About Hannah Mulder
Hannah Mulder is a writer, director and founder of MakeShift, a new company dedicated to making work that helps shift the underlying narratives which drive the crises of our time. Through MakeShift, Hannah is exploring how those shifts might help us imagine – and create – thriving futures for all life.
Hannah 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. For the last two decades, Hannah has also been deeply involved in community responses to the climate and ecological emergencies.
As an Associate Artist at Exeter Northcott Theatre, she’s now weaving these two threads together in her new play Unstoppable.
I absolutely love all the people who work at the Northcott. They’re building not only a community of artists but a community of audiences who are interested in having that conversation with artists about work as it’s developing. It’s brought so much support into the artistic community in and around Exeter.
Hannah Mulder
The Associateship
We spoke to Hannah about her experience of being an Associate. Hannah stretches her mind back to 2009, and thinks back to when she responded to an open script submission window at the theatre, then called the Big Read, and was shortlisted into a development process. This led to her first commission: When the Light Comes Through the Trees. She remembers the feelings when her play made it into a rehearsal room with actors and appeared on the Northcott stage as part of an evening of short plays: “I’d worked as a writer in devising processes before, but this was my first solo scripted play that I saw in front of audience. So, it was very very special”.
When Martin Berry became Exeter Northcott’s Creative Director in 2023, he invited South West creatives to get in touch for a cup of tea. Hannah responded, and in that conversation, she mentioned an idea she’d been exploring around tipping points — the moments when systems shift irreversibly from one state to another. Martin’s offer of support gave Hannah something crucial: “A home for the work. It was really important for me as an artist to feel like, here’s somebody who’s excited by this idea and that there’s a home for the work in some way”.
Hannah worked as Associate Director with Martin on The Commotion Time. Then, in 2024 she received an invitation to become an Associate Artist and reflected on how galvanising this was to making her own work again. Beyond that sense of welcome, the Associateship has provided three crucial things: time, space and expertise.
The Northcott team offered advice on Hannah’s Arts Council bid, support that proved invaluable in securing the funding that would enable her to develop Unstoppable. The theatre also provided rehearsal space for development, budgeting and marketing guidance, production support from the team and audiences willing to engage with work-in-progress.
Unstoppable
Her work Unstoppable explores tipping points and imagining positive futures as the first steps towards creating them.
The show fuses a love story between friends and multiple future narratives with interactive audience games and opens up a conversation about how, together, we spark rapid, unstoppable, positive change — just a small task!
Alongside the show, Hannah has created a participatory workshop, titled Unstampable, that invites people to imagine their own positive futures. Through collage, writing or other creative responses, participants play, reflect and creatively explore what thriving futures could feel like.
The workshop can work for people who’ve seen the show or as a standalone experience, and Hannah envisions collaborating with different artists to explore the same prompts through dance, music, writing, visual arts or other forms.
“This show is bringing together my work as a theatre maker with my own personal involvement in community climate action, which I’ve been doing for the last 20 years”.
Hannah Mulder on Unstoppable
More of Hannah’s Work
Hannah’s work spans theatre-making and participatory practice, engaging imagination, story and collective creativity to help shift the narratives which underpin the crises of our time. Her practice is driven by a belief that theatre can work under the skin of our imaginations, creating the story shifts that are essential to cultural transformation. Through MakeShift, Hannah is creating stories and experiences that contribute to the shifts we need to make toward a thriving future for all life. Hannah collaborates closely with producers, dramaturgs and other artists.
Previously Hannah was Co-Artistic Director of award-winning theatre company The Wrong Crowd, resident at Theatre Royal Plymouth. The company made visually inventive shows for cross-generational audiences, which fused puppetry, live performance, and original music and toured 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.
More recently she has been working freelance as a writer, director and facilitator including writing Love Riot and Duffy and the Stiltskin for Miracle Theatre, being Associate Director on The Commotion Time and co-creating a puppetry flash mob for Theatre Royal Plymouth’s Funky Llama Club Night (pictured) in collaboration with Far Flung.
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 has been a performing member of Red Earth Playback Theatre since 2007, using improvised theatre as a tool for listening to under-represented voices.
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