Birmingham 2022 Festival presents a Women & Theatre production
A Thousand Threads
“A thousand stories, all woven together, spinning our stories, to show the world, this game is ours.”
Celebrating Women’s Cricket being part of the Commonwealth Games for the first time, Women & Theatre produced an engaging community theatre production and podcast series, entitled A Thousand Threads.
Developed from local research, the piece explores broad themes about women and girls’ lives and aspirations, both on and off the pitch.
Structured as a 4-day cricket match, live productions of each day took place at different outdoor locations with final performances of the whole series taking place at Midlands Arts Centre.
Bringing together community performers from across Birmingham and Sandwell, A Thousand Threads featured vibrant live performance, set to a unique soundscape of words and music. BSL and captioned video was available for D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences.
Podcast
A podcast series featuring an audio version of the production is available for download on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from or listen below.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Live Performance
Live performances took place at the following locations:
Selwyn Road Playing Fields, Edgbaston Reservoir, Sunday 15 May 2022
Ward End Park, Ward End, Sunday 29 May 2022
Uplands Manor Primary School, Smethwick, Sunday 19 June 2022
Midlands Arts Centre, Friday 15 – Sunday 17 July 2022
These performances also included the chance for audiences to play cricket with English Cricket Board’s Dream Big Desi Women team who hosted All-stars cricket and Dynamos taster sessions.
Creative Team
Janice Connolly, Jen Davis, Benita Umurerwa, Rupinder Kaur, Ella Barraclough, Sam Frankie Fox, Genevieve Say, Maral Mamaghani.
Logo and artwork designed by Cherie Kwok @cheriekwok_illustration
Evaluation
You can read our evaluation report about the project here.
Partners & Funders
Part of Birmingham 2022 Festival, generously supported by Arts Council England, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, as well as Birmingham City Council, The Roughley Trust, The Feeney Trust, The Grimmitt Trust and Cole Charitable Trust.
