With a heavy heart, we regret to inform you that we have taken the decision to cancel the tour of Alice Mary Cooper’s Waves which was scheduled to tour this spring.
The safety, health and wellbeing of our team and our audiences is our first priority and, as rehearsals for Waves were due to begin on Monday in Edinburgh, we decided to put measures in place to combat the spread of COVID-19.
The project’s writer and performer, Alice Mary Cooper said, “I’m sad not to be able to share Waves at this time. I have been looking forward to this tour for a long time and, alongside performing, was excited about meeting people from Shetland to The Borders. I’m really grateful to the Independent Arts Projects team for the huge amount of work they have put into making the tour a reality and to Creative Scotland for the funding to make it happen. Hopefully, Waves will tour Scotland again one day.”
We will continue to work remotely throughout this period. We are developing a number of projects and we continue to explore how we can make positive progress by connecting online, discussing the way forward and experimenting with working by digital means. Our work is analogue – we need warm bodies in rooms together collaborating and connecting – but we know this is also an opportunity for experimentation.
We are in uncharted waters now with a future that is both uncertain and unpredictable. We can draw inspiration, courage and support from others in facing that challenge – Ireland’s Taoiseach telling us stories of real-life ‘superheroes’, not in capes but in scrubs and gowns, and Norway’s Prime Minister reminding their country’s children that it is okay to be scared.
Our stories connect us and help us understand ourselves and the world we live in, they will help us get through this difficult time together. We want to continue our work – telling stories and sharing experiences with others – and we look forward to getting on with it albeit in different ways at the moment.
Thanks to the support and clear guidance from our funder, Creative Scotland, we are able to pay our freelance team as promised for this project. We hope that we can find an alternative time to reschedule the tour, but this is subject to additional funding being sourced and to the impact of the COVID-19.
If you have already purchased tickets for Waves, please wait for the venue to contact you directly. As most of the touring venues are an arts charity, if you are in a position to do it, please consider donating the ticket amount to the theatre as a charitable gift.
As, we too, are an arts charity, if you can support us to commission an artist to develop new and fantastic stories, please do consider doing so.
We thank you for your understanding at this difficult time.
Independent Arts Projects
18 March 2020
>> Waves by Alice Mary Cooper
>> Donate to Independent Arts Projects below
