Anna Poole

Venue partner: Park & Dare Theatre, Treorchy
Partners: Treorchy Primary, School, Gellu Primary School, Treorchy Library, E-Teens (teen zone at Treorchy Library) plus local businesses and organisations such as Station Café and the Model Railway Club

Anna is a freelance theatre director originally from the West-Midlands. She moved to Cardiff for university where she studied Drama (Theatre and Media). In 2012 Anna joined National Theatre Wales as TEAM Assistant. Anna was also an emerging director on NTW’s Bordergame in 2014. Anna was a Foundry Artist on The Birmingham Rep Artist Development programme in 2014 and is a founder member and director of new theatre company otherMother. She has Assisted on other productions such as Parallel Lines (Dirty Protest), Last Christmas (Dirty Protest), and Crazy Gary’s Mobile
Disco (Waking Exploits). Her Directing credits include Blud by otherMother, NFSW by Waking

Exploits, The Drowned Girl by Kelly Jones at The Yard, Lady Lust by Sarah Hamilton Baker at The Birmingham Rep, and Sherman Swingers (2013), Sherman Cymru.

Dare to Reimagine

Anna was resident artist at the Park & Dare in Treorchy in the South Wales Valleys, building on Theatr lolo's existing work with the theatre in developing links with local schools and community support services. The South Wales Valleys is recognised as an area of multiple deprivation with high levels of child poverty. Anna developed Dare to Reimagine, a devised piece created with local Year 6 pupils (aged 10 & 11) made for a broader audience of other children and their families. Using a series of combined schools and theatre-based workshops Anna aimed to draw out the children’s unique sense of place and connection with their local community through a series of imaginative short stories, performed as part of an audio-tour throughout the theatre and its surrounding area. One of the aims of Anna’s project was to explore a model of engagement based on meaningful interaction, creativity and a sense of place, as well as working with different forms outside of Anna’s usual practice as a director.

Anna worked with children from Treorchy Primary School on a series of story-writing workshops, creating fantastical short stories inspired by the town of Treorchy, unicorns and death. These took place on a weekly basis at the school and at the Parc & Dare. These stories were then woven into a longer story which was recorded by professional artists and children from the school. The culmination of this was a series of audio tours for children and their families which took place in June 2016, penned by the towns young community with Anna during the school sessions. These tours travelled through parts of the town and the Parc & Dare, reimagining what these spaces might look like. Anna worked with visual artist Tiff Oben to create visual installations that popped up at different places on the audio tour route within the town and sound artist Greg Harrradine on a sound scape for the piece.

Meiddio Meddwl

As part of the National Eisteddfod, which was hosted in Cardiff in 2018, Theatr Iolo produced a Welsh language version of Dare to Reimagine. We worked with pupils from Ysgol Glan Morfa in Splott and a team of writers, musicians, visual artists and poets to create a fantastical audio tour of the Eisteddfod site at Cardiff Bay for the whole family.

Supported by Arts Council of Wales’ Creative Collaborations scheme.