Barking Nuns

The foyer of Barking’s Broadway Theatre hummed with anticipation in the hot bright summer’s evening sunlight. Young children clambered over blue plastic chairs, their parents chatting over drinks.

We were about to travel back through time, on a tour of Barking and Dagenham’s rich feminist history – from the first abbess of Barking Abbey in the 7th century, to the Ford plant strike 50 years ago.

So, how did we get here?

The production of Barking Nuns is one of the projects from Change Makers, the Barbican’s year-long artistic residency at nearby Sydney Russell School. Devised by the Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning team, it’s an ambitious programme that translates our theme, The Art of Change, into an educational setting. Working with different classes over 12 months, internationally-renowned artists, musicians and theatre companies come into the school to unleash the creativity of students and teaching staff.

Visitors so far include jazz musician Zara McFarlane, who grew up in the borough and went to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama; and beatboxer Bellatrix, who created a new work with the students.

Before Christmas, the students will have taken part in an artist residency at The White House in collaboration with Create London; a herstories poetry exchange in collaboration with poet Toni Stewart and a school in Cape Town; and a two-month exhibition at Valence House Museum in Dagenham.

But back to the present, and Barking Nuns. It was made by students, who worked with world-renowned theatre company Complicité to tell a story of St Ethelburga – the first female abbess of Barking Abbey – and the subsequent intersecting histories of religion, suffrage and women’s lives in the borough.

To unearth the history behind these events, the teenagers took part in a workshop at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the City, followed by a further three sessions with research experts from Valence House. There they learned how to be researchers, and dug into the borough’s fascinating past.

What they discovered helped shape the story that unfolded at the Broadway Theatre, accompanied by a choir assembled by ancient music specialist, Belinda Sykes. She brought together teachers and parents to explore and perform the choral music that would have been a part of everyday life in Barking Abbey.

It was a powerful and evocative soundtrack to the vignettes being acted out in front of the time travellers that filled the theatre

As the audience took their seats, photos by the Young Photographers – led by Camilla Greenwell – were projected onto the wall at the back of the stage. Showing the students as they rehearsed and learned, they captured school life and showcased the skills of this group of creatives under Greenwell’s tutelage.

Change Makers also saw award-winning artist-filmmaker Eelyn Lee work with a group of Year 9 girls and women from the Huggett Women’s Centre in Dagenham to create a short film which imagined a future where women were equal and able fulfil their potential: Futurist Women of Barking and Dagenham.

With Lee, the group explored stories of local women, then wrote and shot their own reimagining. The resulting film, a powerful meditation inspired by examples of the borough’s feminist history, was shown before the performance of Barking Nuns:

And, as the final notes reverberated around the theatre, the spellbound silence erupted into a standing ovation.

Leaving the theatre, a group of women wandered back into the town centre. ‘I never knew that women had more rights in Anglo Saxon times,’ one of them reflected, before cackling, ‘I didn’t actually expect to learn something at the theatre!’