Hooligan Art Community: The Hooligan Project

A participatory performance by Hooligan Art Community in residency at The Pearl Exchange, Bude and in collaboration with The Ladder, Redruth.

The Harbour Festival produced by The Ladder Redruth
Redruth International Festival of Theatre – celebrating stories of migration and sanctuary

Hooligan Art Community is creating a participatory music-theatre production devised with young adults by a team of Ukrainian, German and British artists. They are doing so in post-industrial communities and spaces across the UK.

Hooligan Art Community is an independent theatre company founded in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2019. We make performances in non-traditional spaces that explore the dynamic relationship between actor and audience. We devise brave, unconventional music-theatre performances with a commitment to artist development as means of creation. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many of our artists were displaced and now reside in the UK. In 2022-23 we toured UK and Europe with our acclaimed show Bunker Cabaret, first developed in the bomb-shelters of Kyiv.

The Hooligan Project is a music-driven, multidisciplinary performance co-created with young artists to be performed in local non-traditional spaces. The project is inspired by the story of Simeon, a Ukrainian actor who grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he became a teenage football hooligan, fighting in brutal clashes against rival football supporters in forest clearings. At the same time he was studying in the arts lyceum in Kharkiv and dreaming of becoming an actor. He would cover his bruises with make-up before going on stage at the local opera house and present evenings of music,
poetry and dance.