SPID Theatre

The award-winning SPID (Social Progressive Interconnected Diverse) uses immersive youth arts to regenerate community spaces. We work with young people on West London council estates to create participatory drama shows.

Our free sessions are targeted at and prioritise North Kensington estate residents. If we’ve space we let others get involved. We work with National partners on projects like our UK estate tours, which advocate and celebrate social housing.

We use interactive, immersive techniques to create cheap, participatory work that happens off stage and up close in estate community spaces and parks.

We celebrate the true diversity embodied by social housings’ architecture, the way it unites people of every different age, class and race. Our work focuses on all we have in common; the spaces we share, the heritage that belongs to all of us, and the youth of tomorrow, for whom we are all responsible.

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.

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