OffScript

What does it take to reclaim your voice when your country wants to silence it - and then take it on stage?

This is the second in our Songs of Solidarity series - conversations with artists, academics, writers and thinkers whose lives and work illuminate the themes at the heart of our new production: migration, displacement, survival, and the stories we tell to make sense of all three.

In this episode, Josephine Burton is joined by Elaha Soroor: singer, composer, and one of the most compelling artists to have emerged from the Afghan diaspora. Elaha began her career as a celebrated musician in Afghanistan. She was forced to leave. In London, she found her way back to music and used it to speak about the lives of Afghan women.

This is a raw and honest conversation: about survival, about what it costs to make art under threat, and about the particular power of music to say what other forms cannot. Elaha talks about the inspiration behind her latest album Our Freedoms Must Be Won, her ongoing collaboration with Kefaya - whose singular sound blends Afghan folk with synth-rock, post-punk and jazz psychedelia - and what resistance actually looks and feels like when it is lived rather than theorised.

Elaha's music: youtube.com/@elahasoroormusic

In this episode:
Josephine Burton - Artistic Director, Dash Arts
Elaha Soroor - Singer and Composer

Songs of Solidarity is a Projekt Utopia and Dash Arts co-production, currently in research and development, co-produced with the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, in partnership with the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the School of Advanced Study, Roundhouse London, Asylum Welcome and Unbound Philanthropy.

Find out more at:
www.projektutopia.org
www.dasharts.org.uk

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you create an epic for the modern world?

This is the start of our Songs of Solidarity mini-series; Josephine Burton and Maria Aberg take us behind the scenes as they discuss the journey of the last 18 months—from researching ancient epic traditions with academics to interviewing those with lived experiences of migration. Join us for a conversation about the art of "future-making," resisting traditional singular narratives, and the exciting, messy process of creating something new.

Songs of Solidarity, is a PROJEKT UTOPIA and Dash Arts co-production. We’re currently in the research and development stage co-produced with the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, in partnership with the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, School of Advanced Studies, Roundhouse London, Asylum Welcome and Unbound Philanthropy. We are particularly grateful to Fiona Macintosh for her support and encouragement throughout.

Our gratitude goes to all the wonderful international artists, academics and participants who enriched our project.
In this episode we hear from:

Josephine Burton - Artistic Director of Dash Arts
Maria Aberg - Artistic Director of PROJEKT UTOPIA
And voices from our R&D in Oxford in December 2025: Leo Boix, Sabrina Mahfouz, Saili Katebe and Anna Sulan Masing.

Our gratitude goes to all the wonderful international artists, academics and participants who enriched our project.

Find out more at:
www.projektutopia.org
www.dasharts.org.uk

We have run several phases of R&D over 2024-2026, co-produced with the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, in partnership with the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, School of Advanced Studies, Roundhouse London, Asylum Welcome and Unbound Philanthropy. We are particularly grateful to Fiona Macintosh for her support and encouragement throughout.

Our gratitude goes to all the wonderful international artists, academics and participants who enriched our project.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Dash Arts at the Freud Museum in London as we delve into “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal.” Curator Vanessa Boni guides us through Carrington’s turbulent early years—from her life with Max Ernst in France to her wartime breakdown and confinement in a Spanish sanatorium.

We explore the haunting "Villa Pilar" and sketchbooks born from crisis, linking Carrington’s mythic imagery to Freud’s own underworld motifs. This episode uncovers the alchemical threads connecting two 20th-century icons in the very room where Freud once slept.

This episode is part of Dash Arts' series At Loggerheads with Reality - an ongoing exploration of creativity, mental health and the radical act of making art, and part of the development for its production of The Degenerates.

To hear the previous episodes in this mini series head to www.dasharts.org.uk/podcast.

Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi

In this episode we hear from:
Josephine Burton - Artistic Director of Dash Arts
Vanessa Boni - Curator
Friends of Dash Arts

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Three years. 80 workshops. One thousand speeches. One pub.

As Our Public House takes its final bow, so too does Albion; our long exploration of who we are as a country, and who we might yet become.

In this closing episode, Josephine reflects on the whole journey: from a tent in a field at Latitude Festival in 2019 to stages across England, from the first hesitant speeches in community halls and prison workshops to songs performed live every night on stage by a cast who made those words their own.

She's joined by composer Jonathan Walton, who talks about the extraordinary challenge of finding music inside real people's words and what it means to turn a speech written in a working men's club or a prison into a song that stops an audience in its tracks.

And together with several of the speech-makers and audiences, they ask: what does it mean to have been heard? What have we learned about the country we live in? And what happens next?

Find out more on the Dash Arts website: dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house

Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi. You'll also hear extracts of I Dream Of A Bin and Woman Like Me by Jonathan Walton, arranged by Yaniv Fridel.

Our Public House was written by Barney Norris. Created and directed by Josephine Burton.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton heads out into the land itself and into the long, tangled history of who has felt at home there, and who has had to fight to claim it.

Join us to explore connection, place, and the ever-evolving landscape of English identity.

First, she talks with Toni Murphy, founder of Touching Grass, a community creating space for queer women, trans and non-binary people of colour to experience the outdoors as somewhere that belongs to them. Toni describes the hiking trips, camping and the careful acts of presence in landscapes that haven't always felt welcoming.
Then Josephine takes the longer view. What does history tell us about who has always assumed the countryside is theirs and what have people done when that assumption has been challenged? With Professor Alan Finlayson, one of the UK's leading political and social thinkers, she traces the deep roots of England's relationship with its land, all the way to the present and to Andy Burnham MP's recent journey down from the north to Westminster, reclaiming something as he went.

Find more information on Touching Grass and their latest events: www.touchgrasscamp.com

Our Public House arrives in London this week at the Marylebone Theatre for its final run, after a national tour through Leeds, Prescot, Coventry and Sheffield. Find out more

This episode is part of Dash Arts' Albion series - an ongoing exploration of what it means to be English today.

Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.