Schools · Wakefield
750 students, one theatre.
- Need
- A landmark day of inspiration for young people across the district.
- Delivered
- Inspire Beyond at Theatre Royal Wakefield.
- Outcome
- 750 students in one day, covered by the Dewsbury Reporter.
05 Human performance
Three acts, told straight.
The work comes from one life, and he tells it plainly. That is why young athletes, students and senior teams all hear themselves in it.
Act one
The academy
Signed as a teenager by Blackburn Rovers in their Premier League years, then Bolton Wanderers, playing under Kenny Dalglish, Roy Hodgson and Sam Allardyce. England at youth level, on the Wembley pitch he had once watched from the stands on a ticket his teacher paid for.
Act two
The end
He never made the first team. It was over just as it got started, and this is where his life really began.
Act three
What came after
On the building site he kept thinking about an orphanage he had visited on a Blackburn Rovers trip to Eastern Europe. Children with nothing, who were happy. Twenty years of rebuilding followed: a book, a TEDx stage, a schools programme that has run for a decade, and a body of work about how a person does exactly that.
I fell massively short on my sporting career. Prouder of how I found the strength to start again. That was harder than any football match.Luke Staton
