Join our nest!
BECOME A FRIEND OF THE BIRDS AND JOIN OUR NEST
If you believe that no one should be excluded, that access to art and culture is a basic right and not a privilege, then join The Paper Birds’ nest, become a friend, and help us sustain our work.
First and foremost, we hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well in these troubling times.
The Paper Birds has been creating original devised theatre for 17 years and with your help, we can continue our activities that put those who are under-represented, those furthest from power, and those least often seen, centre-stage.
Founded in 2003 by a group of six women who shared a mutual passion for creating original devised theatre, The Paper Birds place empowering female roles and representations of women on the stage. Our high-quality theatre reaches over 12,000 young people each year, teaching them that their voice matters.
We have been very fortunate to secure some Arts Council England Emergency Funding to help sustain our organisation over the coming months. For now we are safe, but not saved: as a small, project funded charity, with no core funding, we are at real risk. Over Spring-Summer 2020 our lost income due to CV-19 amounts to an average of £3,725 per week. We can’t continue without your support.
We wish we could tell you that your support would directly create the opportunity for a young person to attend a workshop or help us develop a new play. But we can't. We need your support just to survive - but by doing so, you'll be making sure we're here to deliver more of that Paper Birds' magic in the future.
If you love The Paper Birds, help ensure we are still here in years to come. If you have anything to spare, please support us. We thank you in advance for your generosity.
A Message from our Artistic Director
“My first experience of theatre was pantomime. It was colourful, loud and funny. The goodies won and the baddies lost. My second, some years later, was Shakespeare. It was complex and wordy, it was dramatic and tragic. It was beautiful, but it was alien, I had to be taught how to appreciate it.
It was only when I began to study drama and was given permission to ‘make’ something that theatre began to feel exciting to me. It allowed me to re-imagine the stories that have gone before; to question who are goodies and who are the baddies? Why are we laughing? Who has really lost?
To us, devising theatre is empowering. It is not about playing out, again and again the stories that have gone before us, it is about making new stories. We want to make work that is relevant, about things that are happening now, to us and around us. We want to pull things apart, we want to hold people to account, we want to celebrate, to warn, to encourage, to challenge people. We might never influence policy, but we can influence people...We want our plays to change the world...one story at a time.”
Jemma McDonnell, Co-Director, The Paper Birds
For more information on supporting The Paper Birds and how we can work together please email Senior Producer Charlotte [email protected]