Border Crossings has created intercultural theatre to defend peace, justice, freedom of expression, gender equality and human rights since 1995. Our work affects real transformations in people’s lives. We tackle difficult issues, challenging prejudices by providing engagement and education opportunities to communities who have been marginalised.
Our professional theatre and community engagement work go hand in hand: the professional productions give exposure to stories that are rarely told, and our long lasting relationships with grass roots communities steer, inform and feed our artistic vision, which pushes for change and equality for all.
This work has three key strands:
1. Intercultural Theatre Productions
We create new, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary performances in collaboration with artists from different countries and different cultures. Our productions open up spaces for the expression of different viewpoints, ideas and voices. They draw off a broad range of cultural traditions and innovations, shedding new light on the complex relationships generated by the globalised world.
2. Community Engagement, Participation and Learning
We work directly with a broad range of communities across the world, and particularly in the UK. We have worked with unaccompanied refugee children, with students in China and the West Bank, with Muslim women and Roma in London, with young theatre-makers in Botswana. Our community engagement work is like our professional work: it does not instruct, but rather empowers the participants. There is a real dialogue between workshops at a grass roots level and performances on our professional stage: by working closely with and in diverse communities, we can vouch for the authenticity of what we perform.
3. Festivals
We curate and produce the ORIGINS Festival - a gathering of Indigenous artists from around the world in London. Through performance, film, ceremony, debate, food and workshops, ORIGINS opens a dialogue between the First Nations of the planet and the city from which their lands were once colonised. As with all our work, there is an active, dynamic exchange between artists from wildly different backgrounds and a broad range of communities.
