Origins Festival took up residency at Birmingham Hippodrome last month - showcasing new work from eight home-grown writers and exploring how such work can be created, nurtured and developed in new and fruitful ways. One of the festival’s participants, Grace Barrington, and the Hippodrome’s Head of New Work & Artistic Development, Sophia Griffin, spoke to What’s On about why this year’s festival was such a success...

West Midlands audiences were treated to a host of performances of new shows when the week-long Origins Festival took over Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre in May.

The festival showcased the work of eight local writers who have spent the last 18 months on the theatre’s Origins artist development programme, which culminated in live performances in the venue’s Patrick Studio.

Each artist staged their piece as a work-in-progress, with a professional director and actors, in front of largely sold-out houses. And the writers -  Zakariye Abdillahi, Grace Barrington, Tina Hofman, Nathan Sebastian Lafayette, Jaz Morrison, Elizabeth O’Connor, Amerah Saleh and Louis Wharton - created a series of hugely entertaining shows featuring drama, comedy, poetry and dance.

Launched by the Hippodrome’s New Work & Artist Development Department, the Origins programme aims to offer support and encouragement to the writers to develop their practice and their work.

Opening the festival was Grace Barrington’s Money For Nothing - a comedic tale set in a social club in Yardley. Twenty-nine-year-old Grace, who grew up in Ladywood and has lived in different parts of Birmingham and the West Midlands, shared the first two acts of the play, leaving audiences with a cliffhanger for the third act.

“Seeing it on stage made me feel a bit emotional,” she says. “It’s been an idea that I have had in my brain for a really long time and then was fortunate to have the Origins programme to explore it through.”

Grace co-hosts Writer’s Block at Birmingham Hippodrome, which offers local artists the chance to test out ideas, so she knows the value of sharing work-in-progress: “You need your work to meet an audience to see how it lands in a space. Energy is always a really useful indicator of what’s working and what isn’t. You can feel when you really win an audience round or when a certain character enters and people sit forward.”

But Origins is about so much more than the final performance. With support from the Hippodrome’s New Work & Artistic Development team - Anna Himali Howard, Maria-Magdalena Mineva and Sophia Griffin - the group initially explored different aspects of theatremaking, seeing shows and taking part in workshops and discussions. 

Then, gradually, the focus turned towards their individual pieces and preparing them to be staged.
“Anna has been a dramaturgical guide throughout the process, and she has a really gentle approach,” Grace explains. “I think we’ve all felt really held over the last 18 months, and then the last six months have felt more intense. The stakes have risen slightly, and we’ve come to terms with the fact that people are finally going to see this thing that has lived in our brains or in conversations for a really long time.”

Sharing ideas and work with the other members of the cohort has also been a huge help, Grace says. 

“One of the most beautiful things about an artist development programme is that it isn’t just access to the building, it’s also the new relationships that you build through the cohort, and those can be some of the most transformative relationships personally and professionally. 

“I feel like these relationships are going to last for a long time, and that ecosystem in itself will continue to create exciting things.”

After sharing Money For Nothing with an audience, Grace now intends to continue developing the play.

“I want to do some digesting. There are definitely some things I want to work on around the draft. We also have some time with Anna and get some feedback from the directors that we worked with, so that all gives us things to think about. 

“I’m very committed to getting the play to a place where it needs to be and that I feel confident in. I feel like I’ve got the right people around me to get the draft there, and then it’s the next step, which is how you pitch that to the industry and get it produced.”

For the Hippodrome’s Head of New Work & Artistic Development, Sophia Griffin, the Origins Festival has been a celebration of all the elements of the programme over the past 18 months. 

“Our two main areas of focus were to support artists to make the work that felt most alive to them, and to ensure that the process was as important as the performance at the end. This was our first time running Origins. It’s been a big deal and there will be a lot of learning, but the fact we were able to achieve those two things and sell the festival out means we’re very happy.”

Sophia says Origins also shows that there’s an appetite for theatregoers to experience new and West Midlands-based writing.

“This festival has been so well supported and received. I think there’s a real misconception in the industry about risk and new work and whether it’s worth the investment. I think we have really shown that it is. 

“There is an audience for it, there is real support for it. It’s important for artists, it’s important for audiences, and it’s important for the region as a whole that we continue with these programmes and continue to support artists to make new work.”

The Hippodrome team are exploring how to take the Origins project forward into the future. 

“We are absolutely committed to doing a second iteration of Origins, but we’re not rushing into it,”

Sophia explains. “We want to take time with this cohort to celebrate, to evaluate, to learn and to make sure we are continuing to support them and their work.

“Then we will look at how we can have a second cohort and still bring the first cohort in. We are trying as a department to break the cycle of artist development where you are held really well and work really intensively for a period of time and then there’s nothing.”

Sophia believes the benefits of the programme go much further than these first eight artists.

“It’s important that the Hippodrome be part of a wider artistic ecology in the West Midlands and does its fair share of supporting artists in the region. That is for the artists but also massively for us. 

“The way the building felt during the festival, it was so buzzy. We had people coming in who had never been to the theatre before, we had regular theatregoers who wanted to try something new and different, and then we had our core supporters and artists who are supporting their artist peers.”

The festival also invested in local artists by ensuring the majority of the actors and directors involved were from the West Midlands.

Sophia adds: “The intention has always been about the ripple effects of Origins, how we pour into these eight artists and how they pour into their communities and how we can bring more and more people into theatre-building.”

The first Origins Festival took place in May at Birmingham Hippodrome

By Diane Parkes