Andy Field and Krista Burāne

Andy Field is an artist, writer and curator based in London, and Krista BurĀne is a Latvian artist and film-maker.

Together with Latvian set designer Ieva Kauliņa and Swedish choreographer Erik Eriksson they spent spring 2018 in residency at Deptford Lounge creating Nocturne, a journey into the wild side of the city and the creatures that reside there. The world premiere of Nocturne was presented and produced by the Albany and London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) on 27, 28 and 29 June 2018.

Read what Andy had to say about their time spent in Deptford:

‘It was in London, with its foxes, that we started our research for the project, following a family of four as they shimmered back and forth across a quietly anonymous corner of Deptford and listening to stories shared with us by local people; foxes stealing chickens from the Albany garden, rats chewing holes in thick leather work boots, eels seeking shelter in submerged shopping trolleys, a chattering of parakeets illuminating the parks of South London with a flutter of colour.

We met a man called Edwin from London Wildlife Trust who took us around a nature reserve carved out of a thin sliver of land next to the railway lines. He told us about a time when the whole of South London was a vast area of public woodland, now reduced to splinters of park and place names haunted by trees: Norwood Junction, Honor Oak, Penge.

From our conversations with him another place began to emerge out of the noise of the city, a place bigger and older than us, in which we were merely visitors. We stood with Edwin in the darkness by Deptford Creek, listening for the bats who had sensibly decided it was still too cold to be out this late at night, and watching the ducks spinning around in the oily dark water of the creek, as I imagined they had done long before we arrived and would do long after we had gone.’

In the 2017/18 financial year we worked with almost 1,000 different artists