Club on the Edge of Town
'There are children in Holbeck without crayons. Living in a city with an opera company. An opera company paid for with money from all of us. Until everyone has crayons no one gets opera. That’s what I believe.'
A deeply moving memoir of how a group of artists fed their local community during the Covid pandemic.
When crisis hits, and audiences stay home, what’s the most useful thing a theatre company can do? The answer was to become a food bank and one-stop-help-shop for those in need. In fifteen months, Slung Low would go on to deliver over 15,000 food parcels.
Alan Lane is Artistic Director of Slung Low, an award-winning theatre company based in the oldest surviving working men’s club in the UK. Slung Low specialise in making large scale productions in non-theatre spaces with community performers at their heart. During the Covid crisis, the company was the ward lead for social care referrals in Holbeck and Beeston, nearly 8000 homes in South Leeds. They ran a non-means tested self-referral food bank from March 2020 to June 2021. Lane was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to South Leeds during the crisis.