History
Arcola Theatre was founded by artistic director Mehmet Ergen, in September 2000.
Its original location was a former textile factory on Arcola Street in Dalston. The theatre celebrated this with its fifth anniversary production, The Factory Girls by Frank McGuinness.
Since its inception the theatre has won the Peter Brook Empty Space Award two years in succession and was awarded Time Out Live Awards in 2003 and 2006. Many productions at the theatre have been selected as Time Out Critic’s Choice.
In 2007, an Arcola co-production of Mojo Mickeybo by Owen McCafferty became its first West End transfer to the Trafalgar Studios. 2007 also marked the first season of the Arcola's Grimeborn, an opera and musical theatre festival that runs for two weeks in August.
In January 2011 the Arcola moved to a former paint-manufacturing workshop on Ashwin Street in Dalston, after its previous landlord earmarked the Arcola Street site for redevelopment as apartments. It marked the move by premiering The Painter, a play about J. M. W. Turner by Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
The theatre is also one of the most successful participants of the 10:10 project. Over the course of one year they reduced their carbon emissions by 32%.
Read more about this topic: Arcola Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)