The Production Team
The City Wakes’ award-winning production artistic and support teams, are made up of members of Escape Artists’ staff, freelance artists, clients and individuals seconded from Escape Artists’ partner organisations.
The Musical Director and Co-Creative Director the City Wakes project is Simon Gunton:
Specialising in the trombone, sackbut, bass trumpet and euphonium, Simon Gunton is an exceptionally gifted musician and workshop facilitator, who has reached the highest standards of performance across a huge range of musical styles and genres.
 photograph by Christine Cellier
After receiving a scholarship to, and graduating from, the Royal College of Music, Simon became a member of both calypso band Arrow (who, among other releases, recorded the original Hot Hot Hot), and award-winning brass ensemble the Wallace Collection. With the Wallace Collection and its successor The Golden Section, Simon has played at venues including Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, Wigmore Hall, Moscow Tchaikovsky Hall and Moscow Conservatoire. In 1994, Simon won a Best of Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Festival for two-man show Fools Progress.
As a classical trombonist, Simon has performed as principal trombonist with the Philharmonia, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and London Sinfonietta. His opera and ballet work has included appearances with the Covent Garden Orchestra, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera and Birmingham Royal Ballet. Simon has performed as a soloist at venues such as the Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and, on the penultimate night of the 1996 proms, the Royal Albert Hall. Playing the sackbut, Simon has appeared with the Gabrieli Consort (with whom he won a Gramophone Award), the London Classical Players and The King’s Consort.
Simon’s commercial work has seen him perform on hits by/tour with artists such as Robbie Williams, Boyzone, Westlife, Mariah Carey, George Michael, the Pet Shop Boys, Catherine Jenkins, Paul McCartney, Missy Elliot, Lou Reed, G4, Yousson Dour, The Whalers, Brian Ferry and Elton John. He has played on soundtracks for films including Casino Royal, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Sharks Tale, Shrek 1&2, Bee Movie and Mission Impossible. He conducted on the score for Tim Burton’s 2005 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Simon’s West End credits include Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Producers, Spamalot and Evita.
In the last decade, Simon has undertaken several projects as a composer, notably writing the music for the BBC’s Gormenghast and The Cazalets, Channel 4’s Home Help, and Escape Artists’ Adoreus - A Cambridge Cantata. Through this work, Simon discovered a love of helping others to create music. He has now worked in numerous primary and secondary schools, Higher Education establishments, hospitals, hospices, mental health hospitals and day centres, prisons, homeless centres, after school youth clubs and youth clubs specialising in work with excluded children. He has also undertaken education work for organisations such as the British Council, the Royal Opera House, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Spitalfields Festival, the Royal Academy of Music and the Sydney, Paris and Moscow conservatoires.
Since 2004, Simon has dedicated part of his time to working as Artistic Director of arts and mental health charity Escape Artists. As well as facilitating the charity’s music-related education programmes, he is Joint Creative Director and Musical Director of The City Wakes.
The Producer and Co-Creative Director of the City Wakes is Matthew Taylor:
Matthew is the founder of Escape Artists. He worked for three years as Director of the Wayland Prison Drama Group before setting up the company in 1996.
For Escape Artists he has produced Adoreus – A Cambridge Cantata as well as a number of plays including: The Dumb Waiter, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, Monster, Something Wicked and Blagger. He is also the founder of Arts@the Edge, through which, on behalf of Escape Artists, he has produced two Edge Festivals and the Arts@the Edge Conference in Cambridge. He has also been instrumental in developing Arts@the Edge in Rome, where there have also been two Edge Festivals and an Edge Conference.
Besides producing The City Wakes, Matthew is also working on The Bach and Mozart Project by Adriano Vianello, a drama production that will be toured to theatres and prisons in 2009.
Darren Johnston – Choreographer / Video Artist
Darren is a director, choreographer, and video and sound artist. He has won numerous awards, including 1st Prize at the 2000 International Choreographer Concours in the Netherlands, and 1st Prize at the inaugural International Choreographers Competition in Bornem, Belgium. In 2001/2, Darren won the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award and in 2005 he was presented with a prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh International Festival. This latter honour was for his full-scale installation piece, Ren-sa. Darren is Artistic Director of his own company [array].
Simon Fraulo – Lighting Designer
Simon has been Chief Lighting Technician at the National Theatre since 1994. His extensive list of credits as a lighting designer, associate lighting designer and technician include The History Boys, The Cherry Orchard, Amadeus, In Extremis, Inadmissible Evidence, King Lear, The Madness of George III, Richard III and The Crucible. He also worked as Production Manager on the National Theatre’s 2001 production No Man’s Land. Simon is the Lighting Designer for The City Wakes.
Robin Emery – Production Manager
Robin is a freelance production and project manager based in East Anglia. He started out at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington, and over the last twenty years has worked with a wide range of companies and organisations in the West End and elsewhere, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera Theatre, Dublin, London Children’s Ballet, Richard Mallett Arts Management, Menagerie Theatre, Stretch People, the London School of Puppetry, the Haddenham Community Play, Central School of Art and Design and Rose Bruford College.
Previous projects for Escape Artists include a prison tour of Monster, which was also presented at the Royal Opera House studio, the Edge Festival and the Cambridge Cantata. Other Cambridge based work includes The Phoenix Project for the Junction and Trans Europe Halles in Copenhagen and the Respond and Enter events in Cambridge.
Sarah Allan – Assistant Producer
Sarah studied Politics and Parliamentary Studies at the University of Leeds, graduating with a 1:1 and the Annual Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. As part of her degree, she spent a year working, first as an intern, then as an employee, for independent think-tank The POWER Inquiry, where she headed-up its work on political parties and elections. More recently, Sarah edited the TUC’s major Touchstone Pamphlet A Green and Fair Future.
Sarah’s first job in the arts was as Research Co-ordinator for Audiences Yorkshire. In this role she worked as a consultant for organisations including Northern Ballet Theatre, Opera North, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Grand Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and the National Coal Mining Museum. She then completed a marketing internship at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, before joining Escape Artists in December 2007. Sarah has previously worked as the Producer of two shows – A Christmas Dream and Cinderella both performed by Northwood Ballet School.
Rosie Marteau – Author, Syd: The City Wakes
Rosie graduated from Cambridge University with a 1st in Spanish and French, picking up some Catalan and Italian along the way. She specialised in literary translation, working on a collection of poems by Cuban poet José Martí for which she received the University's highest mark. She has also published poetry and has worked as a journalist for regional and University newspapers. Her literary interests are myriad, ranging from Classical Greek tragedy via French Symbolist poetry to contemporary Latin American novelists.
A qualified English Teacher and skydiver, Rosie has spent time living, working and jumping out of planes in Cuba and Barcelona, as well as teaching here in Cambridge at various summer schools. Whilst at University she got involved in volunteering, principally with the homeless community, until joining Escape Artists in January as an in-house writer. In September she will be taking up a job with Look Ahead Housing & Care, a charitable Housing Association, as a graduate trainee. She grew up listening to her parents' wonderful LP collection, and was particularly enamoured as a child with sixties' psychedelics the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band and (of course) early Floyd, Brian Eno and The Fall.
Iggy – as in Pop – was her first word (or so her parents tell her).
Paul Herrington
Paul studied Architecture at Kingston-upon-Thames Polytechnic in the late 70s. He began working in mental health in the early 1980s in Gloucester, running an Occupational Therapy Woodwork Department then managing a MIND run day centre. He moved to Cambridge in 1985, and trained as a psychiatric nurse, specialising in day-care provision.
In 2002, Paul left the NHS to work with Andrew Peters Garden Designs in Bedfordshire. In 2004, he set up his own garden design consultancy and created an award-winning Chelsea Flower Show garden in the same year. He rejoined the NHS in early 2007 and currently works part-time for the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust as a Development Worker in the Cambridge Social Inclusion Team.
Paul has worked collaboratively with Escape Artists since 2004, including participating in Adoreus – A Cambridge Cantata in 2005, BBC Blast in 2007 and the Work in Progress performance of The City Wakes in late 2007. His role in The City Wakes involves the recruitment and support of musicians with mental health problems vis-à-vis the project’s workshops and performances.
Paul is a musician in his own right. He grew up playing the tenor horn, euphonium and French horn, before discovering the electric guitar. He currently plays guitar, bass, melodica and alto sax in the Delta Family, an experimental ambient band.
Richard De Rosa - Support, Time and Recovery Worker
Richard trained as a wood machinist technician at East London College of Arts. After qualifying in 1987, he worked for three years as a technician in England and one year in Australia. In 1990, he began a ten-year career in network management and fibre optic network design, before moving to Essex to begin working in health care in the private sector. Eventually, he moved on to working in the community as a carer for the NHS.
In 2002, Richard moved to Cambridgeshire and began working at Addenbrookes on the Infectious Diseases Ward. It was here that he first became involved in the mental health sector. He was first introduced to Escape Artists when working as an Occupational Therapy Assistant on Friends Ward.
Today, Richard works as a STR Worker with CAMEO, an Early Intervention team based in Cambridge. He plays a very active role in The City Wakes workshops, helping to run those sessions involving CAMEO clients.
Peter Wynne Willson – Lighting Designer
Peter Wynne Willson is an internationally renowned lighting designer and inventor. In 1962 Peter began working in the theatre, first as an electrician at Buxton Repertory Theatre, then at The Fortune Theatre Drury Lane. By 17 he was chief electrician at Harrogate Theatre, and later operated the lighting console at The Albery Theatre for the original West End production of Oliver!
He worked with Pink Floyd between 1966 and 1968 when he created light shows for their performances at UFO and the Roundhouse; he went on to design the lighting for the Floyd’s UK, European and American gigs and tours.
From 1972 to 1980, Peter worked on prismatic and colour effects, which were manufactured by his Light Machine Company. During this time, in 1980, he invented the Pancan remote-control reflector system, which launched a decade of moving mirror entertainment lighting.
In 1986, Peter set up WWG Ltd., his long running lighting partnership, with the late Tony Gottelier. He continues to design lighting devices, highlights of which include: ‘Dalek’ colour generators and projection effects for Pink Floyd’s Division Bell tour; ‘Razorhead’ high-speed searchlights for U2’s Popmart tour; liquid-light effects for Roger Waters’ world tours; and award-winning ‘Catalyst’ for digital media manipulation. The ‘Catalyst’ system is at large with George Michael, American Idol, five Eurovision Contests, Fame Academy, The Sugar Babes, Pink, Barry Manilow, Grand Central Station NY, and the Opening of the Beijing Olympics.
Other items include ‘Fantôme’ automated ecliptic framing spotlights for Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam, Kammerspieler Theatre, Munich and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; high-power overhead projectors and special effects for the Syd Barrett tributes at The Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall; a massive airborne searchlight for the Red Bull Air Show and liquid special effects for Scissor Sisters’ concerts.
A recent invention is a flowing colour device licensed as ‘VersaTube’, for installations, among them O2’s new Dublin HQ, the Grammy and MTV Awards, and used by numerous artists, including The Police and Sting, R.E.M., Prince at the Superbowl, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and latterly Daft Punk, Coldplay and Radiohead for their current tour.
Peter lives and has his studio on a farm in the Cotswolds dividing his time between there and Cambridge. Since working in Earlham Street, an apartment he shared with Syd and others in 1967, his focus on creating lighting effects has not reduced by a single dioptre!
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Stephen Pyle – Set Designer / Curator (The Other Room)
Stephen Pyle is an internationally renowned stage craftsman. Resident in Cambridge from 1957 to 1967, he became a close friend of Syd Barrett. After meeting Syd at Homerton College’s Saturday art classes, he went on to study with him at Cambridge School of Art, and in 1963-64 played the drums in Those Without, a band of which Syd was also a member (he was the group’s vocalist and guitarist).
After successfully completing his art foundation course, Stephen spent three years working for Cambridge Arts Theatre (backstage and workshop). In 1967, he moved to become Assistant Prop Maker at Scottish Opera, changing jobs again a year later to become Assistant, then Manager, then Co-Director of an independent workshop in St Albans.
In 1979, Stephen established his own workshop. The Stephen Pyle Studio’s pioneering development and expansion of glass-fibre as a scenic material made it highly successful. To-date, it has built sets for, among others, The Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Glyndebourne, English National Opera, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast and, recently, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Evita and Dirty Dancing.
Collaborations with Mark Fisher have included sets for two Rolling Stones and one U2 world tour, and a ten-metre bas relief portrait of Nelson Mandela for the 46664 Aids benefit concert in 2003. The Stephen Pyle Studio has also built sets for Elton John and AC/DC.
Richard Brown – Workshop Assistant
Richard Brown will be born just as soon as he can get around to it, and represents at least three thousand notes he was not counting on. He is a composer of acoustic and electronic music, performer, arranger and video artist, and studied music at Durham University, specialising in composition. He has had his own music performed by the Composers Ensemble, Genista Ensemble and Durham Cathedral Ley Clerks. His video installations have been housed in various locations throughout Cambridge.
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