THE lives of Northern women and girls are set to be explored as part of an outdoor theatre performance in York.

Performers will return to their hometown for three new stagings of Pilot Theatre's Northern Girls project - giving underrepresented voices the chance to share a short piece on female life.

The performances will be deeply rooted in where the women and girls are from: York, Bridlington and Redcar.

The shows will all be made up of a series of individual and deeply personal stories exploring big ideas around place, identity and asking what it means to be a woman in the North in 2021.

The long-running project is coming to Explore York on October 6, 2021 - featuring new and established talent Hannah Davies, Lydia Marchant, Juliana Mensah and Kat Rose-Martin.

Each place will host four performances with the shows also recorded by Pilot Theatre to be streamed at a later date.

Tickets are available via www.eventbrite.co.uk - with general admissions costing £10 and £5 for concessions.

After York's stories, the show will then move on to Bridlington in East Yorkshire - with storytelling from Shannon Barker, Ellie Brammar and Nadia Emam - before reaching Teesside. 

Esther Richardson, Pilot Theatre Creative Director, said: “Northern Girls is my dream project and it really has been a dream to conjure it into existence. Being a woman from Redcar and Durham has been a lonely path in theatre. I want this show to change things for young women in 2021.

“Young women in Yorkshire and North East must have the opportunity to speak about their lives in their own voices, and the subjects that matter to them.

"We want to foster the opportunities that were missing when we were growing up: the chance to work alongside professional writers and theatre makers for support, solidarity and inspiration.

"We want to encourage a new generation, because we need more women who are visibly from these areas crafting the narratives and speaking up.”

Esther added: “It’s not an accident that the project is happening where it is, and is hopeful this incarnation is giving some of us the chance to make work specifically in our home towns and to work with teenage girls specifically at our old schools.

"In the case of Redcar and Bridlington these are places that still don’t have producing theatres and access to arts and culture is still limited and precious for young people.

"We love where we’re from – it’s who we are - and we’re incredibly proud to be from this part of the world, but we’d like to see activities like theatre increased and considered more ‘every day’ and normal in these places.”

Northern Girls works with local communities to create a participatory professional piece of theatre that will tackle inequality and unfairness in the arts across the UK.

The show hopes to open up doors for working class people to get into theatre and inspire a new generation of women to unlock their talent.