Devoted & Disgruntled 2025: what are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?
Schedule
Sat, 12 Apr, 2025 at 10:00 am to Mon, 14 Apr, 2025 at 02:30 pm
UTC+01:00Location
Shoreditch Town Hall | London, EN
Devoted & Disgruntled turns 20! Improbable’s annual unconference for everyone who is passionate about theatre and the performing arts returns for the 20th time! This year we will be at Shoreditch Town Hall on 12th – 14th asking the question: What are we going to do about theatre and the performing arts?
An invitation from Improbable's Associate Director, Matilda Leyser;
This year Devoted and Disgruntled will turn twenty. We have done it enough now to know that it works, and that it is worth doing again – and again.
If you have never been before, don’t worry - it’s not like a Netflix series where you have to binge-watch the previous nineteen episodes in order to feel up to date. The whole point is that the people that come make it new, make it up, each year. So, this year, even for those who have attended all the previous iterations of it, this will be their first time. Because this event, in 2025, has never happened before. Which makes it still relevant, still urgent, even though we have been asking the same question for nearly twenty years: What are we (meaning you, meaning me) going to do about the things we care about?
Still, I get that it could be intimidating to come along. Because the very idea of attending an event with, perhaps, two hundred odd people there, who all have some relationship to theatre and the performing arts could sound terrifying, or exhausting. In the two years that I didn’t go, that’s what I thought. I thought hiding in my room would be a better, less stressful and more productive use of the weekend. I was wrong.
This year, however, I am feeling intimidated again. This is because I spent a good deal of the last nine months in a hospital room, on my own, undergoing intensive chemotherapy, and I am now wondering how to step back into life, so the idea of a crowd of people with whom I might have to interact is alarming. I will almost certainly cry. But because I know that getting what you need - whatever that is, be it quiet time, or connection, or inspiration, or support on a specific project or issue, or an antidote to despair, or a chance to be heard, or a new haircut - is embedded into the structure of D&D, I know it will be okay, important, helpful.
So, whatever you have been through in the last year, whatever you are facing now, please come. Get shit done. Have a laugh. Have a cry. I will bring tissues. You bring the issues.
