How does an idea become a story? What goes into turning someone else’s personal experience into a performance? Why does music have such a powerful effect on storytelling?
Zita Whalley and Andy Malt, editors of Thanet-focussed culture newsletter Strange Tourist look at how stories are formed and the many roads into creating narratives. Putting together a creative panel of performers, writers, artists and people working across multiple disciplines, Building Stories explores storytelling approaches across several practices.
Speaking, performing and showing their work will be:
Songwriter and director of Margate’s Social Singing Choir Hughie Gavin on writing music for film and TV.
Actor and playwright Katie McGarry on turning personal stories into theatre - both her own for her show You’re Not in the West End Now, and those of other with Letters You’ll Never Send.
The Body As Data’s Sidonie Carey-Green on documenting real life stories of forced migration through dance and spoken word.
Margate Queer Library & Archive founder Sé Nomayo on curating LGBTQ+ stories from the local community.
Hughie Gavin is an Emmy-nominated composer, arranger, producer and musical director based in Margate. His work has included global campaigns for WWF and Audi, commissions for the 2019 Turner Prize as well as multiple choral collaborations including HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, BBC’s Silent Witness, and with Universal Records, Ninja Tune, City Slang, Sub Pop and Moshi Moshi Records. From the Institute Studios in Margate, he leads both a contemporary vocal ensemble, the Institute Collective, and The Social Singing Choir.
Katie McGarry is an actor, singer and theatre-maker. She makes work about relationships, the rawness of the nitty gritty, silliness and finding the little bits of magic in life. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Bindlestick Theatre Company and recently co-created comedy show Shakespeare’s Royal Company. Other credits include West end, UK Tour, Open Air Shakespeare, directing and producing new writing for Off West End. Katie has been an associate artist and regular performer for companies such as Looping the Loop, Screaming Alley Cabaret, POW! Thanet and Ramsgate Festival of Sound since 2015.
Dr Sidonie Carey-Green is a UK-based dance filmmaker and practitioner-researcher whose work explores the intersection of movement, film, and technology. Her work investigates connections between ideas of local identity and choreographic mapping. She is the co-creator of The Body As Data, a collaborative performance project working with people impacted by the UK’s border regime. Through workshops, creative research, and live events, this project uses movement, sound, and surveillance technologies to re-map erased stories and challenge systems of surveillance.
Dr Sé M. Nomayo is a writer and researcher who explores and experiments with connections to place, particularly through queer placemaking. Their PhD examined the spatialised activist practices of lesbians in 1980s London. In June 2025, they opened the Margate Queer Library & Archive, a free DIY space for the community aimed at increasing access to queer histories, methods, and theories, especially those shared, materialised, and remembered in Thanet.