Pascal Theatre Company is grateful to The Arts Council and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport for a Cultural Recovery Grant during the COVID crisis.
MISSION STATEMENT
Pascal Theatre believes that theatre and the arts are a human need and, that without them, our lives are the poorer. Our mission is to connect theatre and arts with this unstoppable impulse to story-tell. Poems, fables, myths and the narrative of our own experience, thrive in all cultures. Giving voice is as vital for women as it is for men. Our mission is to encourage, nurture and excite this storytelling whether it is through drama, film, painting, music or voice recordings. We recognise the importance of the arts to stimulate our mental and physical health. Our mission is to provide a platform for those who are unheard and to tell their stories so that they can be enjoyed by the widest possible audience.
Pascal Theatre Company was originally set up to stage New Writing that revealed hidden histories. It embraced new writers from many disciplines but gradually the Company became drawn to the stories of the unknown women and men whose lives are rarely noted in history books.
Often this work within the arts is described as Community as if there is a separation between the ‘top layer’ of society and the unheard groups blanketed under this label.
What does Community mean? Is it the voice of a woman on the bus, the train, in the street? Is it the woman without a husband struggling to support her children? Is it the homeless man who picks in the rubbish bins for warm clothes? Is it the youth who is lost because he is on the autism spectrum and cannot recognise the geography of the street?
Each person carries a wealth of history. And now we come to another circle which embraces what is called Heritage. What is Heritage? Is it the East London graveyard that tells the story of Jews covertly coming to England in the 17th century?
Is it in the grounds of Trent Park mansion where Nazi generals were spied on in the 20th century? Is it in the memories of Jewish mothers and daughters, themselves the children and grandchildren of those fleeing European death camps? Or the memory of a man who was a slave worker in Germany or a woman who escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto as a child? A Kurdish woman on the London street has a flashback of fighting for her country. An Iranian man remembers sewing his lips outside Parliament in protest at being sent back to a regime that will kill him. An African in London rebuilds his life after being forced to be a mercenary. These are some of the people we have met and whose lives have sourced elements of our work.
And then we come to Education. Drama classes all over London have brought us not only children but whole families with layers of world history. A woman whose brother was killed by a V2 bomb tells of this moment and her story is retold by a girl who was her age at this moment. A cross generational sharing of history makes the woman understand that we value her story. She sees herself reflected in the child and the child speaks a history that was not hers but which she now understands.
Our theatre company, over three decades, has grown to discover and reveal ways of presenting these secret histories through performance in unusual spaces, theatre, film, digitally or through sound. This is why the website is set up in intersecting circles. We invite you to enjoy the fusion that this offers and also ask you to bring us your stories as a rich treasure for future generations.
This is why the website is set up in intersecting circles. We invite you to enjoy the fusion that this brings and also ask you to bring us your stories as a rich treasure for future generations.
Read A Short History of Pascal Theatre Company
Pascal Theatre Company was formed as a Registered Charity in 1985.