A portal has opened in Basildon, Essex on the site of Laindon Shopping Centre: a half demolished brutalist plaza earmarked for redevelopment. A young journalist enters an alternative reality Essex, where the synth pop scene pioneered by Basildon natives Depeche Mode and Alison Moyet flourished, and collective action defeated Thatcherite individualism to create a queer communist Essex utopia. The human creatures from the portal world move between the two Laindons via the unmanned border of the portal, calling in to question the discrepancy in representations of the movement of migrants and of gentrifiers. Essex Mums become freedom fighters challenging top down racist policymaking and rejecting the delusion of white working class sentiment. Narratives blur as the portal people run to save their home from destruction while Basildon Gospel Choir sing an ode to the town’s future.
A trans person returns home to Basildon, Essex, at the start of a pandemic and tries to make a Very Important Trans Artwork. Unfortunately they have long covid :/
‘Poppets’ is a surreal soap opera set in Basildon and the Estuary, following an Essex girl investigating malpractice in a local housing development, and two women who meet and fall in love on a night out at Bas Vegas. They are psychically linked to the story of two Plotlands women (as overshared to them by an old man in the smoking area) who visit their local witch to make a ‘poppet’. A journey through 4 generations of capitalistic town planning, from the smallholdings of the 1800s to the luxury flats built on floodplains of the future.
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Principal Boy follows the audition, rehearsal, and performance of the central character in British pantomime, known as the ‘principal boy’. Traditionally a young male protagonist, the character is conventionally played by a woman in drag. Using and subverting traditional British pantomime conventions, Principal Boy explores the presence and absence of trans and gender-nonconforming people in mainstream culture, including film and stage productions.
