THE LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT

This work undertaken as an Eccles Institute Creative Fellow in Popular Print at the British Library was informed by earlier research around energy democracy via US author, activist Ashley Dawson’s ‘People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons.’ It involves delving into the archives of the Federal Theatre Project that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression - specifically the ‘Living Newspaper Unit’ and a series of innovative and censored plays created around the key social justice issues of the time. What would a Living Newspaper for this time and place look like? How can its making be performed? What is the power of the archive to both speak to and impact contemporary debate and action?

From September 2025 to summer 2026 I am researching the Living Newspaper Unit with focus on specific plays (POWER, One Third of A Nation, Injuction Granted, Triple A Plowed Under…) that addressed energy democracy, housing, agriculture and labour and were controversial, censored or banned. I’ll be looking at their innovative analogue multi media stagings and their origins in Soviet constructivist theatre exploring how to ‘stage’ and apply these techniques to miniature, live edited stages of microfiche and microfilm. The fellowship involves exciting collaboration with Rabbits Road Press and their riso expertise experimenting with scanner bed and materials in this process of performing print.