Join ARC Stockton for a live event like no other – where community, creativity, and courage collide.

Our Freedom: Stockton Rising showcases original work co-created by a wide range of professional artists with local participants from ARC’s regular creative engagement classes, refugees and asylum seekers who now call Stockton home, and their award-winning associate company of learning disabled theatre makers, Full Circle.

The production brings together each group’s creative responses to Freedom Road, a specially commissioned poem by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Each moment offers a window into their personal, imaginative and hope-filled answers to the question: ‘what does freedom mean to you, here and now?’

Expect the unexpected: original music, bold storytelling, inspiring films, powerful drama, vibrant movement, and immersive projections – interwoven into one electrifying evening.

This is more than a performance. It’s a raw, uplifting, and unfiltered celebration of community, identity, resilience and place – told through the voices of those who live it. Above all, it’s a call to connect and experience what freedom means to Stockton through the power of creativity.

Get ready to feel moved, challenged, inspired… and changed.