ShapeChangers was a project commissioning young people to create outdoor artworks on the National Cycle Network. The project was supported by funding from the Scottish Government and administered through Sustrans Scotland’s Art and Diversity programme. 

BOP was one of four arts organisations that created artworks as part of ShapeChangers.

Bruce Phillips, Network Engagement Coordinator at Sustrans explained:  

“ShapeChangers is all about helping young creative people change the way we experience outdoor spaces. It’s exciting to see these students take on the task of temporarily transforming their local travel routes on the National Cycle Network. 

Young people are the future, and it is vital that they can help shape the places they live. We hope this will encourage more young people to discover and use their local routes on the National Cycle Network. Travelling independently is a great way to help improve young people’s mental and physical health.”  

The Process

Lead artist Ink Asher Hemp, in conversation with performers Lloyd, Melissa and Cleo.

Lloyd: Initially, I was a little bit nervous. Curious nervousness. I was really excited to learn more about stuff I didn’t know about and have a space to convey my own story on a platform where I could express my own experiences, my own opinions, on a greater scale.

Ink: In the Summer of 2023 I had the privilege of working with three young disabled artists — Cleo, Melissa, and Lloyd — to craft a piece of outdoor performance from stories of community change and dreams of abundant futures. A few weeks ago they interviewed each other — this blog details how they felt about the process.

Before I met them, notebooks were hung in trees to gather stories of change, dreams, and musings from the local community so we could use these words, alongside speeches from disabled activists as a starting point for writing and playing with words using found poetry. 

But first… 

Melissa: We all had to get to know each other.

Lloyd: We sat in a group and did a lot of word association and different ways to articulate what we want to say. 

Ink: We broke it up in past, present and future, and had an interesting history lesson about a group of disabled activists who stopped a bus. 

This helped us work out how we want to change things, the things we want to be remembered for, and sparked the outline of our story.

Melissa: We all played to our own strengths; I wrote quite a lot, Lloyd came up with characters, and you [Cleo] came up with a lot of ideas.

Ink: Those characters were the anarchy loving Helen; Von, who strives for justice and freedom by giving power to the voices of the unheard; and Andrea who Cleo describes as ‘very honourable’. 

As well as considering the characters and the story we focused on how to make it accessible. 

Lloyd: It was really important to break down the script into sections that we could easily and collaboratively use that wouldn’t leave anyone left out or awkward. 

Cleo: For me, I remember you [Ink] wrote script notes on the set to give me reminders of the lines to say and attached the notebook prop into the table so I could open it easily.

Ink: I’ll let Melissa explain why this is important to us…

Melissa: Disabled performers don’t have enough opportunity in theatre and as a result of that disabled audiences don’t have the representation that they deserve. The current standards are pretty much ‘If we have one disabled performer included that’s us mastered inclusion’ which is absolutely not good enough because disabled people should be included in all aspects of theatre like writing, directing, facilitating etc. I think more funding should go into creating opportunities to get disabled people involved in theatre… Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Ink: With this in mind, giving access the time, care, and attention it needs meant we could concentrate on telling the story – the one we came up with follows their characters as they go back and forwards through time writing the world and the changes they want to see. 

Melissa: I like the bit where me and you [Lloyd] were arguing.

Cleo: When you and Lloyd and were like ‘Yes. no. Yes No! YES! NO!’ It was so good — my favourite moment.

Melissa: I like that it brought a bit of humour to it.

Ink: The humour was particularly helpful when it got a bit cold and wet while we were performing — we had made this piece of theatre for a bike path. Fortunately, we had chosen a place sheltered by a bridge. On our last day together, we set up our performance table with analogue captioning to share our work with the passing public. 

Lloyd: I found the location very very interesting. That bridge was really really fun, the echo was so cool, and the scenery was beautiful! Very peaceful making.

Cleo: At first I was nervous to perform to strangers but later I was getting like, ‘Okay, I have to do this!’ and then I was okay.

Ink: Cleo’s being very modest here — they were more than okay! They had worked together to share a beautiful piece of performance with the people wandering along the path, and thanks to the skills of film maker Mal Fraser, by the end of the day it had also been captured on camera. In November we returned to the same spot to share the story as a film projected using a bicycle-powered cinema. 

Melissa: To be honest, the idea of going to a park at night in November… it’s not that appealing… but it was actually really good! I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. 

Cleo: The thing that surprised me was the bicycle cinema — when people are like cycling to make the film go over and over and over and over. I was like, ‘Waow!’ Watching our film made me feel happy, and excited, and funny. I laughed a lot. 

Lloyd: I would love to do more theatre in this style. I felt like I had more of a say — I would love to do more of this again.

Melissa: I would like more opportunities for disabled people to be involved in theatre.

Cleo: I would like more people to join and experience artwork.

Lloyd: I would like more of these kinds of things on a global scale — talking about things we avoid and making art to come up with solutions that will go down in history.

The Artwork

The film records the performance from August 2023, mixing in interviews with disabled activists from as far back as the 1890s and looking ahead to the years 2030–2060. It asks people what kind of world they want to create. 

As Cleo said above, the finished film was then screened on a bicycle-powered cinema in November 2023.