We chatted with FRONTLINEdance Ltd a couple of weeks ago about their work across North Staffordshire. They now have news of a special project to mark the Queen’s Jubilee, and they’re looking for dancers of all ages and abilities to take part.
PODCAST: 5 minutes
Rachael Lines, creative director, said: “2022 marks 70 years since Her Majesty the Queen ascended the throne, and FRONTLINEdance has been awarded some funding to host a creative and cultural event to celebrate.
“We are creating an event called ‘With Soundness of Heart’, which is an inter-generational inclusive performance project, and this weekend is when it all starts.”
The project is now looking for dancers to take part. The first creative meet-ups for interested participants take place this weekend at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Further rehearsals take place on 11th and 18th June. The finished performance will take place in Hanley on 25th June.
“We always open our doors to non-dancers as well as professional dancers,” said Rachael. “This project does exactly that. It welcomes those with previous dance experience and those completely new to dance. The performance will be co-created. It’s going to be very inclusive, and very accessible to people with disabilities and long-term health conditions as well, because that’s who we are.”
Can’t dance? Won’t dance? There’s also opportunities for spoken word artists to get involved, and the event also needs volunteers too.
Funding has come from Arts Council England’s Jubilee Fund, Staffordshire Community Foundation, and Stoke-on-Trent BID’s Let’s Create Fund.
In this episode, I speak with curator Siobhan McAleer “Shiv” about The Depository of the Dull, an unusual museum that celebrates the overlooked objects of everyday life. Created during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the project invited people to reflect on the ordinary things around them, items that might appear dull at first glance but carry deeply personal stories.
PODCAST: 12 minutes
Shiv explains how the project began as a creative response to the isolation of lockdown, encouraging people to look again at their surroundings and rediscover meaning in the mundane.
Our conversation explores why ordinary objects matter, how storytelling transforms the value of everyday things, and what these small artefacts reveal about our lives.
Shiv also reflects on the curatorial challenge of presenting something intentionally “dull”, and why the humour of the title hides a deeper reflection on attachment, loss and memory.
“I think there’s something about that when you really lean in to the form you’re working in, be that a website or be that an audio piece, and you bring your theatricality to that, I think really exciting things can happen.” Ruby Thompson, Artistic Director, The Herd theatre company, Hull, UK.
Ruby is Artistic Director of The Herd, a theatre company in Hull, in the north of England.
The Herd have been collaborating with Stand and Be Counted, another theatre company, based in Bradford, also in the north of England.
Together, the two companies have created an audio walk adventure called Hidden Winter.
Hidden Winter follows 8-year-old Hiba, a mischievous cat, and a trail of winter clothes in a story celebrating the joys and difficulties of making friends in a new place.
PODCAST: 35 minutes
In this podcast, the creative team behind Hidden Winter audio adventure, tell me about the joys and difficulties of adapting their theatre and storytelling skills to reach audiences during the pandemic’s lockdowns and restrictions.
It’s a process that’s presented lots of opportunities for learning new skills, and for doing theatre in a different way.
My guests are:
Ruby Thompson, Artistic Director of The Herd.
Rosie MacPherson, Artistic Director of Stand and Be Counted,
and Firas Chihi, narrator and translator of Hidden Winter.
“We can’t stop engaging with our participants. We can’t stop the work that we do. We are a point of support. So to be able to make work with participants, that they can see is definitely going to happen and have a life, has been really important and crucial in keeping things going.” Rosie MacPherson, Stand and Be Counted theatre company, Bradford.
This week I visited a useful little project that might just have big impacts on our future. One that can help us to reduce the stresses we’re putting on the planet, as well as reducing the stresses we put on our own pockets.
It’s called the Hull Library of Stuff, and its Director is Alan Dalgairns.
I love gadgets, right? When I was 12, I had a study, and I used to fix things for people. It was under the stairs. It was right next to a gas meter. I used to drive my mum up the wall by taking things apart because I always wanted to know how they worked, sometimes I put it back together, not always! I used to have friends who used to bring round broken toasters and I used to fix them and then give them back. Yeah, I love gadgets and I love taking things apart, so this is perfect,” said Alan Dalgairns.
Alan is the founder of the Hull Library of Stuff, a project which opened its doors in March this year. The Library of Stuff is a an organisation that lends things to people.
PODCAST: 12 minutes
“Think of it as like a book library, but actually we do everything other than books. So there’s all sorts of equipment, DIY equipment cleaning equipment, hobby equipment, all sorts of stuff,” said Alan.
The seeds of the idea for this project were planted as far back as 2006, when Alan bought an item off eBay to do a task.
“It was a film scanner for scanning negatives and slides, to scan all my dad’s old slides. When I finished with it I put it back on eBay and sold it again, and I sold it for the same price I bought it for. I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder how many people have bought this before me?’ In those days you could go on eBay and have a look. I went back six people, and I thought ‘they’re basically borrowing it’”, said Alan.
Alan had identified a trend. In essence, people were using an auction site to borrow items for a short time to complete one-off tasks, with all the added hassle of posting and packaging the tools they were purchasing and returning. He knew there must be a more efficient way of meeting people’s needs.
“Then I found the library of things movement,” said Alan. “It’s actually a movement that started in America in around the 1970s. So there was one in California in about 73, something like that. It opened to share tools, it was a tool library.”
The Hull Library of Stuff, which is situated on Cottingham Road, now has 300 members, and has so far lent 260 items.
Alan explained: “It’s getting people to notice that there is a different way of doing things. What we’ve done is we’ve made this available online. It’s like an online catalog. It’s like going to Argos. You can go online, you can look for an item, you join for a £1, and then you can book it out for a full week. You pay a small fee to book it out. Then, if after a week you still need it, you can extend it for another week, if it’s available. So the plan is that we have a store of equipment that people can borrow without having to physically buy it.”
The project has two clear aims, Alan explained.
Firstly, the Hull Library of Stuff helps people to save money, avoiding expensive purchases and hire costs.
“One of the things that I have done is aimed this at people who haven’t got money, who haven’t got the ability to buy these things anyway. So we aimed our pricing specifically at people who can’t afford to buy these things, but they could borrow it for a week and do the job.
“I don’t want people to be getting into poverty or getting into money troubles because they they’ve bought something that they can’t afford.
“We’ve had someone who was going to buy a jet washer on hire purchase because they couldn’t afford one. And they came and borrowed ours, it was £13 pound for a week and they managed to get the job done doing that,” said Alan.
Another example of an item people can borrow, helping them to save money, is the library’s ‘car computer’, a diagnostics tool which identifies the problem behind a dashboard warning light, maybe allowing the car’s owner to fix an issue themselves.
The second mission aim of the Hull Library of Stuff is to help reduce the environmental impacts of manufacturing, owning, and disposing of ‘stuff’.
Many of us own cheap power tools that we rarely use, they just sit on a shelf in the garage.
Alan shared some alarming data about these little-used tools.
He said: “There was some research done recently that suggested that a DIY power drill only gets used for thirteen minutes of its entire life, thirteen. So the rest of the time it’s sat in storage. So you think about all of the garages in the whole world and how many tools are sat there that are not being utilised 99% of the time.
“And that power tool was probably designed to be used for 15 minutes as well. That’s the problem, they’ve got to a point where they can produce something very cheaply, and people can get access to stuff really cheaply, but the problem is that they’re not designed to last a long time. So what happens is, rather than someone selling it on when they’re finished with it, it ends up in the skip. There’s batteries, lithium batteries, and all of that type of stuff that you’ve got to deal with as special waste as well.”
The Hull Library of Stuff is open for two days each week for borrowers to pick up and return items – Tuesday and Wednesday, 10am to 7pm. Items can be browsed and booked online throughout the week.
The range of items available to borrowers is wide and growing.
“We’ve got disco equipment, we’ve got a small disco set-up, which is perfect for a house or a small hall. You can borrow a smoke machine as well, if you want to give it the full effect. I’ve got fishing gear, if you want to go and do some fishing. I’ve got laminators. I’ve got a load of film and photography equipment to convert old analog stuff to digital. Lots of DIY equipment. I’ve got a a cement mixer that will fit in a car. We’ve got a compactor, an electric compactor. A rotavator, quite a bit of gardening equipment as well as DIY equipment,” said Alan.
The library’s commercial carpet cleaners are among the most popular items borrowed.
“I went and hired one and did some market research and then bought a really good one. So we’ve got two of them now.
“I’ve just actually shared my top 30 items to another library with the prices we charge, to try and help another library out,” Alan added.
Safety, of course, is a key focus for Alan, as items are booked by borrowers.
“You don’t want to give someone a chainsaw that they’ve never used before and just pop it over the desk and go ‘see you later’. What we’ve done is we’ve got a list of what we class as dangerous items. We do a risk assessment and then decide whether something should be on the dangerous item list or not. If it is, if someone wants to borrow it, they have to spend 15 minutes with us going through a risk assessment,” Alan explained, adding that he’s always happy to advice borrowers on the right tool for the job, and how to use them.
The Hull Library of Stuff is a useful little project, with big plans for the future. It’s projects like this that will help us all to reduce our impact on the planet, as well as reducing impacts on our pockets.
Alan said: “If we can all use one central pot of things, rather than all having our own version of those things, there’ll be less demand, fewer things created. That will reduce the impact of climate change.”
A conversation between an uncle and his nephew around a red ribbon turns into a candid discussion about what it means to be HIV positive and how attitudes and science have changed in the last thirty years.
PODCAST: 12 minutes
CAST AND CREW
Uncle Collin: Andy Train
Matt: Jerome Denton
Written by Josh Whittingham
Produced by Jerome Whittingham
Music: “Overdrive” by Corbyn Kites Zapslat.com
Additional sounds: Youtube Audio Library
Produced for Trade Sexual Health, Leicester, for World AIDS Day 2020
I’ve been to a couple of meetings recently, scrutinising Hull’s ‘net zero carbon’ ambitions. At each of the meetings there’s been a chap who’s challenged us to think about how we should put nature back into everything we do.
That man is Andrew Gibson. He works for Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, he’s one of their conservation officers.
I wanted to know more about what Andrew means by this phrase ‘put nature back into everything we do’. So I took him up on his offer of a drive around the city to look at some examples of what he means.
We met at Andrew’s office in the Trust’s wildlife garden in the corner of Pearson Park. It was a miserably wet day in late November, so you’ll hear the rain splashing on the mic at times.
I began by asking Andrew what sort of environments we’d be looking at…
I’ve been chatting to people, exploring what can be done to reinvigorate retail in Hull city centre.
PODCAST: 30 minutes
In this podcast we hear from shopkeepers – all confidently trying out new ventures, we dip into history for ideas, we tackle tax and the business rates conundrum, and you hear one of our local MPs talking very passionately about foliage.
There are solutions to the decline of our High Streets.
Project Blyth, run by the Greenpower Education Trust, offers young people the thrills and spills of the racetrack, but only after they’ve successfully built their own single-seater IET Formula 24 kit cars.
I’ve been been following the progress of Francis Askew Primary School’s car, competing in the IET Formula Goblin class for 9-11 year olds.
Children at Dorchester Primary School in Hull tell me all about The Chewy Project, led by innovative design agency Creative Briefs.
We’ve all had it stuck to our shoe at some point, but these children have been exploring what can be done with chewing gum before it litters the streets.
Recorded as part of my ‘Moved’ project, in which Hull’s movers and shakers recall moments in their life when they’ve been moved by an artistic experience.
PODCAST: 5 minutes
Mark Page, DJ, music promoter, and the guy that brings us The Sesh, shares a moment from his early teenage years that switched him on to the music scene for life.
You know, I think it was that summer I had my 1st kiss with a girl, and it was all about this sort of northern soul scene that had sort of started developing amongst the under 18s. And yeah, it gave me a sense of belonging, away from parents and away from, you know, my brothers and sister. It was, it was our moment.
Mark Page
‘Moved’ was commissioned by Roots & Wings and Hull Library Services. Eventually it ran to 30 interviews.
