Daniel Bye Archives - North West End UK

Daniel Bye takes to the road with a new play about running and freedom

19Jan

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

Interviews

Daniel Bye takes to the road with a new play about running and freedom

Daniel Bye made his name with a series of challenging interactive works he wrote and appeared in, but now he’s teamed up with musician Boff Whalley to create These Hill Are Ours that’s nominally about their shared love of running. Daniel and the former Chumbawamba songwriter are also using songs and words to explore who should own the land they run on, and thanks to the virus they’ve been waiting for a year to perform it in front an audience. The idea began life when they were working together on projects around the country. “We go for a run from wherever we were out of the town, or city, towards the peak overlooking the place and that kind of grew into a project,” recalls Daniel about a work that developed as they put the hard miles in over the last three years. “But as we rep...

11Dec

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

NEWS

Boff and Daniel run away from it all

These Hills Are Ours written by writer-performer Daniel Bye and Chumbawamba’s Boff Whalley exploring their mutual love of running and freedom gets its world premiere at ARC Stockton in January. The pair also celebrates the freedom to roam wild places and asks both of them what they’re really running from. For the last three years Bye and Whalley have been running a series of routes, from the centre of any place they found themselves in up to the top of the peak overlooking that city. Daniel then took off on one epic journey travelling more than twice as far as he’s ever run before. In story and in song this is the story of what they found out - about the relationship between city and country, between wild and controlled, about land ownership, about why we’re drawn to wild places a...

Theatre Cash Injection – A Wise Investment?

6Jul

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

Blogs

Theatre Cash Injection – A Wise Investment?

Given we made two appeals for government support for theatres to survive beyond the pandemic it would be churlish not to welcome the government’s £1.57 billion cash injection to protect our world leading cultural sector. Now it’s true that money has to go a long way across theatres, museums and live venues, but considering yesterday we had no support this is a significant acknowledgement that many big and small theatres were on the brink of going under. And, make no mistake, once they went dark the reality was they would never come back like the Nuffield in Southampton. You can’t help but think the National Theatre’s decision to lay off its front of house staff, or the announcement by regional powerhouse the Royal Exchange of potential redundancies must have focused the government’s ...

14Jun

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

REVIEWS

These Hills Are Ours – Clougha Pike

Daniel Bye and Boff Whalley were just about to set off a national of their new show, These Hills Are Ours, exploring through stories and song the relationship between art and the great outdoors, but then the virus struck. So in lieu of those live shows they’ve been releasing a short series of videos where they take a small choir on a hike to the top of a hill singing a specially composed song on their journey to the peak. This time they’ve taken a trip from the nippy shores of Morecambe Bay through town and up some rugged paths to the top of Clougha Pike. This is a more political video as the choir tramp past Do Not Trespass signs as they sing: ‘It’s mine, but I don’t own it/and it makes me sort of sad/to know this land is parcelled and exchanged.’ Once again, the singers are a...