Alan Dix is the Artistic Director of 509 Arts and has worked in the creative sector for over 35 years. He has directed touring theatre, new plays and community events in mills, parks, schools and castles. He ran the £4m Greenwich Millennium Festival, created My Last Car (‘car love meets climate change’) for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and Directed Bike Story for the Tour de France Grand depart in Yorkshire.

He has directed large-scale community opera, music-theatre cabarets, gallery exhibitions, heritage projects and imaginative children’s shows. He collaborates with talented artists to build a response to communities and their testimony, using music, digital projection and contemporary storytelling. Life Class is one of two new pieces of work for Bradford 2025 City of Culture, the other being Unspun Stories, an immersive installation that explores Bradford’s recent textile history.

She founded, produced and directed Ryedale Festival Community Opera for 15 years, was Hull Freedom Chorus director for 11 years and directed the 200-strong Chorus for the award-winning Calderland, and The Batley Variations, both for 509 Arts. Em has trained teachers and led projects for Glasshouse Gateshead, Opera North and Streetwise Opera and co-directed the punk-pop circus opera Back to Bransholme for Back to Ours in Hull. She is Associate Director of The Map Consortium, delivering arts-based professional learning across the UK and internationally. 

Balbir is the Artistic Director of Balbir Singh Dance Company, Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation,
a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute Durham University and ACE Creative Ageing Peer Network Steering Group Member.

The company work combines Classical Indian and Contemporary dance with live music in various settings under 4 major strands:
Classical Revisited, An Appetite for Dance, Sport & Art and Celebrating Age.

The creative output involves collaborations in health and wellbeing which began with its award winning Unmasking Pain project with Durham University BiosScience Department, Leeds Beckett University School of Health and Live Well With Pain.

Current projects include working with Thomas and Guys Hospital INPUT Pain Unit, NHS Cancer Alliance Breast Cancer Survivors and most recently a year-long collaboration with Beamish Museum with its Clover Cottage Dementia Resource.

Other work includes
Nayak working with Balbir’s Kathak Guru – 83 year old Padmashri Pratap Pawar Resilient Dancer Programme featuring Bisakha Sarker, Tammy McLorg and Gary Beacom amongst others.

Ed’s theatre sound designs include: Frankenstein, The Good Hope, The Mysteries (National Theatre); Wolf Witch Giant Fairy, (Little Bulb Theatre and Royal Opera House);  Showboat (New London Theatre); Backbeat (Duke of York’s); Orpheus (Little Bulb, Battersea Arts Centre, Salzburg Festival); The Caretaker and Hamlet (Chichester Festival Theatre); Baddies and Pinocchio (Unicorn Theatre); The Infidel (Theatre Royal Stratford East);  Pied Piper (Battersea Arts Centre and Beatbox Academy); After The Act (Breach Theatre); Doncastrian Chalk Circle (National Theatre Public Acts); Sinners (Playground Theatre); Canary And The Crow, Us Against Whatever, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (Middle Child Theatre); An Adventure, Leave Taking, The Royale, Perseverance Drive, The Invisible and FEAR (Bush Theatre); A Christmas Carol (Hull Truck, Leeds Playhouse); Oliver Twist (Hull Truck); Beauty And The Beast (Improbable Theatre, One Of Us); The Ballad Of Corona-V, Bullett Tongue, Phoenix Rising, Knife Edge, Electric, Politrix and Brixton Rock (Big House Theatre); Ed also has mixed live sound for Anna Calvi, Van der Graaf Generator, The Waeve, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Talvin Singh, and John Tams.

Other work includes The Moon Is Listening (Garsington Opera, Grange Opera, Masquerade Opera, Italy); The Man Who Planted Trees, for orchestra and narrator, and Services No Longer Required (BBC Philharmonic Orchestra); Ludd and Isis (Royal Opera) and Royal Philharmonic Society Award-winning productions Confucius Says… (Hackney Empire) and Calderland (Halifax Piece Hall, for 509 Arts).

Music for plays includes Rock, Paper, Scissors, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Afterplay, Pride and Prejudice, Sheffield Mysteries (Sheffield Theatres); The York Realist (Donmar Warehouse); King Lear, Yerma, Twelfth Night, David Copperfield, A Doll’s House, Single Spies, Medea, Electricity (West Yorkshire Playhouse), and over 50 other productions regionally and West End.

Recent theatre credits include: Sing, Dance, Leap (Royal Opera House), OUM (Dutch National Opera), Dizzy (Theatre Centre, Sheffield Theatres – UK Tour), Northanger Abbey (Orange Tree, Theatre by the Lake, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Octagon Bolton), A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (York Theatre Royal), 24 (Day) (Almeida), Nuclear Children (Platform Presents, Edinburgh Fringe), Arabian Nights (Bristol Old Vic), Christmas Carol (Shakespeare North), Doncastrian Chalk Circle (CAST and National Theatre Public Acts).

Simon is an (occasional) freelance Lighting Designer. He is also Head of Production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.

Simon has lit productions for – York Theatre Royal, Sheffield Theatres, The Arcola, East Riding Theatre, 509 Arts, amongst others. His work is detailed at www.simon-bedwell.co.uk

For the last 12 years, Simon has predominantly worked as a Production Manager and been involved in theatre conversion projects, new builds and for a short period within the educational sector. Now at the SJT, Simon looks after all produced and touring pieces, including as Production Manager for Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s presented new work.