Catherine Dyson

Lead artist: Catherine Dyson
Venue partner: The Riverfront, Newport

Catherine is a writer, performer and theatre maker. She has collaborated with companies and artists including Chris Goode, National Theatre Scotland, Uninvited Guests, David Rosenberg and Punchdrunk. Focusing more on her work as a writer and solo artist, she has received commissions from BBC Radio and Dirty Protest, and is currently part of the Sherman Theatre’s New Welsh Playwrights Programme. Her short play ‘My Electric Soul’ was selected for the first round of the Sherman’s TAITH scheme, and her short film script ‘Hold Me Down’ was shortlisted for the Beacons Ffilm award. Recent and current projects include ‘Be Brave And Leave For The Unknown’ (written for award winning physical theatre company RedCape Theatre, touring nationally), and ‘Light Waves, Dark Skies’ (with Matt Ball’s company We Made This).

Transporter

Catherine developed a script suitable for 11-14 year olds, called 'Transporter', around themes of transience, home and belonging, with the support of Theatr Iolo and The Riverfront and mentors. The play’s protagonist, Maya, is at once an 'every girl', who could represent anybody's ordinary life in a recognisable city, and a cypher to an extraordinary world, someone who has moved across time and space in a never-ending search for love and a place to call home.

As part of her research for the play during her residency, Catherine took part in training activities, attended shows for young people at theatres across the UK, attended festivals, made new friends, talked about theatre for young people a lot and was mentored by writer, facilitator and lecturer Sian Summers and writer and performer Tim Crouch. She immersed herself in life at The Riverfront, working with the venues staff to meet groups of teenagers both at the venue and across the city of Newport, asking questions around how they feel about their city and what belonging means to them.

She collaborated with sound artist Chris Young to explore initial ideas to integrate live and found sound into the work and with Newport-based illustrator Joely Dean to develop a graphic novel companion piece to the script.

Catherine shared the final script with schools at The Riverfront in March 2018.

Transporter

Theatr Iolo decided to develop Transporter further and produced the show in full and took Catherine to India to represent the company and Wales in the Tata Steel Junior Kolkata Literary Meet. Transporter was also performed at the Agor Drysau Festival and toured to venues in Wales and England throughout 2019.