BIG SOUL MCR
-PROJECTS -
Big Soul Productions develops original artistic projects that bridge installation, performance, and socially engaged practice. Led by Yusra Warsama, our work often emerges from lived experience, community narratives, and the shifting identities within contemporary cities. We create projects that not only occupy space but activate it—inviting audiences to step inside complex stories of migration, belonging, conflict, and transformation. These works vary in scale and form, but they share a commitment to curiosity, nuance, and a deep respect for the communities and histories that inspire them.
BIG SOUL MCR PROJECTS
International Youth Project - A Big Soul Production in collaboration with Mixit (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
This international project brings together young people from Manchester and Auckland—many from migrant, refugee, or diaspora backgrounds—for a creative exchange across hemispheres.Through digital storytelling, imaginative collaboration, and shared lived experience, the project opens a space for two groups of young people who are “worlds apart” yet deeply connected by their histories of movement, resilience, and cultural inheritance.
This cross-cultural collaboration invites participants to dream, create, and determine the narrative on their own terms—free from patronage, assumption, or external authority. Using accessible digital tools such as CapCut, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, and iMovie, each group crafts and shares original material filmed on their phones. The digital environment becomes a playground for experimentation: mixing video, sound, graphics, animation, and music, as each team discovers how their creativity meets, merges, and grows when united with others across the globe.
The project centres the voices of young adults who have navigated forced migration, displacement, or the complexities of diaspora identity. Through creative dialogue, they explore who they are, what they carry, and what they dream for the future. They compare their lives in two urban centres—Manchester and Auckland—seeking the common ground and the differences that shape them. Together, they build a cultural exchange that leads directly to a shared digital outcome created entirely by them.
At its core, the project aims to remove power imbalances often present when working with marginalised youth.
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Instead, it offers a platform rooted in ownership, agency, imagination, and play—a structure where the participants lead the creative process and tell their own stories. It recognises the transformative potential of art to uplift, to bridge experiences, and to generate meaningful dialogue across borders.
Over a 6–8 month period, both groups will collaboratively define the creative intention of the work, design the methods of exchange, and choose the tools and techniques that best express their worlds. Through questioning, responding, provoking, and sharing, they will shape a final digital performance piece that captures their collective journey—an artwork made from the gifts, stories, frustrations, hopes, and ideas they exchange along the way.
This project embodies the Big Soul ethos of hospitality and welcome: creating spaces where young people feel seen, valued, and empowered to shape the narrative of their own lived experience.
If you work with a Manchester-based youth or community group and would like to connect them to this project, please get in touch via our contact page.
BIG SOUL MCR PROJECTS
Big Soul - Nomadic Tent
Big Soul Nomadic Tent - Living Room Chats - is a roaming, intimate space designed to spark conversations about Manchester and its many identities. A travelling “living room” or “boudoir” stays in situ wherever it lands — a space the public can enter, respond to, and reimagine even when no one is performing. It becomes a quiet invitation to pause, reflect, and add to the collective story.
(Working Title)
The project asks three simple but powerful questions:
What are the stories of Manchester?
What makes someone Manc?
How do Mancunians feel about this ever-changing city?
This process is rooted in a gathering I created years ago, where artists could come together and let unexpected “happenings” unfold — a response to the isolation of freelance life. From that experience grew the philosophy of Big Soul: the idea that you are big, that everyone carries a vast, imaginative inner world.
When people are given safety, permission, and space to be themselves, art flows. Stories surface. Audiences encounter something honest, expansive, and deeply human. The living room in situ allows these conversations to extend beyond the performers to anyone who wanders in.
A Space for Big Souls
This project ultimately feeds into a piece of site-specific theatre — a journey through dreams and nightmares, fantasy and reality, all rooted in the everyday rhythms of Manchester life.
In a city shifting rapidly, where divisions between the “haves” and “have nots” grow ever sharper, I’m interested in the deeper questions:
What makes Manchester home for those who have witnessed its skyline rise around them?
And what makes it home for someone who has just arrived?
At the centre of this work sits one essential inquiry: What is community?
The answers, I believe, live in the stories we are brave enough to share.
- Yusra Warsama
BIG SOUL MCR PROJECTS
Mancunian Nomads
Mancunian Nomads is a groundbreaking museum-based project curated and directed by Yusra Warsama and the Big Soul Collective. Rooted in ethical collaboration, the project explores the knowledge, histories, and lived experiences of Somali elders and women in Manchester, inviting them to engage directly with museum artefacts—objects that were often acquired unethically or misidentified in the past.
Curated and Directed by Yusra Warsama
In the first phase of the project, these community members are welcomed into the museum as experts, treated with dignity, and offered a sense of belonging in a space that has historically felt distant or alien. Through careful facilitation, the women and elders are invited to share their wisdom, correct historical records, and provide context for objects that carry both cultural and personal significance. Hospitality, respect, and welcome are central to this process—values that underpin all Big Soul Productions projects.
The next phases of Mancunian Nomads extend this engagement to younger generations, bringing the knowledge shared by elders into local schools and public exhibitions. By connecting youth with the lived experiences and expertise of their community, the project fosters understanding, curiosity, and intergenerational dialogue. It is a practice of care, learning, and cultural reclamation—transforming the museum from a space of observation into a place of shared storytelling and active participation.
'Mancunian Nomads' Contd.
All of Yusra’s work through Big Soul Productions operates on the principle of hospitality and welcome for everyone: creating environments where voices historically overlooked are amplified, where histories are corrected, and where dialogue bridges generations.
If you are part of a school or community group based in the North-West interested in connecting with this project, please reach out through our contact page!
BIG SOUL MCR PROJECTS
Prodigal Sons (Working Title)
Currently in development in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Prodigal Sons continues Yusra Warsama’s commitment to theatre that confronts pressing social realities while embracing the poetic, transformative possibilities of storytelling.
'Prodigal Sons'
Working Title
Written & Directed by Yusra Warsama
Prodigal Sons is Yusra Warsama’s deeply resonant exploration of the “lost men” of the diaspora—the fathers whose histories, qualifications, and lived experiences are often overlooked, dismissed, or erased in new lands. This play asks urgent questions: What becomes of a man uprooted from the life he knew? How does displacement ripple through generations, shaping not only fathers but their sons? Through these intergenerational tensions, Prodigal Sons examines the struggles, resilience, and silent sacrifices of men navigating worlds that too often refuse to see them fully.
Drawing inspiration from the timeless depth and tragedy of King Lear, Yusra delves into the complex dynamics of authority, inheritance, identity, and belonging.
'Prodigal Sons' Contd.
The play foregrounds the intimate and sometimes painful relationships between fathers and sons, highlighting how cultural displacement, systemic invisibility, and shifting societal expectations shape their journeys. It is a story of love, responsibility, frustration, and the enduring quest for recognition—both within family and society at large.
Through this work, audiences are invited to witness the lives of those who carry histories often ignored, to feel the weight of displacement, and to reflect on the ways legacy, identity, and aspiration are passed down—and sometimes lost—across generations.
