Common/Wealth wrapped!

It’s a wrap!

2025 has been one of our biggest years ever! We’ve had so many amazing experiences, including releasing our first book, working in Newport on our massive production Demand The Impossible, and staging both Public Interest and the 29% Festival as part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been involved with our work this year; we’re so lucky to have had such brilliant audiences, and to have worked with so many great participants, campaigners and freelancers.

We’ve seen 2025 as our Year of Justice. Whether we’ve been working with JENGbA on Public Interest, exploring real cases of Joint Enterprise to confront racist and classist discrimination within the justice system, or with the Undercover Research Group, Spycops Info Podcast and Police Spies Out of Lives holding the police and state to account over the infiltration of activist groups and the suppression of activism and democracy – justice has been close to our hearts and the deep thread across all our work. 

Here are some of our highlights:

• Sneaking in just before the end of December…We’re so thrilled to be shortlisted for The Stage’s Community Award, alongside Arcola Theatre, ATG Entertainment’s West End Creative Learning projects, Cardboard Citizens, Imaginate and the Royal Exchange Theatre. The final award is to be announced on 12 January 2026.
• Publishing Do It Yourself: Making Political Theatre was a fantastic experience and the culmination of a big dream for us. We’re thankful to everyone who has bought the book and let us know what they think, and which parts of it will be useful to them. We’re grateful to the bookshops that have stocked it, including Lighthouse Books, Book Space Cardiff, News From Nowhere, Bookhaus and others.
• Thank you to our new funders Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, John Ellerman Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Immersive Arts, Raymond Williams Foundation, Harry & Mary Foundation, who have supported our work in south Wales and Bradford during 2025. 
• We’ve welcomed new members of staff Molly Harman, Lewis Greener and Eugenia Taylor! Molly works on comms in Bradford, and Lewis and Eugenia are supporting our work with young people in Cardiff. 

Cardiff 

• Staging Demand The Impossible in Newport was a huge highlight for us! We welcomed almost 900 people to our show, part-performance, part punk-gig, part-sensory experience, exploring police injustice and the undercover infiltration of activist networks. Demand The Impossible highlighted campaigns such as Justice for Mouayed Bashir, Black Lives Matter, and the Blacklist Support Group, as well as those holding the police and state to account through the Undercover Policing Inquiry.
• Demand The Impossible allowed us to experiment with new ways of making theatre and new technologies. Our Creative Producer and Creative Technologist wrote a blog about the immersive technology we’ve explored here: Expanding Realities – DIY Immersive Performance Toolkit – Common/Wealth.
• Demand The Impossible allowed us to work with our Community Cast, made up of people with direct experience of police injustice and infiltration. Some of whom hadn’t performed before! All of whom shared heart and soul about what it means to be human in the face of oppressive systems. 
• Nourish and Everyone Is An Artist brought people to East Cardiff to participate in creative workshops. We welcomed creatives from Palestine, Glasgow and Manchester to facilitate these workshops.
• We partnered with FUNDUS Theater in Hamburg to work on Act Your Age! Supported by Cultural Bridge and bringing 15 girls from Germany and Wales together – and take the lead. 
• We recruited an amazing cohort of young people to Take Your Place, which starts in January 2026. 
• We’ve recruited new members to our Sounding Board, Janine Newbury and Justin Chandler. 
• We worked with Chapter Arts Centre and Steve McQueen to curate Grenfell: We Stand With You. We were so thankful to work with so many amazing people on this project, including Grenfell United, Forensic Architecture, Nabil Al Kinani, as well as local artists Ophelia Dos Santos, Kyle Legall, Vanja Garaj, Gavin Porter and Jon Pountney. 
• We held four Posh Club Boutiques, hosting over 240 glamorous community elders at the St Mellons Hub, and introduced them to fantastic new artists such as Oola Pearl, Justin Drag and Rahim El Habache. The Mirror made a beautiful film about Posh Club in Cardiff and the positive impact that it can have.

 

Bradford:

• We presented Public Interest, commissioned by Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, in partnership with JENGbA over 8 sold-out shows! Part music video, part political theatre, challenging the narratives spun about working-class young people, using real cases of Joint Enterprise and an original rap soundtrack to confront racist and classist discrimination within the justice system.
• Our Public Interest cast performed parts of the show at the launch of Joint Enterprise on Trial – a groundbreaking report by APPEAL in London. The beats and bars connected deeply with the room.
• Young people from Theater EvRG, Erfurt, Germany and our Youth Theatre Lab connected on two exchange trips, culminating in an outdoor performance in Erfurt.
• Plus 12 members of Youth Theatre Lab responded to The Portrait of Mai – the first portrait of a BIPOC person not depicted as a slave – at Cartwright Hall. Exploring colonialism, identity, race, migration and mental health, they performed their response as part of Bradford 2025.
• We hosted Know Your Rights workshops: 6 self-defence sessions for 60 young women and non binary people, led by Queer Romani and female South Asian martial arts instructors.
• Our interactive installation about fast fashion – Wear & Care – has been enjoyed by visitors to Bradford Industrial Museum all year round, inspired by Fast Fast Slow (2023). 
• Our new network of working-class artists under 30, the Collective, was born! Made up of different artistic practices, cultures, ages and backgrounds, our Collective is a way for rising Bradford artists to connect and collaborate. 
• Our last live event of the year in Bradford was 29% Festival – a free festival celebrating the creativity of the young people of Bradford, who make up almost a third of the city. Over 100 creatives aged 12-25 were commissioned to make, programme and perform original work, to an audience of more than 400 young people.