Our Artistic Director, Josephine Burton, gives us the lowdown on Our Public House:

The big project at Dash Arts at the moment is ‘Albion’, where we're exploring what we mean by England and ‘Englishness’. I felt the most amazing way to understand and explore that would be to listen to communities, visiting different parts of the country and hearing how they feel, what they feel passionate about, what they want to change in their communities. And by supporting people in writing and making speeches about these passions and ideas, together we’d create a reflection of the state of the nation. We've truly been doing that. We're actively documenting the country on a micro level as it approaches the next election, and creating an extraordinary picture of a country at a crossroads.

We've been running speechmaking workshops with female prisoners, activists with Citizens UK and young people from across England. In all of these pockets of communities, we've been hearing about what they care about, what they want to change, and what they feel is being ignored by decision makers.

[Workshop participant]: Food, heating, transport, toiletries, the internet, light. These things we would call a central to our every day. Yet 91% of households receiving Universal Credit have gone without at least one of these things in the past year.

We’ve teamed up with some wonderful academics from the University of Birmingham and the University of East Anglia, who truly believe that we all have the ability to speak enthusiastically, clearly and eloquently about the things that we believe in. But we don't necessarily have the tools. Together we’ve built a workshop structure to do that. Alan Finlayson is a political theorist and scientist, and the professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia, and Henriette van der Blom, is a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Birmingham. They’ve both been co leading the workshops with us.

[Workshop participant]: In the supermarket, the average strawberry travels 1930 miles on average, this needs to stop. Did you know 46% of the food we consume in the UK has travelled from abroad. The most commonly imported foods in the UK are fruit and vegetables. I fundamentally believe that we should reduce food miles for healthier consumption. I recommend we should be eating locally grown foods.

We're in the thick of the project, going to Oxford, London, Brighton, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester and Norwich. It is phenomenal how personal some of the stories that come out in the workshops are. I thought it would be more about bin collection or moving traffic lights, particularly local issues. And although some of the stories remain local, very personal stories, people are also really motivated by global national issues. So that’s been fascinating and deeply inspiring.

[Workshop participant]: Gay won't go away. If you don't say gay, it will just go into hiding like it was in the early 1900s. Issues like this are brought up to distract us from the real issues such as the economy, health, defence. Politicians should stop doing this and deal with the real issues that affect people's lives. If a drag queen reads a story to school children, they will still be the same children afterwards.

I’m going to sit with all of these extraordinary speeches and ideas and really listen to the audio recordings and the transcripts and start to navigate my way to creating a piece of theatre called Our Public House, in collaboration with Jude Christian. This new work will be inspired and effectively co created by the communities who’ve taken part in the speechmaking workshops.

You can listen to a podcast about the journey (both geographically and emotionally) about the speechmaking workshops and the history of speeches and rhetoric here: