Brave Bold Drama
award winning theatre and community arts | playable family theatre adventures | authentic working class arts engagement | work for audiences living with dementia | working class & LGBTQI+ led
Everyone deserves high quality arts experiences in their lives, even if they can't pay.
Brave Bold Drama is a working-class and LGBTQI+ led not for profit company. We work to dismantle the barriers that can prevent some members of the community, particularly in Hartcliffe and Withywood in south Bristol, from engaging with the arts and accessing opportunities to explore their own creativity.
We partner with other community organisations to provide creative workshops for community members. We commission artists to join us when we need creative skills we can't provide ourselves. We take creative activities and theatre to community events, festivals, schools, children's centres, libraries and parks.
In 2019 we began making theatre for people living with dementia with our Arts Council funded show, Wonderland. Our work for audiences living with dementia has continued with our multi-sensory sensory story projects: SpringTime and Beside the Sea, and is ongoing as we hope to ultimately create a set of four sensory stories, one for each season.
The theatre we make is award-winning, and for all. We are best known for our family theatre, and we never forget that true family theatre needs to speak to all ages, not just the children. We carefully craft thoughtful layers into all our devised work so that all ages of audience have something to relish. No-one should feel our show is not for them.
Our family shows are boldly non-didactic. They are glimpses into multi-faceted worlds. Of course our shows discuss ideas, for example resilience, selfishness, absent parents and environmental activism, but these ideas emerge organically from within the world of the play and are not writ large. We do not believe family theatre should be simplistic, saccharine or superficial. Our shows do not end with neat and tidy resolutions, but leave our family audiences with questions to discuss together afterwards.
We made our first playable family theatre adventure, The Munch Mission, in 2021 and are currently developing a second playable family theatre show, The Midnight Mission.
In summary, we are good for questions about:
authentic working class community arts engagement
work for people living with dementia
playable theatre
we're good for lots of other things too like sound design, producing....but we'll headline with those three for now.