MAKING WAVES
In September 2019, UK Arts International, with Looping the Loop, produced Making Waves - a festival of live performance featuring some of the most exciting and cutting edge work that is currently being created in East Kent.
Coinciding with the start of Margate Now and the opening of the Turner Prize exhibition, Making Waves showcases the wealth of local talent to industry professionals, as well as the general public.
Making Waves 2019 featured Roots (1927), Hannah and Hanna in Dreamland (UKAI), Bumper Blyton - the improvised Adventure (Make ‘em Ups), This is Broken Folk (Lunatraktors), Harry Baker -I am 10,000, Lady Bracknell’s Confinement (Good Stuff Theatre), Reynard the Fox (Theatre of the Small), Land of Lost Content (Henry Maddicott), Julie’s World (Trudi Jackson), plus excerpts of work by Cohesion Plus, Tom Adams and Co, Tiny Circus Tent, Sharon Byrne Productions, Marianne Dissard and Tiago Gambogi.
HANNAH & HANNA FOREVER
In 2015, UK Arts commissioned John Retallack to write a follow-up to his hugely successful 2001 play, Hannah and Hanna, which tells the story of two sixteen year olds - Hannah from Margate and Hanna from Kosovo - whose unlikely friendship, founded on their mutual love of pop and karaoke, transcends prejudice and fear.
In October 2018, in association with the Marlowe in Canterbury and Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts, Hannah and Hannah in Dreamland opened in the Marlow Studio before touring to Poole, New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, the Woodville, Gravesend, Quarterhouse, Folkestone, the Tramshed in Woolwich and Theatre Royal Margate.
Hannah and Hanna in Dreamland brought together the original Hannah and Hanna story and their second meeting sixteen years later - once again, in Margate and once again, focusing on the issue of migration, as Hannah and Hanna journey to Calais in search of a young Syrian refugee….
In 2019, a new version of the play was presented, which, whilst referencing John’s original play, focused on the friends meeting as young women in 2016. The migration crisis is hitting the headlines and UKIP is a gaining a foothold - especially in Thanet.
This latest and final version has been renamed Hannah and Hanna Forever.