On the 14th July nearly 2000 children will come together in Leeds’ iconic Roundhay Park to install a landscape of banners and build an improvised protest camp. From 7:30pm they will be joined by thousands of others to watch a programme of films and spoken word that highlights the lived experience of the children of Leeds and around the world.  The event ends as night falls, and the children raise their voices to the darkening sky in song. 

Children’s Day: Reimagined promises to be a really extraordinary event and we really hope you can join us there.

Location: Soldier's Field (East) in Roundhay Park, Leeds
Time: 7:30-10pm

Tickets are be available through the Leeds 2023 website.

Commissioned and Produced by Leeds2023, funded by National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

On Monday 14th of November, Dance Reading will be screening our short film 8 Tender Solitudes at 7:30pm followed by an online Q&A with Artistic Director, Sam Butler, plus dance artist at 8pm.

8 Tender Solitudes was created in collaboration with seven extraordinary dancers, each performing alone. Featuring a soaring score by composer Kate Whitley, it’s made from yearning and sensuality, anger and frustration, grief, memory and love.

Over the last year, we’ve had to learn new ways to connect with our friends and our loved ones. We’ve met each other at a distance, but rarely skin to skin. We’ve become fearful of breath, hugging and intimacy, and we’ve thought we might never be touched again.

When we’ve lived like this for so long, can touch ever be the same?

"Stunning. Global, trans-age, dancing digits that evoked the emptiness and pain so felt by all from the loss of intimacy…"

ANONYMOUS VIEWER

We’d like to invite you to take part in a series of nourishing walks with different groups of people who live and work in Tower Hamlets. They take place in Tower Hamlets and are led by Samantha Butler, a Fevered Sleep Artistic Director.

During these walks you ​will explore different themes​,​ connect with new people and the world around you. This event is part of The Health Tree social prescribing project, a partnership with St Margaret’s House.

A group walk which explores the art of listening. We’ll pay attention to birdsong and the sounds of the world around us; with time for reflecting, talking and writing. The walk will last approximately 2 hours and it's free to attend but booking is essential.

If you’d like to talk to us about your access needs or you have any other questions please contact us amy@feveredsleep.co.uk or stuart@stmargaretshouse.org.uk

This event is part of The Health Tree social prescribing project, a partnership with St Margaret’s House.

We’d like to invite you to take part in a series of nourishing walks with different groups of people who live and work in Tower Hamlets. They take place in Tower Hamlets and are led by David Harradine, one of Fevered Sleep’s Co-Artistic Directors.

During these walks you ​will explore different themes​,​ connect with new people and the world around you. This event is part of The Health Tree social prescribing project, a partnership with St Margaret’s House.

This is a group walk in which we’ll pay attention to light, the sky and weather; taking time for creative writing and conversation. The walk will last approximately 2 hours and it's free to attend but booking is essential.

If you’d like to talk to us about your access needs or you have any other questions please contact us amy@feveredsleep.co.uk or stuart@stmargaretshouse.org.uk

This event is part of The Health Tree social prescribing project, a partnership with St Margaret’s House.

As a part of our project, This Grief Thing, we’d like to invite you to attend this one off event, where we’ll be sharing the exceptional performance work of our Commissioned Artists; Akshay Sharma and Rayvenn D’Clark. 

The first performance of the evening is a live reading of Rayvenn’s urgent dialogue; ‘Grief Revisited’: Liquid Blackness. This will be followed by Akshay Sharma’s moving dance solo ‘Whom did the light touch?’ accompanied by cellist Nicole Robson. After these performances we invite you to join us for refreshments and an informal discussion about the work.  

Fevered Sleep commissioned these artists in 2019 to create new works in response to the theme of grief, and this will be the first sharing of those pieces. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic Akshay and Rayvenn have also transformed their ideas in to digital works, which will premiere online on Saturday 5 June.  

The evening will be hosted by Sam Butler and David Harradine, Fevered Sleep’s Artistic Directors. For anyone interested to talk more about grief, Sam and David will also host a mobile Grief Gathering before this event. 

This event has been developed in partnership with Stratford Circus and presented with The Royal Docks Team.

Akshay Sharma is a choreographer, dancer and performer based in London who comes from India. His work as a dance artist is invested in languages that are emotional and dynamic. He believes dance can be an antidote and is invested in exploring its vital untamed labour through rigour, attention and joy. Akshay is currently inspired by the surface of the earth and rocks.

‘Whom did the light touch?’ - A short dance film

This film was commissioned by Fevered Sleep for their project This Grief Thing supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

“In this film a vast landscape pulls together spaces to live within and hold before the day disappears. The film weaves dance, landscape and sounds to create atmospheres of loss, hope and companionship.

Natural light was the starting point, providing a trajectory on which the film sits, exploring how it is held, captured and reflected on the water, cliffs and sand. The title comes from the idea that light falling on a body is reflected and bounces off to fall on another body, visible or invisible - this process of light traveling therefore connects both those present and absent. 

Although the seaside brings joy and the warm feeling of a vacation, for Akshay it is also raw, harsh and bare. It is also where cycles of time interact with eroded histories of the elements. There were moments at the beach where the cliffs, the little patches of moss and warm British sun offered spaces of companionship. Big waves crashing offered a soundscape that melted into the melody of dusk.

Dance has its own significance for Akshay in the middle of a pandemic. He wonders what has accumulated in the body over this period. In its poetry, he believes, dance offers a natural ease in the language of loss.” - Akshay Sharma

Rayvenn D'Clark is a UK-based, digital sculptor, writer/researcher and curator, based in London. Rayvenn’s practice explores the nuances of identity. Her work chronicles black anatomy alongside the handmade aesthetic in the everyday, collective experience.

‘Grief Revisited’: Liquid Blackness

‘Grief’ is at the forefront of national - and global - headlines, as we continue to wage (war) through the Coronavirus pandemic. Now well over a year since the news broke across global headlines, why is it that we still find it so difficult to articulate what grief feels like? As we all move to better understand the modern body politic, we must not, however, neglect the factors that provide the necessary permissions to grieve in a landscape littered with just that; grief and loss in abundance. The dialogue that D'Clark has with herself explores the often inconsolable and incompressible state of black womxnhood.

This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep

Supported by

Arts Council England
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Wellcome
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

We acknowledge the assistance of the 2018 Banff Playwrights Lab – a partnership between the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canada Council for the Arts - in the development of This Grief Thing.

We’d like to invite you to take part in a small group conversation called a Grief Gathering in partnership with Stratford Circus and presented with the Royal Docks Team. We'll meet you at The Pavilion of Remembrance in Thames Barrier Park, and in small groups travel around the park together, talking, listening and learning about grief.

Grief Gatherings are part of our project This Grief Thing, which addresses the silence around grief and grieving. We’re living at a time when many people find death and grief - our own grief or other people’s - almost impossible to talk about. We don’t know what to say, what to do, or how to act. So we stay silent, we pretend that grief doesn’t exist, or we hide it.

We’re really keen to hear from all sorts of people about how easy or difficult they find it to talk about their own or other people’s grief. There is no obligation to talk, you’re welcome to just sit and listen.

The conversation will be hosted by our Artistic Directors Samantha Butler and David Harradine. It will last approximately 90 minutes and is free to attend. If you’d like to talk to us about your access needs or you have any other questions please contact us griefgatherings@feveredsleep.co.uk

This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep

Supported by

Arts Council England
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Wellcome
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

We acknowledge the assistance of the 2018 Banff Playwrights Lab – a partnership between the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canada Council for the Arts - in the development of This Grief Thing.

“It was incredibly useful for me to hear others share how they feel. Even just being able to identify my feelings in others made me feel soothed and brought me a feeling of relief. ”

Grief Gathering Participant

“It was so beautiful. Something about it meant we could just talk gently, and openly, and follow the shared lines of enquiry together, in the last light of the day. It felt like a piece of art in itself. ”

Grief Gathering Participant

We’d like to invite you to take part in a small group conversation called a Grief Gathering as part of our project This Grief Thing which addresses the silence around grief and grieving. This event is presented in partnership with St Margaret’s House.

We’re living at a time when many people find death and grief - our own grief or other people’s - almost impossible to talk about. We don’t know what to say, what to do, or how to act. So we stay silent, we pretend that grief doesn’t exist, or we hide it.

We’re really keen to hear from all sorts of people about how easy or difficult they find it to talk about their own or other people’s grief. There is no obligation to talk, you’re welcome to just sit and listen.

The conversation will be hosted by our Artistic Directors Sam Butler and David Harradine who will be joined by Nurjahan Julie Begum, our Community Engagement Associate. It will last approximately 90 minutes, is free to attend, open to everyone, and will take place in the garden of The Gallery Cafe at St. Margaret’s House. Booking is required.

Nurjahan Julie Begum

Julie started youth and community work in 1986 and, from 1992, went onto teaching adults English for Speakers of Other Languages. In 2002 she began working in the heritage sector and in 2017 started work in adult social care. Julie has written about the Bengali Language Movement, The World in the East End at the V&A Museum of Childhood and a bi-lingual play The Altab Ali Story, which was dramatised in the Season of Bangla Drama. In 2000 she helped set up the Swadhinata Trust and, in 2017, received the Award for Outstanding Service to the Community. It will last approximately 90 minutes and is free to attend.

If you require a British Sign Language interpreter or would like to talk to us about your access needs, or for any other queries, please contact: griefgatherings@feveredsleep.co.uk

This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep

Supported by

Arts Council England
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Wellcome
The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

We acknowledge the assistance of the 2018 Banff Playwrights Lab – a partnership between the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Canada Council for the Arts - in the development of This Grief Thing.

“It was incredibly useful for me to hear others share how they feel. Even just being able to identify my feelings in others made me feel soothed and brought me a feeling of relief. ”

Grief Gathering Participant

“It was so beautiful. Something about it meant we could just talk gently, and openly, and follow the shared lines of enquiry together, in the last light of the day. It felt like a piece of art in itself. ”

Grief Gathering Participant