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 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.

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. Artistic Director, 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, live in Hull and on BBC2. Over a half million people saw a part of ‘Flood’ and the show won a Royal Television Society Yorkshire Award for excellence.

At the start of 2020 we made The Good Book, a short film – the first with Leeds People’s Theatre

Recent work – on an epic scale using cityscapes as backdrops – includes ‘Mapping The City’ (with iMove Yorkshire Cultural Olympiad in Hull), ‘Blood and Chocolate’, (York Theatre Royal & Pilot Theatre), ‘The White Whale’ (Leeds Inspired) and ‘Camelot: The Shining City’ (Sheffield Theatres and Sheffield Peoples’ Theatre).
Our Artistic Director, Alan Lane, co-directed the opening ceremony of Leeds 2023, The Awakening, at Headingley Stadium in January 2023

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.

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.

 

 

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We are Slung Low

Joanna Resnick - Executive Producer

Matt Angove - Technical Director

Alan Lane - Artistic Director

Community Advisory Board

Carolyn Eden
Lucy Potter
Bea Fuentes
Laura Hodgkinson
Graciela McIntyre
Adam Ogilvie
Pam Chandra
Carl Akeroyd

Advisory Board

Lolita Chakrabarti
Laura Clark
Lesley Jackson
Nicola Miles-Wildin
Rachel Miller
Jill Shelley
Kully Thiarai
Erica Whyman