The Yorkshire-based Northern Rascals return this April with Sunny Side, their timely exploration of men’s mental health through dance, theatre and spoken word.
Northern Rascals have toured this incredible show about a tumultuous adolescent journey that captures the anxiety, disconnection and identity crisis confronting many young men in today’s society.
Now they’re returning to the North – visiting Stockton, Bradford, Rotherham, Scarborough and Leeds. Sunny Side will tour in partnership with ANDYSMANCLUB, a men’s suicide prevention charity.
Anna Holmes, co-artistic director of Northern Rascals, tells us more about how Sunny Side came to be and what it represents.
Sunny Side blends dance, theatre, and spoken word in a work about the modern young male experience. What can you tell us about the development of the show?
Sunny Side has been developed over a period of 5 years. From its very initial conception back in 2019, the work has always been a vehicle to voice the experiences of young people. Initially, our audience was ourselves.
Working on this fresh out of a formal arts education, the themes of returning home, revisiting old pathways and feeling stuck in the face of our unknown futures were unavoidable. The studio became a place to explore these feelings, to put those very real in-the-moment experiences into movement.
As the project progressed, we opened the doors to other young people, way over 1500 of them to date, to understand their experiences of being a young person growing up in today’s world.
What we found was that collectively, we were struggling in a world that had changed so significantly from the one we had imagined for ourselves. The dreams that we were promised when we were young, or the pathways we were shown as guidance that we set those dreams upon, no longer exist.
Then we entered the pandemic, and the show entered a digital stage of development, where we took our planned in-person community activity online. Our screens became lifelines, connecting us with young people all over the UK.
The themes of the work were exacerbated; many of us were back in our childhood bedrooms, stuck on a loop, losing our identity and our hope for the future against the background of a turbulent world.
On reflection, this period was vital to the development of the narrative and spoken word in the piece.
As we said, the point of the show is to be a vehicle to voice the experiences of young people. And this is something we’ve worked hard to maintain as the show and the cast have grown older. In practice, this has meant continually checking in with its target audience as we tour.
In fact, during this tour, we’re joined by two fantastic young people who are shadowing us at every part of the process. Their insight is vital for the performers to maintain the show’s relevance and authenticity.
Sunny Side requires the cast to meet the performance as a living thing, something that is always in development, in order for it to resonate.
You’re doing a short tour in the north of England. How would you sell Sunny Side to young male audiences in this region, and what do you hope audiences take away from the show?
Sunny Side is a show written and made for young Northern men. The narrative and characters are a collection of stories from real boys that have fed into the development of the work. It’s a story of men that we all know.
Given the current lens through which young men are viewed today, we think the show is a chance to see a different perspective. It helps us give our boys a chance.
Personally, I think the power of the show and of experiencing these topics in a theatrical space is that it provides a moment of safety. To view these difficult subjects without the focus being on yourself. The spotlight is on the stage, not on the person sitting in the audience.
We hope it provides a chance to bear witness and begin these important, life-saving conversations. We believe our show is a vehicle for change. To recognise something in yourself or inevitably at some point in your life, in someone you know.
We cannot fix the problem, but we can raise awareness. We can put the private struggle on a public platform, in order to offer support and normalise the struggle that so many people face.
Men’s mental health has historically been linked with weakness, leading to a high proportion of suicides in young men. How is this changing, and how do initiatives like #AndysManClub help?
We are living in difficult times. The world is changing at a quickening pace, and the precarity of our normal feels more unsteady than ever.
Our cultural shift must meet that speed to protect not just our men, but our society as a whole. Initiatives like AndysManClub are a lifeline, in softening the systemic barriers to who accesses emotional support.
We need softness now more than ever, to create humans and a society that are able to hold, heal and therefore thrive. We need open-armed, linked, integrated communities. Community as survival.
How did Northern Rascals start, and what do you hope to achieve with this show and in the future?
Northern Rascals started on the roof of our local student bar when we skipped training for a slice of pizza in the sunshine. In the last moments of our training, we took that literal blue sky thinking moment to dream of a world in which we could make our own work together – and get paid for it!
It began with a quiet rebellion, a resistance to the norms that we were told we had to adhere to….” don’t do a dance degree”… “get a proper job”… “the only way to exist in the arts is to be in London”… “there’s no opportunities in the North”. The ‘Rascal’ part of us always pushed against that.
We couldn’t possibly set up a dance company that placed more value on the human behind the dancer in the North and thrive! Or could we?!
Our hopes for Northern Rascals are still firmly rooted in that blue sky thinking; no ambition is too big for us. Despite the challenges, we move.
As a fellow Northern voice, knowing the culture, I wonder if you have encountered any resistance along the way to your focus and mission?
Resistance is something I was nervous about, for sure. I’m very aware of Northern pride; it’s something that I feel deeply, myself. Naturally, I worried that there would be backlash, a push against painting my community in a negative light when I’ve always wanted to protect it.
I have felt a huge sense of duty to represent these stories accurately, and there have been times when I’ve nearly decided to wrap it up neatly and present the audience with a less demanding show.
But the response has been overwhelmingly positive, and now, I think that minimising the truth is a discredit to the community it serves to the very real problems that it voices.
Sometimes theatre must shock, to feel bleak, to feel like this can’t continue to happen, to make sure that it doesn’t.