A transporting arts programme for children aged 8-13 which I co-founded nearly two decades ago. This September I went back to facilitate some sessions in SPID Theatre’s beautifully renovated community rooms at Kensal House.
In 2006, SPID’s Artistic Director Helena Thompson and I started working with the children and young people on the Kensal House estate in Ladbroke Grove. The resident kids banged on the door whilst we were rehearsing a play in the derelict community rooms in late 2005 and asked what we were doing. That’s how SPID Theatre’s youth work began, and how we took up residence on the estate.
You can read about the remarkable story of Kensal House and SPID in my news post from Dec 2025 called ‘Artivist’s Handbook’. Or search the web to read about it in the national press, and watch BBC coverage of the company’s (successful) fight with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
But this is a different story. In those early years of SPID Helena managed to secure funding for us to create a series of new, immersive plays with the teenagers. It was amazing. Large casts of local young people led audiences from scene to scene, whirled them around on wheeled benches with UV murals flashing all around, created buses and bus stops indoors, and worked with a passion, dedication and talent that was exhilarating.
But something wasn’t right. All the funding we were getting came with strings – the work needed to be about knife crime, gang crime, bullying. All the things older people who didn’t really know these young people thought they would be interested in.
And this didn’t sit right with me. I felt that theatre should be about getting away from the here and now, dreaming of things that you’d never seen, playing out ideas and feelings and circumstances very far from your own, and making space for the imagination to take flight. I was bored and frustrated with working with these talented young people in their own clothes, own language and familiar scenarios. Couldn’t we take them far far away, I asked?
So ‘Far Far Away’ was born. A new programme for younger children, aged 8-13, where the subject matter would always be from a time or place far far away from the here and now.
We started with a drama project, ‘My Star’, a beautiful French play by Jean-Claude Grumberg, about intergalactic penpals – one from a planet where the people have the heads of leeks, and another where the people have potato heads. The children go on adventures including a star safari and create a monster which gets out of control.
Over the years Far Far Away expanded to include artforms including animation, radio, film and more.
And this month, many years since I stopped running the programme and it was taken over by SPID’s brilliant outreach director Nnenna Samson, I went back and led a block of sessions on ‘My Star’ with a new group of young people, who loved it as much as their predecessors nearly 20 years ago.
For more information about the programme, click here.