WHO WE ARE
Our mission is to build a community where voices, often unheard in the booming halls and white boxes of traditional art spaces, are empowered through TRUE collaborative work. We stand side by side with those from under represented backgrounds to create unique, engaging, and impactful, artist led work, whether it’s theatre, workshops, outdoor performances, carnivals, festivals or lantern parades.
At B.ARTS, people are at the heart of everything we do. We lift individuals to share their stories, hopes, dreams - or even just their favourite flavour of crisps - and build creative experiences together. Our work is rooted in the WHO and the WHERE, the people and places we engage with, ensuring everything we do is fun, vibrant, challenging, inclusive and ever-evolving, as we trample the borders between artist and audience, ringmaster and clown
We specialise in working with those often disregarded by formal art settings, using our co-creation process to produce site-specific cultural projects WITH communities.
Images show the women who founded B. ARTS.
The History of B.ARTS
1985
Beavers Arts Ltd was founded by Gill Gill, Hilary Hughes, and Yvon Appleby - as the first female-led street theatre company in the UK. Later that same year Susan Clarke joined the company to create The Weird Sisters of Char – a family of roving tea ladies (created for Stoke Garden Festival in 1986)
1985-1988
Gill, Hughes and Clarke expanded the company’s work from appearing as a range of eccentric walkabout characters at garden festivals and events to encompass close creative working with communities, initially in and around their base in North Staffordshire.
Creating touring shows for schools and playschemes (Cold as Ice, Hooray!, Stormy Weather, Respect) and in North Staffordshire we worked on Rattling Bones, a programme of site specific theatre based on the social history of Stoke on Trent.
1988-Our first local co-created community celebration, market the start of open cast mining in Apedale Valley and the 10th anniversary of Wood Lane Youth Club.
1990s
Beavers arts became known as B arts
1989-2009
Projects in Italy and in post-communist Europe, starting a 20 year cycle of exchanges and international projects, involving an extended period of collaboration that crossed the political divides in Bosnia-Herzegovina, working with local youth organisations and displaced people.
2000-2009
In 2000 we began to engage with newly dispersed asylum seekers – in the grimmest of hostels – to create performances; Crossing Frontiers, Englandistan and Reading the Book of Freedom. This led to The Bridge, a project which engaged displaced young people living in North Staffordshire in a programme of tailored support, arts, educational and cultural activities and community integration, from 2000 to 2009.
And then The Kitchen – a project co-run with and for the wives and young children of settled refugees.
1985-2025 (and beyond)
For the whole of the B. ARTS history. There have been lanterns. In Tipton, Bilston, Lichfield, Burntwood, Bedworth, Chesterton, Stoke and Lochgilphead. In Italy, Romania, Bosnia, Denmark and Mexico. On the waterfront in New Zealand and the canal in Warwickshire. On baby buggies, wheelchairs and wheelbarrows. Mostly made of willow and tissue paper, but not always. Often very simple, sometimes complex, breathtakingly beautiful. A light in the darkness, and a lot of fun.
2006
B.ARTS co-founder, Gill Gill died at the age of 56.
2005-2025
Place based work. Through the Place, Space and Idenity programme and then later through the Art City programme, B arts led creative interventions to bring empty, post-industrial buildings and spaces back into use, as performance and exhibition spaces. As part of this work the company relocated from their long-term base at The Barracks workshops in Newcastle Under Lyme.
2014
B.ARTS moved to a new building in Stoke-On-Trent. Taking on a large empty industrial space on the outskirts of Stoke town centre, 72 Hartshill Road, with the ambition of transforming it into an arts hub and opening Bread in Common a real bread bakery and waste food café and community pantry on-site.
2009-2025
Site specific theatre (sometimes 3 shows a year!) – ranging from an exploration of food justice in A place at the Table to living with Dementia- in Take This Waltz, or where post goes that’s just too magical to send? In The Lost Post Office. Alongside an ongoing programme of neighbourhood work – whether that was creating animations and a pop up outdoor cinema events in Meir, helping stage carnival in Blurton or delivering creative youth sessions, from an art bus.
2021
Hilary Hughes, B arts co-founder died at the age of 72.
2023
Susan Clarke, ended her time as artistic and executive director of the company.
2024-present
B.ARTS Creative Producer team co-artistically direct the company.
