Curious Company

Come play with us!

Starting with the Mutoid Waste Company in the 1980s and a decade of stage shows with big techno party production company Megadog, led me to a career of immersive, interactive performance in non-theatre spaces. I trained at Fool Time and set up Curious Company in 1994.

The main aim of my practice is to involve the audience as much as possible, for them to have the experience of being inside the story and as it happens to do some of the work! As a result we are sharing the joy of performing the shows and leaving the audience with more than just a vision of our work.

Our most enduring and successful production is based on Alice in Wonderland. This has taken us all over the place from Bucking ham Palace to wonderfully seedy arches in Vauxhall and most enjoyably a decade as the theatre dept for The Rabbit Hole at Glastonbury etc. We love that this story works for all ages and contexts.

We have enjoyed working with our local council on various community engagement projects and are working towards developing this into the corporate workplace to support connection and engagement and reduce staff turnover. This work has included our Dept of Complaints, a faux complaints department that invites communities to share their grumbles, collects the data and presents it back as a gameshow called What’s Your Grumble? where leaders compete to guess the most popular grumbles. Also the Disco Litter Queens- community litter picking to a disco soundtrack. Both projects making boring/serious stuff more fun.

We also love dressing up and going to parties and have created various gorgeous and playful characters for nightclubs, corporate and private parties.

• 1992-2000 performed and produced circus and cabaret shows at clubs and festivals, including as VPC at Megadog Productions, a company that produced and toured large-scale rock and roll tours and stages at festivals with UK dance music bands and DJs. This included producing the first dance music stage at Glastonbury, touring Europe several times, America twice and Australia and Japan. I performed and coordinated large scale circus shows.
• From 1998 started working in corporate entertainment and included developing several marketing campaigns with corporate clients
• In 2000 worked at the Millennium Dome including at the opening NYE 1999 party
• 2002 performed our production of Alice at the Party at the Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee (Who’s Queen?)
• 2004- moved out of London to Wiltshire, got married and had a couple of kids
• Continued working at street theatre and music festivals including running the theatre dept at The Rabbit Hole stage Glastonbury from 2007 (to now)
• 2006-10 supplied entertainment to Halswell House (stately home wedding and event venue in Somerset) inc several commissions and collaborations
• 2007 taught the cast of the Lord of the Rings (west end) stage show to stilt walk
• 2008 received first ACE funding for Mr Wippy and the Conettes

• 2011 engaged with Wiltshire Council and for the Cultural Olympiad (2012) created (wrote, produced and directed) an aquashow version of The Little Mermaid collaborating with a local youth synchronised swim team, contemporary dancers and opera singers and toured council leisure centre pools @LittleMermaidAquashow
• 2014 collaborated again with Wilts Council and the Trowbridge Players to create (wrote, produced and co-directed) Bombs, Tiaras and Any Other Business, an immersive historical recreation of the history of Trowbridge Town Hall @BTaAOB
• 2014 with Wilts Council Library Service and artist James Aldridge http://www.jamesaldridge-artist.co.uk created the Living Memory Wiltshire project @LivingMemoryWiltshire engaging across generations to create town scrap books and bring local stories back to life. These scrapbooks are still in the libraries and being added to.
• 2015 became carer for father with Alzheimer’s (to 2017)

• 2018 commissioned by Bath Fringe to make The Dept of Complaints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePZGfnZbIWA&feature=emb_logo
• 2019 commissioned by Bath Fringe to make The Disco Litter Queens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYeH0JAHnA
• 2019-2020 supported by Bath Fringe to develop online version of Dept of Complaints which culminated in a zoom gameshow called What’s Your Grumble? In which we collected grumbles from Bath and guessed the most popular
• 2019-2020 volunteered with The Cleveland Pools Heritage Project in Bath and made (script wrote and directed) 3 short creative heritage films for social media use
• 2020 In lieu of performing at the opening of The Potteries Museum’s Tenniel 200 anniversary exhibition, we created a series of short films incorporating some of the exhibition’s key objects for SM use.
• June 2020 started engaging with my community as a residential artist
• July 2020 performed Disco Litter Queens in my village (Marshfield) as part of the Bristol Coddywomple
• October 2020/21 produced a local Covid safe Halloween trail for Marshfield
• Funded by the Potteries Museum to create a series of short films about the Staffordshire Hoard exhibition. We launched with a live event with the characters from the films giving tours.
• 2022 performed The Dept of Complaints at Out There Festival
• 2022 performed The Disco Litter Queens at Hat Fair
• 2022/3 Funded by Bath Spa University to create The Ideas Bank, an engagement in Twerton supporting grass roots ideas for community development
• 2025-6 developing The Dept of Complaints as a corporate wellness engagement