About Us

Our vision is:

Poetry and music are central to our projects that:

Engage and Empower collective creativity to explore questions and possible solutions for our times

Our Motto is: Go Brave

StrongBack Productions promotes and stimulates understanding, solidarity, and appreciation of each other through the arts, particularly through poetry and music.

With our partner, Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions we work in and with communities to build bridges and bring to the fore the extraordinary and everyday lives and hidden histories that surround us.

Rooted in the Caribbean heritage of our founders, our perspective is inclusive, integrating the arts as a way of translating life. The Backchat News page brings arts news from the Caribbean and around the UK while shining light on injustices such as the ongoing Windrush Scandal. Our annual Come On In programme provides access to the underserved arts through participation in collective creativity.

So….what do we do?

We deliver an annual programme through Come On In: an invitation to explore the worlds on our doorstep, discovering what we share and appreciating our variances.

We bring together in conversation poets, musicians and visual artists with those working in and using everyday workplaces, transforming these conversations into visual song-poems.

StrongBack’s history/origin:

StrongBack Productions was founded in 2013 by Patricia Cumper, playwright, director and cultural commentator and Dominique Le Gendre, composer, curator and producer. A small project funded arts charity, we have created performances and events inspired by the lives of African, Asian and Caribbean women, the life and work of St. Lucian poet and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, little known music archives from Berwick-upon-Tweed and the recorded contributions of Jamaican soldiers to World War 1.

Over 8 years of activity, StrongBack has issued 40 commissions and collaborated with over 375 artists and facilitators. Our performances and events have reached over 4,000 live audiences and participants with partners such as The National Maritime Museum, Ovalhouse, Brixton East, Rich Mix, The Maltings theatre and cinema Berwick-upon -Tweed, Berwick Record office, Tara Arts, The British Library, Migration Museum, Imperial War Museums, Croydon Adult Education, WAC arts and many more. Our online audience grows steadily and we aim to offer our Come On In programme through a series of tailored educational resources to be distributed across online platforms provided by the Open University, Literature Works and local authority education providers.

A Message from our Artistic Director

Our world at present feels like a river flowing uncontrollably, that can no longer contain itself within its normal course, spilling out and wreaking havoc. Today’s clash and collision of peoples, regions, cultures, religions, identities and value systems and more, alongside the upending of the balance of nature and our planet’s systems, are in fact the natural consequence of 520 years and more of relentless and mostly ruthless expansion, empire building, colonialism and exploitation by successive superpowers.

And yet for every age and every ill, almost as a counterbalance, the true genius of the human spirit treads another path revealing itself through the arts, developments in science and medicine, advances in law, justice, philosophical thought, advocacy of human rights and the common good, engineering, technology and more. The very best of our humanity is universal and exists in every corner of this earth.

It is this very best of humanity, wherever it may be, that I want StrongBack to harness and to work closely with. I want StrongBack’s work to demonstrate the value of people from all walks of life coming together to fix and build a better world for the future armed with the knowledge we have accumulated over centuries, capable of recognising where we have made mistakes and rectifying them. I want StrongBack to be a catalyst for change that can admit the fear of change but see beyond it to recognise that many of the old ways that defined us need to be expanded and redefined in particular notions of identity, sovereignty, land and resource ownership. Those elements of the past that have stood the test of time, that represent valuable traditions, are the ones that we will take into the future. I want StrongBack’s work to be a force for change, a testament to the value of the common good.

The value of translating life through the arts, is contained in the slow, methodical and careful process required to create something exquisite from our everyday. Beyond its entertainment value, the manifestation of the change shaped by our collective endeavour is what must also be valued.

Dominique Le Gendre
Artistic Director, StrongBack Productions
December 2021