About the Film

Unfolding is a community arts film made with Dry Water Arts Centre in Amble, documenting a programme that ran through 2025 and asked a deceptively simple question: what are the stories of us? Led by Frances Anderson and Paula Turner, the programme brought together 62 events and activities across and around the town, engaging 2,961 people and creating 40 volunteering roles undertaken by 94 volunteers. The film follows two of those events in particular: an Indian classical dance workshop that drew participants of all ages from across the area, and a week-long residency by Newcastle-based performance troupe PerHaps Now, which culminated in a shadow play performance called Vanishing Point.

Dry Water Arts Centre occupies a converted workshop space on Wellwood Street in Amble. The Unfolding programme was funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, with the North East Combined Authority as the lead authority.

We Meet, We Make, We Move

The film opens with an Indian classical dance workshop whose teacher drew participants who had travelled from across the area, several of whom had never been to Dry Water before. The workshop included seated participation so that no one was excluded by mobility, and moved between technical instruction and something freer: an invitation to use the face, to express emotion, to let the body do something it does not usually do in public. It is the kind of encounter that a community arts film can hold without needing to explain.

Several participants had driven from Rothbury and other villages in the area, precisely because this kind of programme is not available closer to home. The intergenerational mix — young girls alongside older women — felt significant in itself, a kind of learning that runs in both directions.

“I don’t know anybody in this room at all. So to come here was really out of my comfort zone. The way she did it was with such joy, and I could feel it in my heart today.” — Dance workshop participant

A Week in the Studio

The shadow puppet workshop, led by a specialist in the form, brought together local people and members of PerHaps Now, giving both groups a shared introduction to the techniques: how light and material interact, how a painted surface held against a screen changes with movement. For PerHaps Now, it fed directly into the week ahead.

The residency was the troupe’s first experience of working together intensively over a full week. The performance they made, Vanishing Point, used shadow play alongside their own movement vocabulary: playful, absurdist, collaborative, built around the relationship between the performers and the audience rather than a conventional narrative arc. The show was free, performed in the movement space at Dry Water, and came with a whoopee cushion on the way in. The show had the relaxed, inventive quality that this community arts film tries to catch wherever it finds it — the sense of something being made in public, in real time, without a safety net.

“We haven’t worked with a shadow screen before, except for when we did a workshop where we were introduced to how to use the lighting and how to create shadows. So this week we’ve been working with a new material, a new way of working, and using that to reflect on how we worked before and to learn new ways.” — PerHaps Now performer

Filming Unfolding

What drew me to this community arts film was the particular character of Dry Water Arts as a place. It is not a large venue or a well-funded institution. It is a converted workshop run by Frances Anderson and Paula Turner, and it has made itself into something that people travel to from villages across rural Northumberland because it offers things they cannot find closer to home.

Filming a programme like this means working quietly in spaces where something fragile is happening: someone trying a movement for the first time, an audience not quite sure what to expect, a performance troupe working out how a week’s experimentation will translate into a show. The camera has to be present without being an imposition, and the community arts film tries to sit with that balance throughout.

“I didn’t know what to expect, and I felt like they weren’t completely sure what to expect either — from us or from each other. That little awake, alive vibration going on.” — Audience member, Vanishing Point