We are thrilled to announce Katrine Turner, Davey Anderson, Marie Williamson and Andrea Ling as our Tender Ground artists!

Tender Ground invited socially engaged artists working in performance to apply for a short residency focused on experimenting in co-creation with the public, communities or individuals who aren’t usually engaged in theatre making.  

Katrine Turnerwill undertake a period of creative research around the themes of new towns and utopia, childhood and future building. She will work collaboratively with a group of 8-12 year olds in Cranhill in Glasgow using a blend of live performance, recorded interviews and archive footage to explore these themes. As part of her residency she will also gather stories and impressions from people who moved to Cranhill in the 1950s as children. The project will explore the relationship children have to the future, the false promise of utopia the new towns offered and the experience of childhood in a new town today.    

Tracing the path of a lost river, telling forgotten stories along the way, Davey Andersonwill engage with communities in the East End of Glasgow to explore the city’s founding legends, secret histories and myths about the future. When St Mungo settled in the place we now call Glasgow, he built his church on the banks of a beautiful burn. When the Merchants turned the opposite hill into a Necropolis, they built a magnificent bridge to carry their coffins over the stream. By this time, the pristine waters had already become an open sewer. These days, if you go to the bridge and look down, there’s no sign of a river. So where did it go? And what other dirty secrets have we buried beneath the city streets? This project combines urban exploring, counter-mapping, folk singing and puppet-building, with a wee bit of Situationist-inspired mischief making.  

Marie Williamson's project brings football supporters and theatre together through the power of football chants. Working with supporters of Hibernian Football Club, Marie will explore how football chant's express identity, solidarity, humour and social commentary. Through conversations and workshops, participants will collaboratively create new chants and movements responding to a collective social issue. The resulting group will perform both within a football setting and an arts venue, creating a space to explore how different audiences respond to the same collective act. This project asks what can emerge when football culture and the arts overlap, challenging assumptions about who participates in performance and where it belongs.  

Andrea Ling is leading a practical research enquiry into what kinds of “containers” or spaces teenage boys and young men might create for themselves, and what becomes possible when they have agency in shaping them. At a time when conversations around masculinity, identity and polarisation are increasingly present in young people’s lives, Andrea is interested in creating a space that begins with curiosity rather than assumptions. What happens when young men are given agency and authorship? What might movement, co-creation and space-making open up that existing language, expectations and cultural narratives cannot?