We are veterans of the festival circuit, and have built up an impressive menu of shows and experiences. Over the last five years we have produced ambitious work for the likes of Standon Calling, Green Man, Valley Fest, Secret Garden Party and Boomtown.
Please see below for an overview of some of our key projects from the last five years, and some more information on what we have plannned for our season in 2026.
Please see below for an overview of some of our key projects from the last five years, and some more information on what we have plannned for our season in 2026.
AS SEEN AT...
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STANDON CALLING - 2021-2023In 2018 and 2019 Nigel took over hosting and curating an outdoor entertainment area at Standon Calling, an independent boutique festival in Hertfordshire. In 2021 this expanded to a site-wide theatrics offer, and over a three year period 6FootStories delivered some really ambitious work, combining street theatre, circus, hosted entertainment, mass participation “big ticket” events like the Dog Show and the Costume Parade, digital and physical treasure hunt mechanics, pop-up happenings and site-wide narratives.
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We partnered with Mat Burtcher of Butcher Way Productions to co-produce the festival storyline each year, which involved the development of a bespoke storyline/treasure hunt webpage app. This allowed us to gamify the site-wide theatrics, track engagement and put live messaging out directly to people participating in the narrative. We had a combination of one-on-one installations, tent venues, open air arenas, walkabout performance and pop-up street theatre working alongside the digital treasure hunt, and we worked closely with both the site decor team and the central HQ at the festival to ensure that the aesthetic and communication of the narrative was clear and working on multiple levels. With a different theme each year - ‘Time Turbulence’, ‘Who Let The Toys Out’ and ‘Stranger Valley’ - we had to generate a huge amount of bespoke content, and we proved that we could work at scale across a variety of locations, media and forms, all delivered within the budgets given by the festival, and not leveraged with additional funding.
Sadly in 2023 we were not paid our final installment post-festival, and continuing financial issues saw the festival cancelled in 2024 and finally go into liquidation in 2025. We learned a lot from our delivery at Standon Calling though, and have applied this to further multi-location, multi-form work at our other festival partners. The programme we delivered also provided a brilliant opportunity to train and develop performance and design graduates in interactive festival performance.
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VALLEY FEST - 2021-PresentAfter providing family entertainment at Valley Fest in 2017 and 2018, and creating content (funded through the ACE Emergency Grant) for their 2020 live streamed virtual festival, we returned in 2021 to run the Cattle Cabaret, an outdoor stage filled with interactive family content, alongside a programme of walkabout performance. In 2022-2024 we teamed up with the new Regen Stage to deliver a range of family entertainment alongside a programme of talks and workshops themed around regenerative farming and sustainability. We were given a remit to provide light relief from the talks but also reinforce some of the ideas and thinking in an entertaining and humorous way.
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We partnered with broadcaster and comedian Dr Phil Hammond to deliver special quiz shows in 2022 and 2023, and representatives from the Soil Association and Bristol Food Network to create topical panel shows that addressed sustainability concerns. In 2023 we received additional funding from festival sponsor Yeo Valley to create some bespoke walkabout performance to expand the offer of the Regen area. This included a “Wellyvision” installation, a “Buckamoo” walkabout and a Punch & Judy area, all performed by graduates of East 15 Acting School as part of our continued mentoring and development of employment pathways for graduate performers - something we are always keen to offer, whether or not our season has ACE-funding attached.
Our 2024 appearance at Valley Fest formed part of our ambitious ACE-funded season and although the festival had to cut back their budget we were still able to provide an extensive programme of family entertainment and give performance opportunities to a new wave of graduates, as well as our core team. In 2025 the festival took a year off to review finances, but it is returning this year, along with a fully restored Regen Stage, and we are thrilled to be invited back.
GREEN MAN -2022
In 2022 we returned to Green Man in collaboration with outdoor theatre maker Kristoffer Huball, after 3 consecutive commissions from them from 2018-2020. Our return in 2022 was to produce the headline theatre & circus spectacle show on the Back of Beyond Stage, with a £17,000 commission from the Green Man Trust - their largest to date at that point. We created a narrative-based theatrical spectacular, featuring aerial and circus graduate performers from Circomedia, graduates from Northern School of Dance and our own core team of devising performers. The show combined pyrotechnics, aerial displays, original live music, a swordfighting routine, a Morris Dance stage invasion, a giant carnival dragon puppet, an exploding disco shed and our signature kiddie rave at the end of the show. It was an opportunity to work with a number of performing arts training partners and on a far grander scale than we would usually for a narrative-based static street theatre show. It was an immensely ambitious and enjoyable project, and all created simultaneously with our programmes at Standon Calling, Valley Fest and Secret Garden Party that year.
THE 2023/24 SEASON2023 and 2024 were both hugely ambitious seasons that saw us expand our partnerships and capacity significantly. In 2023 we produced work for Standon Calling, Valley Fest, Kendal Calling, Deer Shed and Shambala. Some of this work was delivered by separate performer teams simultaneously at different festival sites, and Kendal Calling, Deer Shed and Shambala were all new bookings for us. Shambala was a particularly important new step for us as a core team, as we took the venue build and decor installation totally in-house (work at Standon Calling or Valley Fest had always been delivered in collaboration with the festival decor teams). Shambala saw us deliver a revived version of our interactive art gallery The Tat Modern, with a graduate designer from Central School of Drama, as well as a graduate stage manager, and it put in place a number of key roles/personnel and working practices that we have maintained in following years.
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The 2024 season was even more expansive. We forged a new partnership with Redbridge Drama Centre, who provided us with extensive rehearsal space in-kind and a slot in one of their studio theatres to preview our new show The Deadcoats. Our successful Project Grant application allowed us to:
- Create new two-man comedy-horror The Deadcoats and take it on a micro-tour to Redbridge, Nozstock, Secret Garden Party and a community venue in Havering in partnership with Havering Changing.
- Produce an extensive programme at Secret Garden Party, featuring a Punch & Judy street theatre area (see Graduate Pathways below), night time installation work and our spoof art gallery The Tat Modern.
- Start a new collaboration with Boomtown Festival (see below)
- Significantly expand our offer at Shambala, taking Tat Modern into a larger venue, building more internal structures and opening late at night with our brand new queer cabaret rave extravaganza, Drag & Bass.
- Offer a number of micro-commissions to cabaret performers within Drag & Bass, as well as paid performance slots for a range of queer cabaret acts.
BOOMTOWN - 2024-Present
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Boomtown is a unique music festival, in that it has an ongoing fictional narrative that evolves year on year, and this storyline plays out alongside the music line-up, delivered by hundreds of actors and circus performers populating street venues, balconies, walkabouts, spectacles and happenings. It also runs an ambitious site-wide narrative treasure hunt, or evidence quest, often referred to as The Game, or the Storyline Quest. This all means that it is possible to produce immersive, interactive work on a scale and complexity far beyond any other setting we have worked in.
In much of the decade leading up to the pandemic, we were core members of immersive theatre collective Dank Parish, with whom we produced work for Boomtown Festival from 2012-2019. Dank Parish was instrumental in the development of Boomtown’s identity as an immersive music festival, helping craft the overarching storyline and the dedicated storyline phone app. After a significant break we returned in 2024 as 6FootStories to run The Network - a new underground resistance as part of that year’s storyline, and an integral part of the site-wide quest. We worked very closely with Boomtown’s narrative director to develop the world and style of The Network, and so impressed the team that we were asked to massively expand our offering for 2025. We went from having just a roaming cart in 2024 to running the cart, a micro-hatch venue and a brand new, purpose-built multi-space theatrical venue that served as the endpoint for the site-wide quest. We were a hugely important and popular venue, with thousands of players interacting with us. We also had our actors involved in a number of key storyline happenings, collaborating with other theatrical crews at the festival and several of Boomtown’s creative directors. |
6FootStories director Nigel has become more embedded in central storyline discussions, and has worked closely with Boomtown’s narrative director and the creative team to develop plans for Boomtown 2026. Nigel completed his MA in Dramaturgy at Birkbeck College in 2025, and his dissertation focused on the unique dramaturgy of Boomtown, and a number of its dramaturgical paradoxes. This research has led to significant changes in the structure of Boomtown’s site-wide quest, as well as practice-sharing among Boomtown’s many theatrical crews. That Boomtown provides a rich playground for both academic research and highly playable interactive theatre is a testament to its creativity and complexity.
At Boomtown 2025, we provided paid performance opportunities to 28 graduate performers from Rose Bruford and East 15 Acting School, a significantly enhanced role and budget for designer Valentina Miranda and her team of grads from Central School of Speech & Drama, and stage management and production placement opportunities for Creative Producer students from East 15.
WILDERNESS - 2025
At the end of 2024 we were contacted by Wilderness who had heard about our work with Tat Modern (presumably as a result of our successful ACE-funded 2024 season) and wanted to commission us to take on a batch of micro-venues. We ended up delivering 4 separate micro-venue experiences at the festival, operating out of wooden sheds. We created all-new content for the festival, managed to give paid performance slots to 13 graduate performers, consolidated our working practices with lead stage manager Mela Birch (originally a graduate designer on our 2023 season), gave a micro-commission to grad company Ordinary Stories and made a new training pathway with Wimbledon College of Art, giving one of their theatre design graduates a paid position designing two of the shed venues. We are proud that we continue to provide extensive paid graduate pathway opportunities, even when our seasons are funded solely through the festival commissions.
The four new installation concepts we created as part of our Wilderness programme were:
- Sauna Souk, an improv game hosted by a sweaty businessman called Olly Gark inside a sauna
- Graham's Gardeners, a multi-activity eco-installation
- Pie in the Sky, a walkabout experience and pin-hole film installation
- Fishermen's Farewell (co-created with Ordinary Stories), a mix of immersive installation and night time performance art
GRADUATE PATHWAYS
Over the last five years we have given a wide range of paid and volunteer opportunities to graduates across performance, design, stage management and production. Design graduates from Central School of Speech & Drama and Wimbledon College of Art have designed costumes at Standon Calling, led decor installation at Secret Garden Party, and led concept design for our work at Boomtown. This latter graduate has delivered work of such high quality that she is now a core member of the creative team, and is co-leading on our vision for this year’s season.
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Valentina's work at Boomtown last year
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We have given paid performance opportunities to graduates from Central, East 15, Rose Bruford, Circomedia, Northern School of Dance and Fourth Monkey. Many performers that made their first foray into street theatre and interactive work with us are now working regularly in the immersive theatre industry, with 6FootStories alumni working across Tomb Raider, Monopoly Live, Traitors Live, Phantom Peak, Loxwood Joust and many more similar settings.
Meat & Potato at SouthWestFest 2023
We have taken a particular interest in mentoring the work of a small group of grads from East 15 who make work as Meat & Potato Theatre. In 2023 we produced a mini-tour of their Punch & Judy show, taking them to community festival SouthWestFest, Valley Fest and a community garden in Dagenham. As well as providing production and logistics support, we have given in-depth dramaturgical guidance, with Nigel helping fine-tune their performances and encouraging them to take creative risks. Our work mentoring and collaborating with them continues into 2026 as they take on delivery of much of the programme at Valley Fest this year.
Ordinary Stories at Wilderness 2025
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SGP 2024
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We have also been supporting the work of a grad company out of Central called Ordinary Stories. They were given a night time micro-commission at Secret Garden Party in 2024 where they really excelled in creating strange, hypnotic work that entranced passing audiences and drew some of the largest crowds of our whole programme at that festival. We followed this up with a micro-commission for Wilderness last year, and once again they delivered a haunting and highly detailed fishermen’s installation in one of our sheds. They have gone on to reprise this work at Newport Fringe recently and have further plans to tour it. Seeing this development and being able to provide the space to incubate ideas like this has been incredibly rewarding. A similar example would be of Georgia Polly-Taylor, who premiered her piece Hot Mess with us at Drag & Bass in the Tat Modern at Shambala 2024 as one of our grad micro-commissions there. She has gone on to expand the work, doing runs at Camden Fringe, winning Best of the Camden Fringe from Everything Theatre, and a cabaret bursary from Brighton Fringe, and now producing a month-long run at Underbelly this year in Edinburgh.
Promo shot for Hot Mess
We are passionate about using the platform and capacity we have within our festival programmes to spotlight the work of younger and fresher artists and support their continued growth and development. This kind of grassroots experience is how we cut our teeth and we want to ensure we keep providing the space and resources for new ideas and performers.
SUMMER SEASON 2026
For our upcoming Summer Season, we are focusing on two of our longstanding festival partners, Valley Fest and Boomtown, but using these kernels of activity as springboards for continued mentoring of recent graduates, for the development of new touring content and workshops, and to trial a number of exciting new partnerships. The season will also see us professionalising some of our company processes, with the creation of new policies and procedures around performing and working at festivals, new induction packs for new recruits, and additional time onboarding new performers, all in an attempt to legitimise our work and improve company welfare and quality when working in intense festival environments.
Our Programme at Valley Fest
We return to host the Regen Stage at Valley Fest, delivering a series of interactive game shows and entertainments. At the moment our line-up of shows includes:
We return to host the Regen Stage at Valley Fest, delivering a series of interactive game shows and entertainments. At the moment our line-up of shows includes:
- The Regeneration Game, a bespoke family game show created especially for Valley Fest, and lovingly ripped off from Bruce Forsyth
- Universally Challenged, another affectionate homage, with broadcaster and comedian Dr Phil Hammond as guest host
- Wheel of Wheel of Fortunes, a mash-up of popular game shows, all given an ecological and sustainable farming spin
- Barnyard Breakfast Bingo - our longstanding and highly popular take on the bingo format makes its first return since 2023, with all new games and all new hosts
- Because You’re Earth It, a brand new family game show where teams compete in a series of high octane and very messy mini-games, hoping to leave the game with the best soil. Along the way we’ll be learning all about the elements that make up healthy soil, and what we can do to look after the land
This programme of entertainment is being developed by Nigel and Isaac Consadine. Isaac graduated from East 15 in 2023, and over the last 3 years has received continued mentoring, guidance and micro-commissions from Nigel and 6FootStories. Isaac will be in charge of his own team of performers and will very much be leading the action on the ground, with Nigel helping shape the content in the run up to the festival, but then handing responsibility over, in order to delegate more and thus increase capacity for 6FootStories in the future.
Because You’re Earth It micro-tour
We want to use our festival gigs as an opportunity to incubate new work, and then find life for some of this work away from festival fields. The new soil gameshow feels like the perfect opportunity to be breaking into some new settings and partnerships, so we are incorporating a micro-tour of the show as a pilot project, with a view to doing more extensive touring of it as a standalone project in the near future. We will be taking Because You’re Earth It to:
We want to use our festival gigs as an opportunity to incubate new work, and then find life for some of this work away from festival fields. The new soil gameshow feels like the perfect opportunity to be breaking into some new settings and partnerships, so we are incorporating a micro-tour of the show as a pilot project, with a view to doing more extensive touring of it as a standalone project in the near future. We will be taking Because You’re Earth It to:
- Essex Wildlife Trust - ideally Thameside Nature Discovery Park in Thurrock
- An RHS site - either Hyde Hall, near Chelmsford or Wisley in Surrey
- Stoneford Community Garden in Dagenham
Our Programme at Boomtown
This will be our third year running The Network at Boomtown, and our biggest offering there yet. The Network is a major part of Boomtown’s ongoing storyline. In 2024 and 2025, The Network was an underground resistance movement, dedicated to bringing together the different districts of Boomtown, and championing a mycelium-inspired connection between all of Boomtown’s residents. At the end of the 2025 festival, the Network were tasked with leading a new People’s Assembly for Boomtown, and creating a People’s Charter. And so we go into the 2026 edition with a high profile, core storyline objective which will see massive engagement from the audience. The last two years The Network has been incredibly popular, partly because we have been an integral part of the highly ambitious site-wide immersive maze that links all the districts of Boomtown together. While the maze is being broken up slightly this year to try and reduce overloading venue capacity (we were seriously oversubscribed last year), we are still a key start and end point for the site-wide maze, and the story finale this year is the reveal of the finished People’s Charter - a declaration that the audience will be creating over the course of the weekend, so a huge responsibility both inside and outside of the narrative for us.
This will be our third year running The Network at Boomtown, and our biggest offering there yet. The Network is a major part of Boomtown’s ongoing storyline. In 2024 and 2025, The Network was an underground resistance movement, dedicated to bringing together the different districts of Boomtown, and championing a mycelium-inspired connection between all of Boomtown’s residents. At the end of the 2025 festival, the Network were tasked with leading a new People’s Assembly for Boomtown, and creating a People’s Charter. And so we go into the 2026 edition with a high profile, core storyline objective which will see massive engagement from the audience. The last two years The Network has been incredibly popular, partly because we have been an integral part of the highly ambitious site-wide immersive maze that links all the districts of Boomtown together. While the maze is being broken up slightly this year to try and reduce overloading venue capacity (we were seriously oversubscribed last year), we are still a key start and end point for the site-wide maze, and the story finale this year is the reveal of the finished People’s Charter - a declaration that the audience will be creating over the course of the weekend, so a huge responsibility both inside and outside of the narrative for us.
We will deliver:
- A brand new core storyline venue - the Boomtown Hall / People’s Assembly, a fully interactive assembly hall hosting debates, deliberation, voting and referendums, building towards the creation of the People’s Charter, which will be a key part of the story finale on the Nexus Stage and the festival Closing Ceremony, being seen by thousands and thousands of spectators
- A secret back room venue sending the more hardcore players/audience members on secret side missions
- 2 teams of physical theatre walkabout performers, spreading the word of the Network around the wider festival, and playing a key visual role in the Story Finale
- A ‘Goodies’ Quest as part of the site-wide immersive maze, linking playable narrative content between key venues, walkabout groups and districts, with the Network very much being a hub of maze activity
- A Thursday night launch party extravaganza, using our Drag & Bass format and adapting it to the new Assembly venue - a People Power Political Party, full of radically inclusive queer love and joyful alternative cabaret performance and flamboyant party tracks. This will feature 3 x micro-commissions for newly graduated performance artists
Development So Far
Nigel and Valentina (lead designer) have already spent a significant amount of time developing conceptual ideas and learning about the political and activist thought underpinning this year’s storyline and new venue. Nigel completed his MA in Dramaturgy at Birkbeck in 2025, receiving a Distinction and writing his dissertation specifically on the immersive dramaturgy of Boomtown. Off the back of this he has been brought into core creative discussions more frequently, with regular story meetings with Megan, Boomtown’s narrative director, a dedicated narrative development day in November, a Ground Crew Directors day in March, an upcoming ‘Goodies Quest’ development day in June and frequent meetings with Valentina alongside all this. Nigel also attended a People’s Assembly research weekend in February with Megan, learning more about real-world assembly movements and the community activist culture behind it. This was a brilliant weekend hosted by Braziers Park, a communal living research centre in Oxfordshire, and run by the Humanity Project, a new community-driven activist organisation co-run by Clare Farrell, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion. It was a fascinating glimpse into how people’s assemblies and community activism works in the real world, and has given us a huge amount of material and insight to build upon within the fictional world of Boomtown - a world which attempts a careful balance between cathartic escapism and the chance to actually play out potential models for change to then take back into our daily lives, or "pre-figurative larping” as Megan calls it.
Nigel and Valentina (lead designer) have already spent a significant amount of time developing conceptual ideas and learning about the political and activist thought underpinning this year’s storyline and new venue. Nigel completed his MA in Dramaturgy at Birkbeck in 2025, receiving a Distinction and writing his dissertation specifically on the immersive dramaturgy of Boomtown. Off the back of this he has been brought into core creative discussions more frequently, with regular story meetings with Megan, Boomtown’s narrative director, a dedicated narrative development day in November, a Ground Crew Directors day in March, an upcoming ‘Goodies Quest’ development day in June and frequent meetings with Valentina alongside all this. Nigel also attended a People’s Assembly research weekend in February with Megan, learning more about real-world assembly movements and the community activist culture behind it. This was a brilliant weekend hosted by Braziers Park, a communal living research centre in Oxfordshire, and run by the Humanity Project, a new community-driven activist organisation co-run by Clare Farrell, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion. It was a fascinating glimpse into how people’s assemblies and community activism works in the real world, and has given us a huge amount of material and insight to build upon within the fictional world of Boomtown - a world which attempts a careful balance between cathartic escapism and the chance to actually play out potential models for change to then take back into our daily lives, or "pre-figurative larping” as Megan calls it.
We have further development planned, with some exciting collaboration and learning being brought to the table by Isabella Roberts, expert in collective intelligence, democracy and technology, and Take The Jump, a grassroots charity focused on people-led systemic change to address climate issues. We are also receiving some exciting training at the next Boomtown workshop in June from Robin De Carterat, an expert and thinker in complex systems, who will be leading us through systems thinking, game-based learning, improvisation, and insights from nature.
All of this is to say that there is a huge amount of deep thinking, research and real-world inspiration behind the work we produce at Boomtown, and for this reason we are very keen that we have an outlet for this beyond the festival. While the thinking about systems, democratic change and sustainability naturally permeates through all of our work, including the Valley Fest content, we want to put the learning and exploration we have been doing around political participation and collaborative democracy specifically into a package that has life beyond Boomtown. To this end we will be working with Community Arts Producer and activist Jordan Abankwah to digest the wider research and the game-based content we create for the new venue into an exciting new Inclusive Debating Workshop, that we will be trialling at Haringey Shed before aiming to take to further settings in the near future.
All of this is to say that there is a huge amount of deep thinking, research and real-world inspiration behind the work we produce at Boomtown, and for this reason we are very keen that we have an outlet for this beyond the festival. While the thinking about systems, democratic change and sustainability naturally permeates through all of our work, including the Valley Fest content, we want to put the learning and exploration we have been doing around political participation and collaborative democracy specifically into a package that has life beyond Boomtown. To this end we will be working with Community Arts Producer and activist Jordan Abankwah to digest the wider research and the game-based content we create for the new venue into an exciting new Inclusive Debating Workshop, that we will be trialling at Haringey Shed before aiming to take to further settings in the near future.
Drag & Bass Preview
In another example of using our festival content as a platform for making connections and opportunities happen far beyond the festival sites, we will be previewing the Drag & Bass Political Party at a Chelmsford queer venue a couple of weeks before we get to Boomtown. This will allow us to trial and refine the content, including the 3 micro-commissions, but it also gives us a brilliant opportunity to run a takeover of a venue, and presents an exciting potential new avenue of work for us, i.e. urban night time entertainment. This is something we have often talked about doing but have never actualised, and this year’s season will see us finally try it out.
In another example of using our festival content as a platform for making connections and opportunities happen far beyond the festival sites, we will be previewing the Drag & Bass Political Party at a Chelmsford queer venue a couple of weeks before we get to Boomtown. This will allow us to trial and refine the content, including the 3 micro-commissions, but it also gives us a brilliant opportunity to run a takeover of a venue, and presents an exciting potential new avenue of work for us, i.e. urban night time entertainment. This is something we have often talked about doing but have never actualised, and this year’s season will see us finally try it out.
Check out the gallery below for more examples of our extensive range of work at festivals, street events and parties. For more details on any of these projects, do not hesitate to get in touch. Email [email protected] or use our contact form.
