Dark Olive is ten.
In that time we have built a drawing room and a kitchen inside an art gallery, staged a show in a council chamber, marked the solstice at a prehistoric burial chamber on Anglesey, and hung a projector ten metres above a city square that had to be a shopping street again by morning.
None of it was the plan. All of it came from the same instinct: say yes to the thing nobody has worked out yet, and then work it out.
Why a CIC, in 2016
I could have registered an ordinary company. Most people in production do.
A Community Interest Company has an asset lock, a cap on what anyone can draw out of it, and a regulator who asks every year what you did for the community you said you would serve. Those are usually described as restrictions. I wanted them, because they settle an argument before it starts. When a project is tight and something has to give, a CIC has already decided what it is not going to be.
Ten years on, that is the single decision I would make again fastest.
What ten years actually looks like
Fifteen projects on this site. Twenty partner organisations. September 2016 to February 2024, and counting.
The map is wider than it feels from the inside: Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey, Craig y Nos in the Brecon Beacons, Newtown in Powys, Chester, Salford, Blackpool and Wyre, Tatton Park, Crewe, Weston Park, Hereford, Worcester, Luton — and one touring production that reached Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Norfolk and Scotland.
Galleries, festivals, local authorities, national portfolio organisations, parish councils, a dance company, a museum. Not one of them found us the same way.
Four things that changed how we work
Grosvenor Park. We consulted on the site build for one of the country's great temporary theatre seasons, in Chester. The thing I am proudest of there is not on stage: we got generator running down from twenty-four hours a day to five. That came directly from touring a solar-powered venue and learning the arithmetic of a battery the hard way. It was the first time off-grid thinking arrived inside a mainstream season rather than at the edges of a field, and it has been in everything since.
Open Space, at Oriel Davies. An open call asking how a gallery space might become a participation project. We are producers, not artists — so our answer started with the words themselves. A space is a room; the room where you draw is a drawing room. Everything came from that. We conceived it, programmed it, production managed it and built the website it ran on, and we sourced every single object in it second-hand — a father-in-law's barn, charity shops, a furniture recycling centre. That project taught us that producing is the creative act, and we have never framed it as a service since.
AURA. A responsive floor projection for Light Night Worcester, in a public square, in February. The image had to come from ten metres up, and there was no building to hang it from. The answer was a projector rigged in the cradle of a cherry picker, drawn up in CAD, signed off, licensed and rehearsed. The square was a shopping street the next morning. Not one person walking through it would have known anything had been there — which is the whole job.
And then the turn. Somewhere in the middle of all this, the thing we were quietly good at stopped being a consideration and became the point. Two of my four children are diagnosed with autism, and living that has shaped how I design an event more than any course I have taught. The things that make an event bearable for a neurodivergent audience — a sequence you can predict, somewhere to withdraw to, honest information in advance about what will happen and how loud it will be — turn out to make it better for everybody else too. That is not an access box at the end of a plan. It is the plan.
What the next ten years are for
Three things, all of them the same argument in different clothes.
A neuro-friendly quality mark. We are working with Lottery funding to explore a standard that an event can actually be measured against, rather than a promise it can make about itself.
A qualification for the people who really run events. There are people on site who can read a field in the rain and tell you where the water will go, and nothing on paper that says so. We are building the framework that says so.
And a duty of care that is written down. The events industry has health and safety law, food hygiene law, a thorough guide that is guidance rather than a standard, and an ISO for sustainability. There is nothing at all setting out what an organisation owes the artist standing in the middle of it. That gap is not an oversight; it is a convenience. Artists are not products, and we intend to keep saying so until somebody writes it down.
The invitation
Over the next few months we are going to put the fifteen projects back in front of you, one a week — what the brief was, what went wrong, what we would do differently, and who we did it with. Some of them are ten years old. Several of the organisations we worked with have changed name, changed staff, or forgotten us entirely, which is fair enough.
If you were part of any of it, we would love you to say so. And if you have a site that frightens people, a building nobody can work out how to use, or an audience you have never managed to reach — that is the conversation we like most.
Ten years of saying yes to the thing nobody has worked out yet. Let us see about the next ten.