30 Years of Fevered Sleep
Inamorata. 1996.
Sam & David by Camilla Greenwell, 2026
How on earth do we go about marking 30 years of being Fevered Sleep?
We’ve been talking about it for a year, it’s been an agenda item at company meetings since June 2025, flagged again and again in the closing minutes around the meeting table as we race to finish discussing the most pressing matters, and so, each month, kicked further down the line. Now, it’s June and we can’t kick it any further down the line, and so, I’m writing a blogpost.
We have wondered if anyone else actually cares about these kinds of milestones, apart from us. When you’re living it, everything feels really intense all the time. Every new direction becomes a turning point, every bit of funding a huge relief, each time someone supports a project we’re elated, each time someone hates our work, a little bit bruised. Every strategised year ahead exciting and daunting in equal measure. The years ahead have just kept coming and coming and we’ve barely thought to look over our shoulder at where we’ve come from. We never dared to imagine still being here.
All of this for 30 years is so many ups and so many downs.
30 years of running an arts company is definitely something to celebrate, and we are very aware that our existence is almost miraculous standing in a landscape amongst our peers, where artists and small arts companies, as well as our friends in big venues and large-scale festivals still struggle just to survive, let alone manage to make the work they exist to make. But somehow as the date approaches us head on - and in fact as I write this, the significant date, 17th June is tomorrow - we still never quite landed on what or how the big day should be.
Let’s have a big party and invite everyone whose paths crossed ours since we began. (David loves a party. Sam hates parties)
Let’s go on a walk which starts at Riverside studios in London, the venue for our first show, and let’s visit all the significant places we’ve worked in across the years, ending back at our ‘home’ in Bethnal Green. (Lovely idea, now how are we going to raise funds for a birthday journey that starts and ends in London but stops off at Sydney Opera House, Taiwan, Hong Kong etc etc?)
Let’s climb a mountain - in the UK - and invite all the people… as above and have a picnic at the summit.
Let’s dress up as crows and carry a door from BAC, where we started out, to St Margaret’s House, where we’re based now. We’ll invite all the people…as above, to meet us and carry the door part of the way. (Very strange, but it does make sense if you know our first show, ‘Inamorata’. Also, great for socials).
Let’s go out for a celebratory dinner, you and me and the team.
Let’s go out for dinner, just you and me.
Let’s just grab a quick cocktail after work?
I think I know the reason we’ve not found the ‘right’ good idea - which is funny, because our job is landing on good ideas. Fevered Sleep the company, is not just our job, at this point in the timeline, if we allow ourselves to look behind us, it’s been our whole adult lives. The company, the work, the art, the ideas, the collaborations, the partnerships are entirely intertwined with our lives. Ours, David and Sam. Though we have long term company members who we love and who have been instrumental in nurturing it (us?) and who’ve navigated the twists and turns the company and our work has taken with us, it’s only ever been us two at the centre these 30 years. I can’t put my finger on the moment the company no longer felt like a separate entity, but at some point, many years ago, I knew we three, Fevered Sleep, David and I, all started to share the same root system.
And it’s a rare thing indeed to have maintained a deep friendship alongside the running of a company and the conceiving of manifold artworks. You know how work relationships go, they’re hard, and how friendships can be, sometimes really complicated. We’ve both had our fair share of major life events, from the exhilarating, to the mundane, to the catastrophic. Though in recent years we are usually at different ends of the country; David can be found walking somewhere up in the Yorkshire countryside, whilst I’m hanging out on the shoreline of Hastings. Yet somehow, SOMEHOW you’ll find us both still together in the same place, standing side by side as the co founders and co artistic directors of Fevered Sleep, and as friends.