Open House at Fire Station for city's performing talent

The £18 million Fire Station Auditorium is to stage Open House, a special showcase for emerging talents.

The venue wants to hear from “singers, dancers, poets, comedians, jugglers, circus performers and all other types of performers”. Performances will be given during Sunderland’s half term holidays, which are in the last full week of February 2022.

The showcase will be there to give a platform to community performers from any background and with any performing talent. It is also open to people of any age.

The producers of Open House are Sunderland Culture, which brings together cultural programmes of all types from across the city.

Helen Green is head of performance at Sunderland Culture and is hoping for a big response from stars of the future.

She said: “Sunderland is a hotbed of artistic talent and the Fire Station is the perfect venue to showcase that talent.

“I want the city to be proud of our community performers – and the fantastic new building that will be an important fixture in Sunderland for generations to come. This amazing new venue is for the people of the city – whether as an audience member or as a performer.

“So our Open House call-out is to everyone. You don’t have to be super-talented and we’re not looking for professionals. But we do want to be bombarded with applications.

"If we get the numbers we hope, then we’ll put on as many performances as we can in the time we have.

“We’ve booked the Fire Station stage out for the whole of the February half-term week so we plan to have rehearsals at the beginning of the week, with the shows at the end of the week – probably Thursday, Friday and Saturday; but that all depends on what response we get.

“Our performances will be as diverse and as inclusive as possible and I just can’t wait for the applications top start flooding in.”

An Open House application form can be found on The Fire Station’s website, www.sunderlandculture.org.uk/openhouse. The deadline for applications is Friday, January 14.

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