Our Night
Monthly events.
Two pieces per event.
Every piece gets feedback.
Everyone gets paid.
Everyone gets support.
It’s as simple as that.
What’s so special
about us?
There’s a fair few scratch nights in the Midlands, so why share your work with us?
We do things a bit differently. It’s not just that we pay union minimum wages for everyone involved, or that we have events each month. We’re focused on building and serving our community of theatremakers outside of scratch nights, shifting expectations, and altering the landscape.
We do this deliberately. Sometimes when we as artists take part in scratch nights in a theatre building it feels like there’s a certain expectation on us and on our work. Especially if we’re being paid.
That isn’t useful. Scratch nights are supposed to be about playing, testing, and learning from our audiences and our peers, not about churning out a polished play ready for production. We’ve found that not being in a theatre helps people relax and focus on exploring, the way a scratch night is supposed to.
We’re not in a theatre
We stream all our events
Anyone else get really annoyed when theatre stopped being livestreamed after lockdowns ended? Livestreaming is not only convenient if you can’t get a babysitter or can’t get a ticket on the night, it’s also solid access.
We talk about being disability-lead, well one of those disabilities we’re lead by is chronic pain & fatigue conditions. Most of us on the Blindspot Nights team struggle to leave our homes to go to events, so we know how important livestreaming is for our own access. Our livestreams also capture the live BSL at our events and have auto-captioning available.
We’re serious about community
Community can sometimes feel like an accident, like something you stumble across or get lucky with. But we want to do more to establish reliable infrastructure for our community of theatremakers. Scratch nights are where it starts, but it doesn’t end there.
There’s no door to get your foot in with us. We prefer to take it off it’s hinges altogether. We’re building a platform online and in person built on your suggestions for how the theatre community can thrive. We’re still learning what that looks like as we talk to more and more people about what they want to see. When it’s ready we’ll share a new community page on our website here for you to check out and see what we’re doing next.