Stories in Transit

Stories in Transit is an ongoing workshop series, inviting participants who have lived experience of migration to imagine and create fantastical stories together. Together with artists, musicians, animators and writers, stories that emerge through play, games and walks are developed and performed. The project aspires to work with displaced individuals, whatever their status. Its work does not extend approval, tacitly or otherwise, to conditions that curtail the right to freedom of movement and work for refugees; no one should be made to pay for their survival with their dignity. The project’s hope of improving those circumstances should not be taken as an acceptance (“normalisation”) of the restrictions imposed on arrivants from any country.

Find out more about the project here, and if you would like to keep in touch with any news from the project, sign up to receive our newsletter here.

The Living Almanac

The Living Almanac are workshops emerging from an invitation to re-claim and re-shape time and the ways in which we mark our days. The first workshops were in summer 2022, with the Essex Book Festival. Marina has also coordinated workshops at Birkbeck, the New School of the Anthropocene, and at the Yorkshire Festival for Storytelling. The most recent workshop was with Steve Willey and Briony Hughes as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2024, which took place on 8 May 2024. Find out more here.

Rawaa, or a Dance Idea

Rawaa comes from Arabic – the root for words meaning “to water” or “to relate”. The theme was explored by Marina in an essay called Rawaa, or a Dance Idea, published July 2017 and developed into a ballet workshop first held at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in November 2017 (see here).

Dancing with Apollo is another dance piece Marina was involved with co-creating, writing the libretto for the event, performed on 11 July 2021 as part of Spitalfields Festival (Hall One, Kings Place, London), with Sara Trickey (violin) and Cathy Marston (choreography). The performance was reviewed by The Guardian, who claimed that it was ‘fascinating, all of it’ (Tim Ashley).