Video / DVDs Archives - Banner Theatre

Chicago: The Great Teachers’ Strike (2020)

In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike to fight for public sector education. They empowered their members and mobilised parents, students and the wider community. The campaign was hugely successful with hundreds of thousands of vocal and active supporters taking part in nine days of mass pickets, creative sit-ins and demonstrations in 840 schools across the city. The strike was won and the organising strategies that were used became a blueprint for other strikes in both the US and the UK.

Weaving together music, song and inspirational video footage and interviews, Chicago: The Great Teachers’ Strike provides compelling lessons for both educational and broader public sector resistance here in the UK.

The company thanks the NEU for its financial support, all the Banner performers, technicians and administrators, as well as South and City College Birmingham and their staff and students for their work on this DVD.

The show toured extensively across the UK between 2016-2019.

“Fantastic, empowering, goosebumps the whole time!” Anna Quick, NUT Student Member

“Changed my opinion completely Ex-tory! Fantastic music and story, brilliant lyrics.” Steve Scott, NUT Student Member

“Many of our members enjoyed your production of Chicago: The Great Teachers’ Strike when the local branch of the NUT arranged for it to come to Ipswich last year. It was a very uplifting and inspirational story, and there was a good discussion afterwards. The impact created by all the teachers turning out in their red union t-shirts made a particular impression on me and I was chuffed when a subsequent decision by my own branch of Unite decided to supply some free union t-shirts to our members in a small factory paid off: boosting confidence and membership take-up and disconcerting management at discipline & grievance meetings!” Sarah Sanford, Ipswich and District Trades Union Council

Wild Geese (2006)

A rich tapestry of songs, live music and archive film is woven into a video ballad for our times based on the stories of migrant workers coming to the UK over the past 50 years and the more recent experience of asylum seekers and refugees.

Filmed during a live performance at Luton Library Theatre.

They get free mobiles… Don’t they? (2007)

This video-ballad shows how our lives here in the UK are integrally connected to those of refugees and asylum seekers, and exposes the big business interests that profit from the exploitation of children and slave labourers, particularly in the mining and production of tantalum – a key element in our mobile phones.

We Share the Same Sky (2009)

We Share the Same Sky looks at migration and the world of work in the context of the global recession. Using video interviews, digital media and new music and song, it entwines the stories of three visitors to Britain:

Ali from Afghanistan, who fled the Taliban and came to England in search of safety;
Natalya from Poland, where unemployment had been spiralling, who came to England in search of work; and
Edenis from Venezuela, who compares life in Britain with the popular revolutionary changes taking place in his home country.

The show weaves these stories into a rich tableau and asks what control we have over our working lives in the crisis-ridden 21st-century global economy, and whether the economic downturn that dominates our lives heralds a new period of struggle, resistance and change.

Burning Issues (2009) The Miners’ Strike – 25 Years On

The Miners’ Strike – 25 Years On

The 12th of March 2009 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. To celebrate the occasion, Banner Theatre has produced a DVD of Burning Issues, the video-ballad production it created for the strike’s 20th anniversary in 2004, made with members of Britain’s mining communities and which toured coalfield and former coalfield communities and elsewhere throughout England and Wales in 2004-05.

Embedded with the Bankers (2010)

Through interviews with key experts – TV journalist and writer Paul Mason, author and journalist Nick Davies and former BBC political correspondent Nick Jones – Embedded with the Bankers charts the structural changes in UK newspapers, which have undermined the strong British tradition of investigative journalism.

The show asks the question: Why didn’t the UK media warn the British public about the impending banking collapse and recession that marred the 2010 decade?