Tuesday 15 April 2025
Blue Fire Theatre and Artists Make Space
Artists Make Space provides free creative workspaces across the borough through Richmond Arts Service which is part of Richmond Council. Blue Fire Theatre took part in the 2024-25 programme and here they share their experience.
Blue Fire Theatre Co is an independent theatre company. They concentrate on telling untold stories and making history relevant and relatable to today’s audiences. Their work includes connecting with musicians using a cinematic approach to music. Lottie Walker writes about how the Artists Make Space programme give Blue Fire Theatre the time and space they needed to research and experiment:
“We got a little carried away and creative whilst up at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year and decided our next theatrical project would be… well, let’s just say – impractical. But nobody made artistic history by playing it safe, so we decided to go ahead anyway.
We were so fortunate to have been offered space at OSO Arts Centre as part of the Artists Make Space initiative and spent two months working on said ambitious piece of groundbreaking theatre. During these two months we had meetings, workshopped ideas, rehearsed and called in favours from everyone we know. We filmed short videos for social media, brainstormed for hours and wrote SO many research notes. And the upshot was – we aborted the mission! What we’d planned was never going to work in the format we’d hoped. However, we did manage to salvage some of the many strands of work involved and not only have the beginnings of a much stronger, more workable – and indeed more commercial – script but all that research has paid off in dividends. There’s enough material there to keep us in podcast episodes and TikTok videos for the foreseeable future.
And this is why the Artists Make space scheme is so valuable and so important. As an independent company with no external funding, we simply don’t have the luxury of paying for space to work on material in this way. We can barely afford the essential rehearsal space we need for finished pieces before we tour them. This gift of time and space gave us the opportunity to discover that our original project was hitting a dead end. It all seemed such a good idea in the creative bubble of Edinburgh in August. Not so on a cold Autumn Day in Barnes!
I’d hoped when writing this to be able to give details of the first performance of a brave new piece of theatre and this has evidently not come to pass, but something creative has indeed come out of our time as part of the programme. In addition to the above projects born out of the ashes of our original idea, we were recently able to record four short audio plays for our podcast during an extra day of the Artists Make Space programme at Orleans House Gallery.
Those eight weeks at the OSO Arts Centre in the Artists Make Space programme have been invaluable in our planning for 2025 and beyond. We’re so grateful!”