SIGNAL FIRES Book is On Sale Now

In March 2020, theatres, community centres and arts venues across the UK went dark, disconnecting audiences and theatre artists. In response, ETT and Headlong came together to imagine a project that would celebrate the extraordinary diversity of the national touring network: an 'open source' idea for performances and storytelling that could happen around a campfire, to inspire theatre companies across the UK.

'Signal Fires' was born.

Since then Signal Fires has taken a multitude of forms: walks, performances, online sharings - and now, a brand new publication, bringing together a collection of texts written and shared in autumn 2020. Signal Fires: 6 Notebooks features short plays, monologues, prose and poems, and presents them with a new invitation: to gather around a fire of your own - be it a bonfire, a candle, or even a torch - with friends or strangers, to collaborate and connect. Share these texts again, or write new ones to perform alongside them; speak up, sing out, and light new ways forward, out of the dark.

The book has been edited by Maddy Costa. Maddy Costa works in and around theatre in various guises, including dramaturg, researcher, conversation host, writer, critic and critical friend. Artists she has worked with as dramaturg include Selina Thompson, Paula Varjack, Rosie Elnile and Jamal Gerald. She is a co-founder and co-host of Something Other and the Department of Feminist Conversations, inter-related spaces for experimental writing, dialogue and critical thinking. With Andy Field she is co-author of the book Performance in an Age of Precarity (Methuen 2021). As a critic she has written for Exeunt, led writing groups for LIFT, In Between Time and Battersea Arts Centre's Moving Roots project, and written about music and theatre for the Guardian, where she also worked as an editor.

The book has been designed by Kevin Mount. Kevin Mount is a book designer, typographer and essayist based in Devon, UK. He runs the ephemera imprint, The Letter Press, www.theletterpress.org, with the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald, using the printed page as a score or as an invitation to live performance. For ten years he was art editor of the journal Performance Research. Latest book projects have included Blind Spot: Staring down the void (Performance Research Books) and Our Gruesome Cultural Heritage: Reframing memory - both for the Norwegian Theatre Academy.

The book includes an introduction by Francois Matarasso, one of the leading writers on community arts, and includes texts by Mike Bartlett, Stephanie Street, Luke Barnes, Tom Wells, Nastazja Domaradzka, Houmi Mouira, Alice Oswald, Sara Sharaawi, Nima Taleghani, Aisha Zia, Karen Spicer, Odile Gakire Katese, Rowan Evans, and more.

Free accessible versions of the text are made available by buying a standard copy of the book and selecting additional access versions on check out.

• Digital (compatible with screen readers)
• Large Print (Digital)
• Audio

The book is available to buy now at https://digital.fueltheatre.com//merchandise/signal-fires-book/ for £15. The costs pay for the making of the book.

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