Description:

With the 2025 season being the eleventh and final programme for Sophie Roberts, she sought to celebrate the kinds of theatre that have characterised her time as an artistic thought-leader. This required design that was equally celebratory, cohesively grouping together the energy of Silo theatre with the overall theme of the programme.

The programme is infused with themes of motherhood, in the many, many forms it can manifest. With works that champion the courage it takes to expand, to care, to nurture and live our lives in a fluid, transitory manner. The imagery plays upon this in a way that visually encapsulates distinctive contextual nuances from each production, ranging from queer identity to maternity, colonialism, and neurodivergence. Woven together with the symbology of evolution, transformation, and expansion.

The ethos of Silo Theatre is brave, provocative, and profound, so our work needed to be too. A design approach that truly captured the spirit of Silo while drumming up anticipation for the 2025 season. It required a certain level of penetration to reach target audiences and intrigue the curious mind, especially in a time where the economic climate has put a squeeze on the arts and theatre tickets aren’t considered an ‘essential’.

This called for audacious displays of queer and feminine expression, outlined with a jagged edge. The strategy developed from Sophie’s assertive, unapologetic take on personal evolution in the midst of a gradually dystopian world. Encouraging the defiance it takes to be joyful and interrogate reality with a healing, regenerative lens, visually symbolised with motifs of identity and self-revelation.

Every iteration uses glass to reference a semi-permeable membrane; the living, breathing boundary that separates the intimacy of the show from the chaos of the public realm. The membrane acts as the filtration system between the productions and those who experience them. Allowing some materials to pass through, but not others.

The photographs feature human anatomy that, when coupled with the lively pink lighting, evoke the visceral, textural, fleshy nature of life. This elevates the idea that we aren’t clean or crisp creatures. We’re flexible, loose and in a constant state of flux, revelling in the tension between what we present and what we obscure. Flirting with what begs to be known and what is left up to the imagination.