Archive / International
International
Sue and Andy’s international work has rarely been about taking a finished method somewhere else. Across many years they have worked with practitioners, communities, students and organisations in different countries, adapting ideas, learning from local experience and allowing those encounters to influence their own practice.
Some relationships lasted for years. Some projects brought Sue and Andy together. Others began with one and were later continued by the other. This part of the archive follows a few of those connections rather than trying to catalogue every journey.
Working together
Romania
Romania became an important meeting place in Sue and Andy’s work.
Sue’s earlier involvement included international training and the Creative Summer School in Transylvania. The surviving material from Zarnesti shows an approach that combined workshops with local culture, stories, masks, play, dance and the surrounding landscape. The programme also stated that most course fees and all accommodation payments would remain in Zarnesti and benefit the local community.
Over time Romania also became a place where Sue and Andy worked together. Their shared projects included The Railway Boys, work in Brasov prison and Project Wolf events.
Project Wolf brought together training, creative practice and professional exchange. Surviving records include work with teachers, psychologists, social workers and other practitioners, alongside projects in community and institutional settings.
The photographs preserve only moments from a much larger body of work, but together they show something important about the relationship with Romania. It was not a single visit or one project. Sue and Andy returned through different kinds of work, with different groups and at different stages in their own practice.
Continuity and development
Norway
Sue’s relationship with Norway developed over many years through creative therapeutic practice, masks, puppets, theatre and work with Norwegian colleagues and students.
Later, Andy followed this connection from a different direction, returning to Norway to train dramatherapists in Social Theatre.
The relationship continued, but the work did not simply repeat itself. Sue’s earlier work and Andy’s later training belong to different periods and different practices, while still forming part of a longer connection between people, ideas and places.
Returning rather than touring
NDP in the Jungle
NDP in the Jungle has taken place four times, in 2017, 2019, 2024 and 2026. Each programme lasted around two and a half weeks and included a week in the jungle, where students lived alongside Temiar friends and families of Sue and Andy.
Sue and Andy designed and delivered the course together, with Actionwork producing the programme.
The students came from many parts of the world, including the UK, Malaysia, Australia, Switzerland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Argentina, France, China and Greece. Across the four cohorts, the great majority of participants were women. Only one man took part, in the first cohort.
The programme was never simply a course transported into a different setting. Living in the jungle, spending time with Temiar families, taking part in shared activities and learning through relationships were central to the experience. Different cohorts encountered different people and circumstances, but each programme was shaped by the same principle: that place, relationship and participation are part of the learning.
Across the years, students have joined in creative work, weaving, raft making, gabag preparations and other shared activities. The programme has continued because the relationships around it have continued.
From the first cohort
Social Theatre in the Jungle
This short film was made during the first NDP in the Jungle cohort in 2017. It gives a glimpse of the programme in motion and of the mixture of play, participation, place and shared experience around it.
The deeper Temiar Archive follows Sue and Andy’s much longer relationship with Temiar friends and families across more than fifty years. Here, NDP in the Jungle appears for a different reason: as a sustained international learning programme built around repeated return rather than one off delivery.
Selected archive glimpses
Other encounters
Not every international connection needs a full section. Some survive as a photograph, a project page or a fragment of another story. The archive will grow as more material is identified, checked and placed in context.
Sue during the Samadham project, New Delhi, 1999. Photograph: Peter.
Andy with a group in Osaka, Japan, 2004. Photograph: Andy Hickson.
Andy running a workshop in China, 2017. Photograph: unnamed observer.
Sue running a Messy Play workshop in Malaysia, 2016. Photograph: Andy Hickson.
What travelled back
The journey works both ways
International work has never travelled in only one direction.
Methods were adapted. Assumptions were questioned. Friendships developed. Ideas changed as they met different people, professions, communities and ways of working.
Some projects lasted a few days. Others returned over years. Some relationships passed from one generation of practice into another.
The archive records the journeys. The more interesting story may be what changed because of them.