Alongside our local UNISON Local Government and Health Branches the Trades Council is promoting an admission-free performance in Darwen this June (Friday 24th) by the “Banner Theatre Company”.
Banner Theatre is a socialist theatre company based in Birmingham. Formed in 1973, from a disparate collection of folk singers, drama teachers, office workers, broadcasters, technicians and car factory workers, Banner is one of the few companies from the radical community theatre movement of the 1960s-1970s still creating and performing work in partnership with Britain’s Trade Unionists and working class and disenfranchised communities.
Charles Parker, an influential founder member of the company, was a left-wing broadcaster, renowned for producing, along with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, a famous series of radio programmes known as “The Radio Ballads” (1957-1964) that represented the level of engagement of contemporary British folk music with social and political issues.
Parker’s untimely death in 1980, and then the termination of the company’s entire revenue budget in 1985, led to the critical loss of several core members whose roles had contributed key developmental and creative energy to the company. The only two theatre-trained directors in the core group, Frances Rifkin and Anna Seymour, left in 1988 and 1989 respectively. A further blow was dealt when one of Banner’s leading creative lights, Peter Yates, died suddenly in 1990. These factors forced the sole remaining core group member, Dave Rogers, to retreat from anything other than the company’s established performance work. As Rogers has acknowledged, ‘the late 1980s and early 1990s were pretty miserable. We were surviving on peanuts…”.
Rogers has maintained the company’s ethos, traditions, and integrity, working over the years alongside a great many collaborators. Crucially, and at times in isolation, he kept the company afloat in an ever more competitive and reduced funding environment, increasingly hostile to the kind of political work Banner was dedicated to.
Rogers continues to steer Banner’s political and creative direction as scriptwriter, songwriter and researcher, as well as singer, musician and performer. Over the last 40 years he has created or co-created over 50 Banner productions and well over 400 songs. He is also a long-time political activist and campaigner.
The company describes its current productions as ‘video ballads’, a form which, while retaining the essential elements of the early Radio Ballad form, builds upon both creative and technological advances. Still retaining a strong “folk” sensibility, the songs and musical elements in Banner’s productions are central to their aesthetics. Many of them are written from the perspective of the characters seen in video ‘actuality’, and the material constantly relates to an archive of interviews with people with “actual” experience of the issues being examined. A typical Banner play involves the recording of 40 to 60 people whose voices may feature in the production, or whose words may help create scripts and lyrics.
In a recent development, the company has explored more portable methods of presenting the Ballads. Where, up to recently, Banner’s productions would have employed multiple slide and video projectors, the technology is now available to enable the touring company to work from a single Mac laptop, thus enabling performances in a wider variety of spaces. This advance has the additional advantage of enabling the company to re-sequence material on the go. Scripts no longer have to be locked into a particular order but can be changed in the same way as musicians change a set list during a live performance. In this way, the company can respond quickly to political and social events as they arise.
Want to see how all this looks in the flesh?
Tickets are available from here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/banner-theatre-enough-is-enough-in-darwen-this-june-tickets-354539847227