Latest News: February 2009

New Production | Popular Education | New DVD | Banner People
"They Get Free Mobiles Don't They?"

Banner begins touring a brand new video ballad production in May this year.

We Share the Same Sky looks at migration and the world of work in the context of the gathering global recession. Using video interviews, digital media and new music and song, it entwines the stories of three visitors to Britain: Ali from Afghanistan , who has fled the Taliban and come to England in search of safety; Natalya from Poland, where unemployment has been spiralling, who has come to England in search of work; and Edenis from Venezuela, who compares life in Britain with the popular revolutionary changes taking place in his home country.

The new show weaves these stories into a rich tableau and asks what control we have over our working lives in the crisis-ridden 21 st-century global economy, and whether the economic downturn that now threatens heralds a new period of struggle, resistance and change.

Funding for the show has come from the Academy for Community Leadership, the Amiel & Melburn Trust, Arts Council England West Midlands, Birmingham City Council, the Communication Workers Union, the Fire Brigades Union, the Sir Barry Jackson Trust, Unison, the Unity Theatre Trust and Urban Living.

Banner is taking bookings for the new show now and welcomes enquiries from anyone interested in booking a performance from early May onwards.

Last November, Banner was successful in securing a £5,000 Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England, West Midlands, and a £500 award from CSAP to help support a series of popular education workshops to enable the company to develop popular education techniques for workshops with schools and trade unions.

The workshops took place in early December and were facilitated by Don Bouzek, artistic director of Ground Zero Productions of Edmonton in Canada, and Warwick University Research Fellow, Jacqueline Contré, who is working with Banner to explore the impact of the company’s work on audiences and communities.

They were attended by Banner members, trade union education officers, academics from Birmingham, Exeter and Leeds, and teachers and lecturers in secondary and adult education, including Workers Educational Association (WEA) tutors.

Banner has secured funding from Urban Living in West Bromwich and Unison in Newcastle upon Tyne to do a range of workshops in secondary schools and youth centres, and the company is planning to extend the range of its education work over the next few years, in particular through partnerships with the trade union movement.

If you think your trade union would be interested in booking Banner for educational workshops please contact us. We do training schools and other work regularly for the Fire Brigades Union, the GMB, Unison, USDAW (the shopworkers union), as well as with West Midlands trade unionists, through a partnership with the WEA.

This March Banner will be launching a DVD of its Burning Issues production, which toured England and Wales in 2004/5 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1984/5 Miners Strike.

Burning Issues features interviews with former miners and members of mining communities in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and South Wales, along with film footage of the strike, plus a range of songs, some written at the time of the strike and some written specifically for the show.

The DVD is of a live performance from March 2004 at Hetton Community Centre in Hetton-le-Hole, Tyne and Wear, which was booked by the then Unison national president, Dave Anderson, and filmed by Swingbridge Video. The Banner performers are artistic director Dave Rogers, violinist/singer Jilah Bakhshayesh and guitarist/ singer Fred Wisdom.

The DVD has been made possible by generous donations to Banner from the National Union of Mineworkers and the Fire Brigades Union in Staffordshire.

Copies of the Burning Issues DVD will be available from early March, price £12.00, including postage and packing, from the Banner office.

Banner people

Following the tour of “They Get Free Mobiles, Don’t They?”, Jilah Bakhshayesh has stepped down from performing with the company as she is expecting a baby in the spring, though she continues to do tour organising work. We would like to thanks Jilah for her work with Banner over more than six years and the contributions she has made towards expanding the company’s musical repertoire, and through her performances in Migrant Voices, Burning Issues, Wild Geese and Mobiles.

Replacing Jilah is singer/musician Laura Owen-Wright who plays guitar, keyboards, flute, ukelele and Balinese gamelin. Laura is originally from New Zealand and has worked in theatre in Auckland, as well as a professional musician in the UK.

Also stepping down from touring is sound engineer and video editor Charlie Davis, who will continue in his role as video editor. Charlie is replaced as sound engineer and technical manager by Barry McParland, a former technical manager with Staffordshire University students union, who has also done sound engineering and front-of-house work, including a spell with Staffordshire Gatehouse Theatre.

"They Get Free Mobiles..Don’t They?"

The company completed its final tour of “They Get Free Mobiles, Don’t They?” in December. The Mobiles show, which began touring in late spring 2007, visited towns and cities throughout England and Wales, as well as featuring for a week at the Bergen International Festival in Norway last October. Altogether the company gave 87 performances of the show.

If you missed the Mobiles tour, we still have copies of the DVD of the show available from the Banner office, price £12.00, including postage and packing.