OVER the last year, a creative team from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama has been exploring the importance of the arts within the social and political record of human experience.

Tasked with responding to the poetry of Idris Davies, specifically his work The Angry Summer (1943), the team has devised an adaptation of the text to commemorate the centennial of the 1926 miners’ strike.

This interdisciplinary project involves collaboration between students and graduates to create a multifaceted response to Davies’ poems.

Through adapting his powerful words into characters and scenes, we aimed to produce a vivid picture demonstrating how he viewed his community. A selection from the 50 poems has been into snapshots of that summer, weaving together puppetry, original composition, text adaptation and wider research, the show illustrates the complexity of the strikes throughout the Welsh Valleys, and the people at the heart of these stalwart communities.

The culture of the Valleys is integral to Davies’ work and forms the world of his poetry. We ensured that this cultural significance was embedded into our project, building on our research and the artistic responses of other creatives throughout the 20th century.

Our work draws inspiration from artists who responded to their socio-political situations, such as Paul Peter Piech for the puppet designs, as well as the traditions of puppetry as a foundational performance art, indeed serving as one of the most popular and accessible theatre mediums in the 1920s.

This production is an abstraction of an abstraction; we could never claim to be wholly representing the communities of the Welsh mining towns, but it was essential to us to authentically capture the human nature of their struggle through integrity and extensive research.

The history is real, the people were real, the impact is still, very, real. Our driver was to bring Davies’ extraordinary work to contemporary audiences, honouring the 1926 strikers and the communities that supported them, celebrating the immense cultural legacy of the Welsh miners of the 20th century.

The two directors (Hazel Pring and Max Dickinson) will be in attendance at the TUC Congress in Llandudno, to present the project and speak about the work, its impact, and the importance of supporting the arts as an integral part of socio-political movements; music, theatre, and art have always been essential to how we explore, communicate, and connect through varied experiences.

Perseverance and empathy are essential to collective action and social solidarity. By representing these values, we intend for our work to resonate with communities across the globe, identifying with the struggle in the face of injustice, regardless of the context.

Art has a unique ability to connect with people in an emotive and personal way, to linger with them and activate engagement or inquiry that wouldn’t otherwise be maintained. This history is still alive and shared by so many people in Wales; we are not separate from the battles our ancestors fought in the hopes of a better future. At its heart, reminding people that this is an ongoing effort is the aim of The Angry Summer Project.

To acknowledge the human connection between the past and the present can be very powerful — we are not removed from our past, and the issues our forebears faced are as relevant and real today.

But so is the strength and value in standing together to tackle them. Using the arts to connect with and explore social and political issues is one of our greatest tools; for education, creating conversations, and promoting longevity in collective movements.

Our project joins a long tradition of using the arts to respond to political and social circumstances, and we hope it helps encourage others to also support and explore the power of creativity in these spaces.