Hidden Spire Collective | Our Freedom: Then and Now

Phase 2, session 1, 22 September 2025

Polly warmed us up with physical jerks and vocal calisthenics, and then led us through a couple of freedom songs, one from the US civil rights tradition and the other our own ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, both proclaiming a belief in a better future.

And then Lizzie reacquainted us with the project’s signature poem, Simon Armitage’s Freedom Road, which should come with a trigger warning, but at least it inspires us to want to tell a more honest story.

That led us into creating tableaux to depict some double-edged images from Armitage’s vision, dancing and digging, in which joy morphs into misery, and which Polly moulded into a single whole.

After a break we explored notions of travelling down Freedom Road: first through a game of Grandma’s Footsteps, which brought out a competitive streak in some and comic ineptitude in others, and, when accompanied by Search reading his poem Freedom Your Way, hinted at the futility of the enterprise; and second, through an exercise of walking round a rectangular grid taped to the floor, which again evoked lots of travelling but no arriving, rendered Kafkaesque by the imposition of more and more arbitrary rules.

All in all, we had a fascinating afternoon – as we always do in this wonderfully diverse and imaginative group – contemplating visually just how elusive freedom can be in an atomised society bound by inherited structures rigorously policed.

Perhaps there’ll more hope next week!

Don't miss the final performance on the 17 November