It’s a Friday afternoon and I am in Dublin. I have an overpriced coffee beside me and I am writing a blog! About the beginning of the Fallen Fruit tour!

It’s a big tour ahead. We are visiting 14 venues and communities in Scotland and another 8 in England. We are going to lots of places we have never been, places we have been to before - places small and places big.

Last year when we remounted Fallen Fruit we knew we wanted the show to tour this Autumn. This Autumn of 2019 exactly 30 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. 30 years sounds like a long time and in many ways it is a long time but in the greater bigger picture- 30 years is a prolonged click of a finger.

This August just gone I celebrated something of a milestone myself - 20 years of life in the UK.  20 years is a long time but also an amount of time where I can begin to measure and see some shifts in my work and of course in my life. Time matters! Time matters because amongst other practical things like being a measure, time also heals! Time has this extraordinary capacity to allow and disallow changes!

Of course, everything and everyone is in constant flux. Nothing stays the same. Wood rots, concrete decays, metal rusts. People age. Tiny changes affect mass shifts. 

From the moment I was born until I was 7, tiny daily changes affected a mass shift in the political environment. My mum, dad and I were all born under the same dictator. So when on November 9th 1989 people climbed the Berlin Wall and started smashing it’s concrete slabs with hammers and DIY tools - it meant everything. It meant that the common man, granted, allowed by the powerful man, remapped a territory and with that remapping- it wasn’t only the contours of the land that felt the shifts but also the minds of the men who for decades had endured a forced stagnation and isolation.

As the contours of the minds of the common men shifted their lines slowly and gently, ideas and imagination inevitably became new tools which in new terms were going to make bigger shifts, harder lines and deeper grooves.

So, for me, touring Fallen Fruit this Autumn, the Autumn of 2019, 30 years on and on the eve of the new dawn of Britain leaving the European Project, for me this tour of Fallen Fruit is not simply about getting people to see my show about how and why walls and boundaries pushing and shoving define our identity, but it is my way to dig a little groove, to make a gentle shift, to educate and to question and map on, to put on the map a story of migration from the other side of the European continent.  

Because this story, my story, is also the story of many others like me migrating to this country from Eastern Europe, for better or for worse and many of us have shifted so much, and some of our shifts are non reversible- to belong, to fit, to serve, to enable.

So, this tour for me is my attempt at a gently shift, a shallow groove to make a story part of history- visible to those of you who know of it, who have never heard of it, those curious and those seeking to reevaluate their own position, to question and to celebrate a moment of time, in time where people united and re-imagined!