This year’s vibrant lineup includes live artist Liz Aggis, Alistar McDowall, Yuvel Soria and so many more. As a result of their important work, bringing together local communities with a diverse range of creatives, Rude Health has been nominated for the 2025 North East Culture award. Celebrating this exiting achievement, I caught up with founders Huss and Oastes to discuss what this means for them and the organisation.
Congratulations on your nomination for the North East Culture Award, along with some of the biggest cultural names and organisations in the North East, what does this mean to Rude Health?
Thank you very much! This is our second year of Rude Health, our second year as a charity too. It was such a hard slog to secure the funding for this year’s festival so our main hope is that this means it won’t be such a battle next year. If this nomination helps us get the word out about the brilliant work and artists coming to the Tute over the next few weeks as well it would be brilliant!
With the cultural kudos of the nomination on your side, where do you plan on taking Rude Health eg. expanding etc… ?
We’d like to maintain it as an annual cultural event in the region, something people mark in their calendar and travel to. We bring brilliant artists who’ve worked internationally but the kind of niche that you’d normally have to travel to London to see so we’d just love to see it established as a must-see event every year.
Your work is for the community, responding to their needs and issues that affect them, how do you identify the themes that need your attention?
We have regular community groups that run throughout the year and so we get to know the people in our community and can use that knowledge to drive our programming. We live here, our kids go to local schools so we’re very aware of the challenges the area face.
What are some examples of the direct benefit that Rude Health has had on the surrounding community?
Last year we worked with schools and nursing homes, taking Beckett into a nursing home was a brilliant experience. This year we’re focussing on schools, we have a creative writing program in the local high school, a movement program in two primary schools and we’re touring a new show about dealing with parents who may have substance abuse challenges by Danielle Slade into 5 local primary schools. We believe the problems in society stem from a lack of empathy in communities and the arts are a brilliant tool for fostering empathy. Working with youth is the best way to develop that. We’re also making a work exploring the experience of refugees, it’s a new play written by me (Alex Oates) and that came about as a way of thinking about how we address the division in the area responding to all the flags that appeared on lampposts in the summer. Overall there’s a feeling of change in Cambois, more people are coming to the area, moving to the area and starting to think about it as a hopeful place. People say that artists move to an area, the prices go up and the artists have to leave and we don’t want that to happen. We don’t want to gentrify it and change the DNA of the place, we just want to create a space where people can share in empathy, ambition and pride in our village.
How do you choose the acts that perform in the lineup, are they all local to the area?
They’re all artists who we resonate with and who are full of integrity. They tend to be well known artists with long careers who challenge the status quo in their fields. For example Liz Aggiss who appears this year is a pioneer in anarchic performance art – Esther studied her at university and so we were thrilled she’d come and be part of Rude Health this year. Alistair McDowall is one of the UK’s leading playwrights and ‘all of it’ was a massive success at the Royal Court but it’s the sort of work which would never otherwise be seen in Northumberland, the fact he’s willing to come and see it in Cambois and speak to our audience just speaks to his integrity. 80 percent of our freelance artists are local and mid-career, it’s important to us to employ local people as well as bringing exciting artists from further afield.