About Hannah Mulder
Hannah is a writer and director. She’s currently re-imagining her practice, starting a new company and fusing her long-standing involvement in community responses to the climate and ecological crises more closely with her theatre-making.
She has always been fascinated by the power of theatre and playfulness to work under the skin of our imaginations, to shift narratives and myths which underpin our ways of thinking and being.
About Hannah’s work
A gap exists between our intellectual grasp of what we face, and its real meaning for ourselves, for the people, creatures and places we love. This gap is where we must make art.
Amber Massie-Blomfield in Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World
During her time as Associate, Hannah will be developing a new show and participatory project. Drawing on her research into living systems science, positive social tipping points, and “thrutopian” storytelling, the project invites audiences and participants into vivid, collective acts of future-imagining. What might a just and thriving future feel like: one where all life can flourish? Who gets to shape it? And how might imagining these futures be a first, radical step towards making them real?
The show will fuse a love story between friends and multiple future narratives with interactive audience games and open up a conversation about how, together, we spark rapid, unstoppable, positive change – just a small task!
It is my belief that we will create the future we long for only because we are able to master the art of telling the most compelling stories. Stories that are delicious, irresistible, mesmerising. Stories that cultivate a deep deep longing.
Rob Hopkins, author of How to Fall in Love with the Future and From What is to What if
Over the last few years, Hannah has worked as a freelance director, writer and facilitator on a range of projects, highlights being as Associate Director on The Commotion Time at Exeter Northcott, writing Love Riot for Miracle Theatre and co-creating a neon puppetry flash-mob with disabled participants for the Funky Llama club night (pictured), in collaboration with Far Flung and Theatre Royal Plymouth.
From 2011 – 2019 she was Co-Artistic Director of award-winning theatre company The Wrong Crowd, making visually inventive, emotionally resonant shows that fused puppetry, live performance, and original music, touring nationally and internationally. She wrote, directed or co-created: The Girl with the Iron Claws, HAG, Kite, Snow White and the Happy Ever After Beauty Salon, Swanhunter and The Imagination Project. The company loved to unearth wilder, older versions of less well-known fairy tales and myths and turn the classic ones a little upside down.
Before co-founding The Wrong Crowd, she was grateful to start out making work in the supportive ecology of the South West, writing performance text for young people’s dance theatre shows at Barbican Theatre, such as One Small Step at the, then derelict, Royal William Yard, writing for Hidden City Festival in Plymouth and seeing her first short play, When the Light Comes Through the Trees, on the Northcott Stage in 2009, as part of a project inviting women writers to respond to a production of A Doll’s House.
She has also worked in many community settings, teaching, mentoring young people and co-creating work with a wide range of groups and organisations and been a performing member of RedEarth Playback Theatre for eighteen years, using improvised theatre as a tool for listening to under-represented voices.
I’m very excited to be embarking on a year at the Northcott as an Associate Artist. I’m so thrilled to be part of such a flourishing, welcoming organisation that is evolving new ways of working, supporting artists in myriad ways and putting thriving community at the heart of what it does.
In the science of tipping points there is a concept called “enabling conditions” which are all the many things that lay the groundwork for a system to suddenly and irreversibly shift from one way of being to another. I think we can all feel the systems we live in right now are unstable! And how we shape where they shift to, it seems to me, requires story and togetherness. Theatre does story and together pretty brilliantly, so I’m daring to hope that the work we make can be part of those “enabling conditions” towards a just and flourishing future for all life. And to laugh and play together while we do it.
Hannah Mulder
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