To make this show, we need to get inside the experience of getting stronger and find out about what strength feels like from the perspectives of growing up and growing older. In Spring/Summer 2024, we secured the funding and partner support for four weeks of devising and writing time with wraparound community workshops. 

In residency at neimënster, we began exploring strength through running workshops with children aged 6-11 with four groups at Luxembourgish and International schools. Research shows that people’s ideas about strength and gender form extremely early in life, and we are asking children what strength and courage look and feel like for them now. They told us it can mean “pulling a car with your teeth” and that you can feel more powerful “when your pet cat is by your side”).

In our hometown of London, we worked regularly with a diverse group of women aged 45+,  asking what is holding them back and imagining ways to change that. They told us they can feel invisible and “you need to do things that scare you a bit to stop your world from getting smaller” as you age. 

We ran theatre workshops about strength with three groups of teenagers, aged 12-19 - Camden Youth Theatre, Longfield Hall Young Company, and a sixth form college through Chickenshed Theatre. They told us about “putting on a brave face” and how what’s inside and outside don’t always match.  

To feel strong from the outside in, we began collaborating with a strength training expert Artur Nowicki learning weight lifting and with fight choreographer Bethan Clark to understand how to fight and how to theatricalise fighting. 

We are collaborating with Costume Designer Sarah Munro, developing costumes that re-use and recycle discarded and secondhand sports gear and found materials into new gladiatorial outfits. 

As musicians, we are experimenting with mixing upbeat fitness pop with Medieval music to create a new uncanny palette using flute, autoharp, harmony singing, and electronic beats. 

This project is about asking when we realised we didn’t feel strong - strong enough to defend ourselves, to fight back, to know what we wanted, and to assert those needs. When did we stop trusting our bodies? And now entering our middle-age, how can we learn to be assertive, and what would it mean to fight back? What does being powerful look like through a feminist gaze, and what does it look like in the real world? 

We have been writing personal, autobiographical texts and mixing these with our research findings and our fantasies of being strong and powerful. We hope to build a new world of feeling strong on our own terms. This is just the beginning… and we need to find project partners and secure funding to take this show to the next phase. But, this is our Iron Fantasy.