Founded in 2000, Slung Low is an award-winning theatre company specialising in making epic productions in non-theatre spaces, often with large community performance companies at their heart.
Based in Holbeck, an inner city South Leeds ward, we run two spaces- The Warehouse in Holbeck and Slung Low at Temple. Both venues are made available to other artists and community groups as performance and cultural spaces to anyone who needs them. The equipment and vehicles of the company are also lent to those who have need. All work presented at our venues in Holbeck is Pay What You Decide.
We also manage an ancient semi-natural woodland, approx. 40 minutes drive from Holbeck. This has a canopied outdoor classroom and acres of space to explore and learn in. It is open to the public (go and try the swing), and anybody who has need. Again on a Pay What You Decide basis.
The company runs a leadership development programme exploring values based leadership through outdoor activity, visiting guest speakers and adventure training. One strand of the programme is designed for artists and arts leaders and one strand is for adults from our south Leeds community.
For 15 months during the pandemic we ran a non-means tested self-referral food bank from The Holbeck, the oldest working men’s club in the UK. Alan Lane’s book The Club on the Edge of Town: A Pandemic Memoir, published by Salamander Street Publishing, covers this period.
Slung Low created Flood by James Phillips, a year-long epic for Hull UK City of Culture told online, performed live in Hull and broadcast on BBC2. Over a half million people saw a part of Flood and the show won a Royal Television Society Yorkshire Award for excellence.
Slung Low has made two short films together with Leeds People’s Theatre – The Good Book (2020) and The Magician (2023).
Recent work includes a large-scale community opera Noah’s Flood with Manchester Collective for LEEDS 2023 and Factory International for Manchester International Festival. As part of LEEDS 2023 Slung Low co-directed the opening ceremony at Headingley Stadium and co-directed and co-produced The Gifting, a storytelling ceremony to mark the end of the city’s Year of Culture.
We are resident in Ingram Road Primary School.
Slung Low is one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations and supported by Leeds City Council.
We believe that access to culture is a fundamental part of a happy life. We believe that actions, however small, can have big impact. We believe that culture can change our world for the better.
We are uncompromising in our beliefs.
We look forward to welcoming you.
Our commitment is to represent, across everything we do, the city we are a part of, to include and celebrate the full diversity of our brilliant city.
In the table below, Total Workforce includes our board, permanent team and freelance artists employed by the company.
The problems of inequality in society are cruel and belligerent problems: the solution of quotas whilst imperfect is our current commitment to addressing such issues. However what this process of recording stats and industry discussion around the issue of diversity fails to recognise is that there is a fundamental difference between hiring a black artist to be the lead performer and collaborator in your main creative project of the year and hiring them to do a day’s administration; there is a difference between hiring a team of women artists of colour to curate a national conference and asking them to assist you in a day’s workshopping. Finding betters ways of recording this, demonstrating this, better ways of telling that story is something we are committed to.
This page is updated every year in line with our annual report.