You’ve been brilliant.

I’d sincerely love to develop this as a conversation with any of you here today. Maybe we can do that in the bar now?