locations

This is our own theatre! We have produced a wide range of professional and community-focused performances here. It has been transformed into everything from The North Pole to a battleground. This venue was originally built in 1907 for miners’ families as a place of congregation and youth learning. This vision lives on today!

As well as producing our own work here, The Enter Centre is also a favourite of visiting theatre companies and has been used by The Take Off Children’s Theatre Festival. We have hosted West End producers, orchestras and brass bands, exhibitions, demonstrations, lectures and talks, as well as rock bands, gospel choirs and folk artists.

We regularly host external workshop leaders and have welcomed the award-winning Ballet Lorent and other professional companies to our theatre and workshop space.

In 2013 we took our own musical, The Wind Road Boys, here and brought the house down. As well as the main production, we dedicated matinee performances to schools and over 1000 schoolchildren were able to experience their heritage in engaging song and stories.

We have performed here on two occasions. The first in 2014 for our original musical, Home Fires and again, in 2018 to perform for His Royal Highness King Letsie III of Lesotho and his consort Queen Masenate Mohato Seeiso, as well as the Minister of Culture of Lesotho. This visit inspired us to write ‘Forever Song’ for Sentebale.

Part of our ‘Over the Wire’ project, we took over the Hall and performed ‘Honoured’, a commemoration to the war dead and to the sacrifices made by ordinary families, during times of conflict. We also performed a special piece in honour of the Hartlepools Bombardment of December 1914. As part of this production, we conducted workshops in 25 primary schools (and over 2000 schoolchildren) across Hartlepool and selected 200 children to star with our professional performers and student cast.

We performed excerpts of our productions here and have also been part of a range of meetings held at the venue to support the work of the theatre societies at Durham University. We have provided many University students opportunities to extend their skillset and expand their professional CV.

County Durham Community Foundation invited our award-winning choir to provide entertainment at their fundraising celebration event.

The church has seen a number of our concerts and productions staged in its wonderful hall. We have been able to provide performances and activities for the elderly and young people in this small and isolated community.

We were commissioned to perform here to promote the launch of Durham Lumiere 2019 in front of a gathering of V.I.Ps.

One of the theatres which hosted our Wind Road Boys tour of 2016.

This iconic venue (and the Everyman Theatre) has seen us perform on a number of occasions, most recently in our ‘touring exhibition’ of the life of WG (Bill) Farrell, the first resident warden who inspired artists such as Norman Cornish, Tom McGuinness and writers such as Sid Chaplin.

We were invited to perform at the Awards Ceremony for Star Radio.

We performed a production of our WW1 musical ‘Home Fires’ for Chelsea pensioners and a gathering of military personnel, as well as the war journalist Kate Adie.

We have staged productions, concerts, singalongs, meet and greets and a wide range of other events at Community Centres such as Shotton Community Centre; Chilton Community Club; Easington Miner’s Welfare Hall; Bishop Auckland Methodist Church; Trimdon Community Centre; Spennymoor Town Hall; St Andrew’s Church, Bishop Auckland; St Hilda’s Church, Hartlepool; Dean Bank Literary Institute; Mainsforth Community Centre; Sherburn Village Hall, a wide range of primary schools across the UK, as well as local and regional care homes. We’ve even performed at a Mecca Bingo hall!

We entered a UK-wide search for the best performance groups to support the world-famous singing quartet, Collabro. Out of thousands of groups, we were selected to perform alongside the national treasures, Collabro at this spectacular venue as part of their 2019 UK tour, The Road to the Royal Albert Hall.

The Theatre Royal has helped us to host technical theatre work experience to some of our technical students. Coordinated through the award-winning New Adventures dance and theatre company, London.

One of the beautiful theatres we played on our 2016 tour of The Wind Road Boys.

Our professional cast brought the audience to their feet at the Durham 2029 MBF Festival Launch 2023.

We performed a range of heritage works at this fabulous museum.

We were specially commissioned by Musical Theatre International to launch their new licensed musical, Xanadu. We took the stage by storm and brought this enormous venue to its feet with applause.

We have partnered with the museum on high profile projects and performed concert versions of our original mining songs. Our students have participated in workshops and experiences including being taken down the only deep mine shaft in the UK, which is open to the public.

Our student cast had the opportunity to perform here and enjoyed every minute. They were highly praised for their performance by a number of talent scouts and producers.

We held a public performance in this iconic church, used by soldiers passing through to war-torn areas. We received a stranding ovation and our cast of young people stayed to talk to locals about their experience.

Our performers were in awe of the incredible acoustics in this building’s inner courtyard. Cloth Hall stands as a testament to the undying spirit of allies after it was bombed almost to the ground during WW1, but was restored later to its current glory.

Talbot House’s garden and commemoration room at the top of the house were perfect, peaceful places in which to perform a number of our songs to a gathering public. Used as a place for wounded soldiers to recuperate, it was a poignant and peaceful setting in which to perform. Our performance was lauded by Trevor Purnell, author of Village Boys Still, who was so moved he asked us to perform the songs in his region.

Our students visited the Football Truce Fields at this historic location and sand Silent Night in both English and German.

On our tour, we were delighted to be presented to Dame Patricia Hawkins-Windsor MBE Knight of the Order of Leopold II and Mr Peter Hawkins. They had high praise indeed for the work Enter had been doing to keep the memory of the fallen alive among the youth of today. “How can we ever put into words the emotion we have witnessed today in this heartfelt performance. Thank you.”