Practices of Repair: Sue Mayo on storytelling across materials and social worlds
A conversation on community theatre, creative facilitation, and the politics of participation.
Sue Mayo, a theatre artist with a background in community practice, discusses her multi-artform approach to storytelling through various media. She is the third facilitator in Looking Forward’s community engagement programme Soft Ground, hosted at SET Social Peckam every Friday, 2 to 4 pm. In this interview, Sue emphasises the social and therapeutic values of hands-on making, fostering imagination and reflection, and reflects on the challenges of sustaining participatory arts programmes for adults in the current socio-political climate. Her work focuses on repair and storytelling, bridging personal, material, and community repair.
When our hands are busy, imagination is released, reflection becomes possible, and the noise in our heads quiets down.
Sylvia Keck: How would you describe your work in your own words?
Sue Mayo: I come from a theatre background, but I don’t really see theatre as a single art form. It’s more like a place where visual elements, sound, the body, and narrative come together. I guess what it really boils down to is that I’m interested in narrative and storytelling. How we put things together, how we make sense of what’s happened in our lives and what’s happening around us. Because I mostly work in community practice, with different groups to create work, it can really take any form: people need to work in different ways, sometimes silently, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or in a group. I’ve found that offering that kind of variety is actually the most productive way to work.
My mother was an artist, so I grew up surrounded by materials. I didn’t really understand houses that didn’t have scissors, sewing machines, lino printing kits. You know, I’d think, how do you live without these things? We never bought cards - we printed wrapping paper, and we would make them. So I think it’s always been in my DNA. But I’ve learned a lot along the way as well. Hence why it feels very natural for me to work with materials, as much as with words - mixing all these creative mediums.
SK: I’m curious about the relationship between your theatre background and your textile work.
SM: The word that comes to mind is texture. The world of textiles is incredibly varied: smooth, rough, velvety, delicate, bold. You can ask yourself, “What do I want to be in contact with today? Something tiny and intricate, or something large and loud?”
And in terms of what I’ll be doing on Fridays for Soft Ground, we’re going to make garlands. We’ll start with very small ones and gradually work towards large ones that will stay outside in the garden. I find it helpful to think of stories in a similar way. Some stories are tiny and delicate; others you want to shout about. Textiles give us a way to choose the right scale and feel for whatever we’re exploring.
Working with our hands is crucial. When our hands are busy, imagination is released, reflection becomes possible, and the noise in our heads quiets down. There’s growing recognition of the importance of tactility in our sensory life. Making together also helps us think narratively.
There’s a beautiful image from psychotherapist Marion Milner. She describes keeping a diary as making beads out of your day. Moments that crystallise, like seeing a bird close-up, a phone call from your son, or the best poached egg you’ve ever had. When you write the diary, you string those beads together. Textile work can function similarly: you decide, “I’m going to keep and celebrate this moment,” and you choose a specific material to hold it.
SK: Was there a transition between your work in theatre and your workshop practice, which feels more focused on making rather than words? Although I suppose theatre is also a form of making and playing with language.
SM: I began in mainstream theatre. For about 10 years, I was an actor and also wrote and directed. That was absolutely my world. As a young person, if I were offered three days of improvisation, I’d be on my feet the entire time. I loved it. But when I started working with community groups, I realised that rhythm didn’t work for everyone. Some people enjoyed moving and improvising, but then they wanted to sit down and cut something out, or write alone, or pick up a big paintbrush and paint a wall. In community groups, where people don’t necessarily come with an ambition to be ‘performers’, you need more than one way in.
I began working very consciously in a cross-art form way. When planning projects, I’d ask: “At this point, will everyone be tired of talking? Do they need something tactile or quiet?” I remember working on a large intergenerational performance project with Ali Campbell. As we approached the performance, anxiety rose, and people were losing their connection with each other. We remembered there was a part of the show involving nets filled with paper fish. One day, we cancelled rehearsal, sat everyone at small tables, and they simply made silver-and-gold paper fish. While their hands were busy, they started chatting freely. They reconnected as people, not just as performers, worried about being in the right place. We lost a rehearsal, but we regained the group!
That experience really articulated something I was already gravitating towards: offering multiple entry points so people who love tiny, meticulous work and people who are flamboyant and expansive each find their place. Once people have one secure way in, they often stretch. They discover they can do quiet, small work or speak out. It’s shifted me away from the idea that I have a single vision I must impose at all costs. Instead, the work emerges from encounters with people, and I try to stay receptive to changes in direction.
For the four sessions I’m going to do for Soft Ground, for example, I’d like to keep the first-week materials available in the third or fourth week. If someone joins later and prefers small-scale work, I can say, “Here are those materials. Would you like to work on that instead?” Keeping varied offers in the room, when possible, means more people can enter in their own way.
SK: It’s been really nice to see, through this programme, how people become more confident and comfortable in the space - and then start sharing more personal stories. It’s kind of amazing to witness. Do you see your practice as socially engaged or as a form of social practice? And how do you feel about that framing?
SM: Yes, absolutely. For me, there are two sides to it. First, I don’t want to live in a sealed-off world of artists. I love artists, and I’m actually going on an artist retreat soon, which I’m really looking forward to. But I also want to meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. I don’t want to miss those connections. Ten years ago, I worked in a housing association where all the residents were of Somali origin. There was a serious generational rift, and they wanted intergenerational arts practice to help them talk to each other. I told a GP friend about the things they were recounting, and he said, ‘I don’t know any of what you’re telling me, and many of my patients are Somali.’. That really struck me, how separate some sectors are. The arts space can be a place where those conversations happen.
I’m convinced that people who participate in arts work grow in confidence, in pleasure in what they do, and in understanding their own creativity. So yes, my work is socially engaged out of both personal need and necessity. I don’t want to drift off into a cloud-land where all I do is get my nails done. I live in an area full of beauty salons, and sometimes it feels like people hide there because the news is so grim. I’d rather step into spaces where we can talk and make things together. At the same time, the landscape is very difficult. My community practice is mostly with adults, and many major institutions have cut adult participatory work - the Southbank Centre, the Royal Albert Hall, the elders’ programme at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
SK: That’s why we wanted to create something for neurodiverse adults. We also realised there’s a fair bit available for neurodiverse children and teenagers, but much less for adults. At school, there’s often some form of support - SEN provision or similar - but what happens afterwards? People are just expected to navigate life on their own, often carrying a sense of difference they don’t always have the space to express. So we really wanted to create a space where difference is encouraged, rather than something to feel ashamed of.
SM: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And you know, so many people only come to understand their neurodiversity later in life. I know several people in their 40s or 50s who are only just realising that what they’ve been feeling, this sense of difference or separateness, actually has a name. And having that diagnosis can really help them make sense of those feelings.
SK: I’d like to talk a bit about Breaks and Joins now, your fascinating, huge project that you’re working on at the moment.
Sue: My main long-term project is about repair. We do lots of things under that umbrella, and the challenge is always to keep the different strands connected, to show they belong together. We collect stories that become performances. We’ve made a film. We run workshops on resolving conflict. We run a repair café. What we’re trying to do is build a project-world where it makes sense that, in one corner, someone is mending an object; at another table, people are making a big painting about what would improve their community; and in another corner, someone is recording a poem they’ve just written.
At the very beginning of that project, my colleague Chuck and I filmed one person having something repaired. In fifteen minutes, three incredible stories emerged because the repairer chatted with the person about the object, about how they learned to fix things, and about the person’s father. Narrative and imagination are completely present in a repair café. We’ve just put in a funding application to run an active repair café alongside performers who will tell stories and collect new ones. So there will be ‘real’ repair and performed repair in the same space. That’s what I’m interested in at the moment: knitting together material repair, personal repair, and community repair, and seeing how those conversations can continue to inform one another.
Sometimes people misunderstand and invite me to run a repair café, as if that’s all we do, or assume all my work is in mental health. I have to keep saying, “It’s not just that. It’s this and this and this, and how they interrelate.”
SK: That’s a really interesting overlap with Looking Forward. We use curating as a tool for social and ecological repair. I mostly work within the community engagement strand, but there is also an ecological strand and a more research-led strand focused on the journal and publications.
SM: It’s great, isn’t it! I spent years in academia, and there’s a deep, often unspoken hierarchy around knowledge. The printed word is treated as the pinnacle. Everything is structured to produce publications. Other forms of knowledge, like lived experience or the practice of an artist like Celia Pym, or the insights of someone at a medical foundation, struggle to stand on equal footing. I adored my students, and I’m still in touch with many of them, but I’m glad to be outside that system now. I can live in a world where a project participant’s knowledge is as valuable as a published book, where we actively invite these different knowledges to talk to each other instead of ranking them in a hierarchy.
That’s one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about the Soft Ground workshops I’ve been to. There doesn’t need to be an agenda. I remember someone at Birungi’s workshop saying, “I finish work at midday on Fridays and cycle past here. What better way to wind down from my week than to come here and make something?” There’s no explicit goal of change or improvement or learning; just the joy of making.
SK: And how organic it is as well. When you bring people together, so much knowledge emerges!
SM: Yes, absolutely. And I think another important aspect is allowing people to come as they are. One of the participants in another workshop I run is this man who always arrives late. He takes time to observe what’s happening, then translates that into what he feels like doing, and then engages in his own way. And that’s completely fine, it really works for him, and it’s something that feels valuable in his week.
In a way, he has created a space for himself without needing to label it or frame it as an achievement. He simply says, “I want to be able to come as I am.” And I think that’s something I really value about creativity: it’s a very generous space where people can just have a go, without needing to define it too tightly or turn it into something measurable.
