Tomorrow's Great Pageant

Abstract

Tomorrow’s Great Pageant is a socially charged project that re-imagined the iconic Suffrage play, A Pageant of Great Women, for a 21st Century non-binary context. Workshops and participatory events with Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ community performed active ways of debating and co-writing to generate new dialogue and form a network of contemporary voices to comment on issues of gender and freedom. The project launched during The Place Theatre, Bedford’s LGBTQIA+ season in February 2019 with a collective brainstorming event. Guest writers, critics and community activists joined an audience to revisit the structure and message of the historic play and discuss how it could be updated to represent the values and ideals of a diverse 21st century LGBTQIA+ community. Using collective creation, improvisation and debate, Bedford’s local community were then invited to co-author the new play. Workshops led by Ray Filar, Claudia Jefferies and Emma Frankland brought together Q:Youth Bedford, students and local performers over a period of six weeks to debate the original play’s premise and characters, transforming their ideas into a new dialogue and updated script. A final performative event, presented a first sharing of the script at The Place Theatre, Bedford on 6 April 2019. Subsequent sharing’s took place at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham