The Voice of The Unheard

Aim

Our aim is to raise enough money to put on our theatre show at the VAULT Festival 2022.

The Voice of the Unheard 

Social media super-fans tune in to watch and listen to Sheryl, a black woman from Tottenham, discuss hot topics with her followers from wigs to white women tears. 

Are you ready for the tea on what it’s like to be a black woman living inner city? Like, comment, subscribe. Get a ticket - come catch a vibe.

https://vaultfestival.com/performances/the-voice-of-the-unheard-work-in-progress-2/

Vanessa Owusu is the writer of The Voice of The Unheard and is starring in this one-woman show. She is also an emerging theatre-maker, who graduated from Kent University in 2016 with a BA (Hons) in Drama and Theatre. Vanessa won the Ashley Walter's Monologue Jam at Soho. As an actor, she has appeared in several short films. She performed a shorter version of The Voice of the Unheard earlier this year at the Arcola Outside as part of "Today I'm Wiser" festival and at The Tower Theatre as part of the "Love (and Survival) in a Time Of Covid" festival.

The production team:

Director - Tramaine Reindorf

Co-writer - Juliana Ayeni-Stevens

Juliana Ayeni-Stevens is a writer and producer. She started her journey aspiring to become an actress but shortly after finishing university threw herself into a full-time career within talent management. Going onto various roles within the arts and entertainment industry. She is an alumnus of 2018/2019 Soho Theatre Writers Lab. Her love for screen began in her early years watching a wide range of films and tv shows from drama to comedy to documentaries. Her writing credits includes a rehearsed reading of Work This Pussy (Talawa Firsts 2021, Talawa Theatre), Arti (Poleroid Theatre, Southwark Playhouse), Broken (Short Film), The Invoices (Comedy Sketch). She has a great love for Latin American Cinema, true crime docs and comedy.

Producer - Amber Ryder

Amber Ryder (she/her) is a film and theatre producer, trained at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts and Bournemouth Film School. She recently founded Ryder Productions, a new writing-based theatre company that embraces untold stories and empowers unheard voices. She has many professional short film, feature film, and theatre production credits with companies such as Nice Shirt Films, Seize Films, Luti Media, Independent Talent Group, Superhero, Big Little Theatre School.

Designer - Roisin Jenner

Roisin Jenner is a performance designer based in London working across theatre, music, dance and film. Following a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Camberwell College of Art, she went on to graduate from The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with First Class Honours in her BA in Theatre and Performance Design. Roisin is currently assistant to Fly Davis on the Donmar Warehouse production of Henry V featuring Kit Harrington. 

Why support us:

We are a team of young, female, emerging creatives that have a united ambition, to make groundbreaking theatre that touches on important subjects, such as highlighting the "black" experience; which The Voice of The Unheard does so well. This new-writing piece of theatre is bold, passionate, daring and speaks the frank truth of black women's experiences living in the UK. The production team involved in this project are passionate about the themes that run through the script and are thrilled to be collaborating to bring their different areas of expertises to the production to make it a success. The team has ambitions to develop the project further and hopefully tour it in the future around regional and off west end theatres. 

Our plan:

We are raising money to put on our show at the VAULT Festival 2022. We are programmed into the VAULT Festival as part of their 10th anniversary and this renowned Festival is the UK's leading independent showcase of live performance and artistic talent. We need to raise money in order to pay for production costs, running costs and expenses, all money raised will go towards helping us make the show a success we believe it will be.  The pie chart below shows where the money we raise will be going, almost a quarter will go towards making the production look visually stunning through props and set, as well as making our actress looks beautiful through putting money towards her costumes and wigs. Marketing is also a big expense, in order to get the word out there about our show to get as many people into the theatre as possible. The Voice of The Unheard is currently a self-funded production so every donation helps us tremendously.

Future life of The Voice of The Unheard:

Investing in us now will be an investment for The Voice of The Unheard to grow as a company and create a vital space in UK theatre, for underrepresented theatre-makers to join forces and make work that is seriously overlooked in theatre and is truly impactful to society. 

With your kind help in investing in us, we hope to inspire people and most importantly empower black women in creating safe spaces to conduct workshops. Using performing arts, we will support black women in any traumas and creatively unlocking black women physically, mentally, and emotionally to their full potential to heal. Additionally, we hope to tour this show around the UK to not only raise awareness of the black experience, but to also make a change in the creative sector and to challenge society. Organisations need to do better in creating an inclusive and uplifting environment for black women. We eventually would love to create more stories and venture out into different platforms. If you aren’t in a position to support us financially, then we cannot thank you enough for still taking the time to get to know us and we hope you can get involved in our journey through either keeping up to date with the project on our social media and sharing our work far and wide, as well as coming to watch the show at the VAULT Festival!

Will COVID-19 affect the production?

The VAULT Festival has mitigations and plans laid out to cover all scenarios of what could potentially happen to the Festival as the COVID-19 pandemic is ever changing. We will follow all rules set in place by the VAULT Festival team to make sure our show runs safely and follows all guidelines.  

More details:

The Voice of The Unheard is on for 4 nights through January and March

Friday 28th January, 10:30pm

Saturday 5th March, 4:30pm & 9pm

Friday 18th March, 10:30pm

https://vaultfestival.com/performances/the-voice-of-the-unheard-work-in-progress-2/

Please check out the link above to purchase tickets and please share this Crowdfunder far and wide, to help us achieve our goal of bringing this show to life about topics that are seriously overlooked in theatre. Thank you in advance for your kind donations and for sharing this page, we really appreciate all the love and support.

Important update:

The team of The Voice of The Unheard are very sad to share the news that the VAULT Festival 2022 has heartbreakingly been cancelled. This run of The Voice of The Unheard has therefore been postponed and we are working on re-homing the show and are positive that we will find a new venue to put the show on very soon. For all those that have donated, we will be in contact with you soon, but we plan to keep this donation page open as donations will be going towards our newly re-homed future run. All those that have donated already will automatically receive a free ticket to the new future run, details of when are where this will be will be with you soon.

Love from The Voice of The Unheard team.

This project successfully funded on 2nd February 2022