The Witness on tour

Aim: We need your help to get The Witness on tour across the UK, and even beyond!...

Help us get The Witness on the road! 

Hello folks, and thank you for stopping buy to our Crowdfunder page! If you've found your way here, I imagine you might already know something about The Witness and it's journey. But for those of you that only know a little, I want to fill you in on why we've found ourselves running this Crowdfunder and what it means for the life of The Witness.

Some background: me and Mary                                                                          At some point in the last seven years, I become utterly obsessed by the mystery of Mary Magdalene, her connection to Egypt and missing strands of the story of Christianity. I am fascinated by the way Magdalene continues to live vividly in the collective imagination, the mythos that surrounds her, and how she evokes and carries the longing for a feminine aspect of the divine. For me, and many others, she is emblematic of all that has been left out of institutional religion: woman, body, eros.

Part of this fascination lead me to discover her gospel. And I found, in the journey of her gospel - the missing pages, the burying, the re-finding, the translating, the many failed attempts at bringing it to the public - deep symbolism of what has happened and continues to happen to this Other strand of Christianity, which was there from the beginning, and carried forward not in stone-built institutions, but in the living, breathing, fleshy body of a woman. A woman who was there and bared witness

With so many gaps in Mary's story, and in her gospel, I had no intention or desire to tell a conclusive narrative. I am not an academic or historian or theologian. I am a storyteller, and believe that often what is lost in the historical record, is carried in the collective imagination and oral tradition. Remnants remain. I am interested in who we want Mary to be rather than in proving her historical reality. The longing for her presence, for her fleshiness, for her as beloved, is very real and very right. It is the longing for what has been too long absent from our image of God...

The Funding Situation                                                                                        So, thanks to Arts Council England and the Kenneth Fund, we were able to create The Witness, show it a handful of times, and run a long project, called Heresy, exploring all of this. The hearts, souls and minds of many people poured into this project: blood, sweat and spirit. 

However, as funding cuts continue and competition for funds increases, we find ourselves in this peculiar and frustrating position: we have a show that's ready to go - the props are made and stored, the soundtrack and lighting all edited, marketing materials at the ready; venues wanting to book the show; and audiences ready to see it.

But between us and the audiences is a funding gap. Although not terribly expensive, the cost of putting on a show is more than venues are able to guarantee. 

We have had two Arts Council touring grants rejected. Of course, this makes me question whether it is right to continue to try. It feels so hard to get it out there. There have been so many difficulties, blockages and delays - as we speak about in the performance itself. It has genuinely felt, consistently, like we are battling a curse of silencing; or, that we continue to, inadvertently, constellate the archetype of the heretic and keep oursleves out at the margins (I will write more about this in the first of my weekly blogs throughout this six week Crowdfunder). However, all of this has lead me to think that perhaps we need to think and act more heretically; to find unorthodox ways of supporting the work onto it's next phase. That is how we have found ourselves here, speaking to you....

Practical Things                                                                                                  So, now that I have laid out the deep currants that carry this work, here are the practicalities we need to contend with: 

The Witness was made with mid-scale touring in mind, which means we built it for larger stage spaces, with lights and sound, and a 5 metre tall ladder structure needing a high ceiling. This means we need three people on the road - me (Jo!), Rob and a technician/stage manager. We also have a wonderful producer, Courtenay, who needs paying as well, and marketing costs to cover. The total cost per show is in the region of £1800, broken down like this:

Company Fees (2 x performers, 1 x stage manager/technician): £800

Travel & accommodation: £400

Van Hire & Fuel: £170

Producing Fees: £250

Overheads (prop storage): £30

Consumables (wine/bread): £10

Marketing: £120

The more shows we do in one place, the more efficient the costs become. Also, these costs don't take into account if we need to hire a venue to put the show on ourselves, as we would like to do at The Actor's Church in Covent Garden. 

This is where we need your help!

Our Vision                                                                                                         Our vision is to perform The Witness in a number of venues across the UK between March 2026 and October 2026. Some venues are theatres that will put the work in their programme, and others are venues we need to hire and ticket ourselves. Our PLAN A is to use whatever we raise here as substantial match-funding for an Arts Council project grant application (which is different to a touring grant, but I won't go into all of that here!). Our PLAN B, if that bid isn't successful, is to use whatever money we raise here to put on as many shows as we can with this money alone.

We appreciate all the people that have contributed to this journey so far. It has been, and continues to be, one of the strangest, most intense and unpredictable processes I have ever been involved in! But it won't feel finished until it's lived out in the world a few more times. Any donations you make will contribute to this beautiful and important work... Mary's gospel has been buried for 1500 years... it's time for her to speak. 

Please see my website for more images and videos of the work, and for weekly newsletters throughout the Crowdfunding campaign (you can sign up for the newsletter!): www.jo-blake.co.uk

With so much love and thanks. 

Jo xxxx

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 8th August 2025 at 10:01am