Bloomin' Buds
Bloomin’ Buds Theatre Company creates professional verbatim theatre exploring working-class narratives.
Two female actors stand side by side both making pretend calls on mobile phones and reading from scripts as they rehearse for a play
Image Credit ©Bloomin Buds
↓
When the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, I was pregnant. I started shielding on 16 March, so we stopped all of our sessions. Instead, we tried to take creativity to the homes of people we would usually work with to make it accessible to everyone.
A young actress stands facing the camera in bright sunlight in a cobbled Bradford back lane with wheelie bins lined down both sides of the lane
We had lots of arts and crafts materials, so I decided to give them out to children whose parents were struggling financially to entertain them all day long. We distributed just over 2,000 arts-and-crafts packs in Bradford in April 2020. With Arts Council England funding, we also created an online exhibition called Working-Class Voices in Lockdown in which 11 working-class artists produced content on our social media.
A lot of people from disadvantaged backgrounds are already resourceful and creative. They have to be to survive. They don’t often have the opportunity to channel that in an artistic way. If you’ve got a family and you can’t pay bills, you can’t feed your children, you’re worried about losing your job, or someone in the house is suffering from poor mental health, going to a theatre is going to be the last thing on your to-do list. If there were the right kind of support to channel the creativity, resourcefulness and initiative a lot of working-class people have to have, they could do great things.
For creativity in Bradford to thrive in every corner, there needs to be more outreach work done in local communities about what’s already going on. Now is our chance to reach out to those people and take creativity to them in a way that is accessible. That is what Bloomin’ Buds is doing.
Katie Mahon
Founder & Artistic Director