We have been making devised intercultural performances since 1999. If your students are interesting in exploring our approach, or would like to use one of our productions as inspiration to create new devised plays, we have lots of resources to help.
Our work is known to celebrate diversity and encourages participants and audiences to share their own cultures while finding shared points of contact and reflecting on challenges in the world around them. Many of our shows are in more than language, and these can be particularly inspiring for work with diverse groups.
To get started:
- Watch this interview with Michael Walling, our Artistic Director (30 mins) discussing our approach to intercultural devising. The video offers lots of helpful insights into our theatre-making process.
- Explore our past work – the digital archive shares all our projects and productions over more than 30 years. Most of our plays have a digital version available. Some of these are linked from the project web pages. For others, we can provide a passworded link and educational license on request. You can also order scripts from our bookshop.
There are many plays and project to choose from. We especially recommend these three, which students have particularly enjoyed exploring in the past, leading to their creating exciting devised pieces of their own.
The archive video of CONSUMED is a fantastic starting point for students wanting to explore how to use more than language and modern technologies in their performance work. You can obtain a passworded link and educational license for the archive video by emailing us.
The play, which is suited to students KS4+, is in Chinese and English. It was made by the three actors, one of whom only speaks Chinese (Mandarin) and one only English, while the third speaks both. The play deals with relationships in our contemporary world of digital communication.
For further insight into working with more than one language, we also recommend our multilingual film MORE THAN WORDS.
Performing Arts Students from St Charles Catholic 6th Form College created their own short play in response to CONSUMED - which was performed as part of the 2025 CHECKPOINT performance (at 34.14 mins).
Students can also watch have Oral History interviews with some of the creatives involved in making the show:
This piece is suitable for KS3+, and possibly KS2, though caution should be exercised around themes of war. The archive video is freely available.
Border Crossings participated in the 2023 Global Reading of THE GAZA MONOLOGUES, a poignant collection of testimonies written by young Gazans with ASHTAR Theatre in 2010, following the attacks of that year. Unfortunately, these monologues remain relevant today, providing a platform to courageous yoiung Gazans and shedding light on their experiences of horror, hope, and resilience.
The readings offer a powerful example of how to use personal experiences to create theatre. There is a collection of 31 short monologues, and scripts can be downloaded here.
GCSE Drama Students from Chiswick School responded by making their own collection of monologues - which were performed as part of the 2025 CHECKPOINT performance (at 2:31 mins).
Students can also watch an interview with Emile Saba, Artistic Director of ASHTAR Theatre.
This devised play explored the forgotten history of the 2 million Indian migrant labourers indentured to work across the globe during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and unveiled the roots of our Mauritian, Asian-Caribbean, Malaysian and Asian-African communities.
You can obtain a passworded link and educational license for the archive video by emailing us. This video is is a great example of how to use complex history and research to create a performance piece. The play itself deals with its own devising process, showing how the actors delved into the history, and found its relevance to their lives in Britain today.
The accompanying Resource Pack puts the play into its historical context, discusses how we used the history and research in our creative process, and includes interviews with the creative team.
There are several interviews from the Oral History project with people who were involved:
SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA (please email for link to documentary) and THE MOUTH OF THE GODS both have documentaries available exploring the process through which the performances were made.
