New Earth Theatre

To establish the voices, stories and creativity of BESEA artists as an integral part of British society.

• We develop and produce high quality work that asks key questions of identity, culture and heritage, of the world we live in and our place in that world.
• We challenge perceptions around, provoke conversations about and promote understanding of the BESEA experience.
• We create new pathways and opportunities for BESEA artists on and off stage – with a particular focus for those outside of London, to engage, participate and grow their creativity and skills.

We celebrate and champion the work of our artists and communities

The company was renamed New Earth Theatre in 2020 to signal new beginnings, new growth and new possibilities. We adopt the following values to guide us on that journey.

• We place BESEA artists and communities at the heart of everything we do.
• We believe to work in a collaborative way is to engage at the deepest level.
• We work to create an open, safe and accessible working space with care and respect.
• We place integrity and excellence as cornerstones of our work.
• We listen, innovate and adapt to a changing world.

We use the term BESEA to mean anyone from the following countries and their diasporas who live and work in Britain.

These countries make up an area that is known as East and South East Asia;
Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam.

Everyone self identifies in their own way and that identity is not necessarily fixed. We currently use the term BESEA so that we can have collective power when making our case for the many artists from communities that continue to be severely underrepresented in our theatre industry.

Tsunagu/Connect: The Exhibition

To Britain from Japan, in our own words

No one knows how many Japanese women live in the UK.
No one knows their reasons for moving here.
No one knows their varied loves or hates, their achievements or mistakes, their opinions and contradictions. 
No one knows their stories...

So we asked them.

From Aberdeen to Huddersfield, Belfast to London, we have collected stories that amazed, shocked and delighted us, upending tired stereotypes and celebrating the multiplicity of voices and experiences of Japanese migrant women.

Tsunagu/Connect is a multi-phased, multi-year project that started in the Spring of 2020. With the help of 12 volunteers, we gathered oral histories from over 30 Japanese women who have settled in the UK since 1945. Inspired and informed by these interviews we have created an immersive theatrical adventure, part exhibition, part promenade theatre, that poses the vital question: 

“What price must we pay to create a third space, neither one nation nor the other, where we finally have room to be ourselves?”