About
The award-winning SPID (Social Political Innovative Direct) uses immersive youth arts to regenerate community spaces. We work with young people on West London council estates to create participatory drama shows.
We run a weekly free programme of Community Hub activities including free youth drama sessions. In addition, we create a youth show, a professional show and a film every 12 to 18 months.
Participants from our youth programme are given the chance to perform alongside professionals. We have delivered London tours of youth shows since 2005, and started touring regionally around the UK in 2012.
We are a registered charity, based in the community rooms of the historic modernist council estate of Kensal House. We also work in other local estates, and our promenade performances in neglected community spaces have won prizes nationally. We champion this popular and accessible form of theatre as a means to strengthen local communities, and we try to involve local residents in the research, creation and performance of our shows, and to encourage typically hard-to-reach participants to get involved.
Our work has three principal outcomes: developing a new form of high quality theatre that engages audiences with the space that it inhabits; regenerating Kensal House community rooms and other neglected spaces; and creating shows that empower neighbourhoods by fostering a sense of community.
Original concept for the Far Far Away program – Nnenna Samson and Rachel Grunwald
Original concept for the Living History program – Nnenna Samson and Mariana Sastre
