The Auxiliary

🔊 welcomes Bob Beagrie, Aisha Lama, Everwitch & 3-Minute-Arts 🎶

A day of local tales, theatre, epic poetry and extra-fun folk music. This programme brings together performers from up and down the railway and river celebrating local artists and heritage.

3-Minute Arts present Ironstone Tales - a new short play dramatising real and imagined events during the rise and fall of Glaisdale’s ironstone industry with music and soundscape.

Everwitch brings Bomb Happy: Smudger’s Story, a WW2 and mental health themed spoken word & song performance that uses first-hand verbatim testimony of D-Day Veteran Ken Smith and his widow Gloria Smith to tell the story of his D-Day and other WW2 experiences and its impact on his mental health and marriage through the lens of lifelong sleep trauma.

Acclaimed local poet Bob Beagrie, and composer and musician Stewart Forth, perform poems from The Hand of Glory: a biography - an absurd narrative relating the adventures and exploits of the infamous mummified and supposedly enchanted human hand currently displayed in Whitby Museum.

Aisha Lama brings her distinctive spoken word exploring nature, love, loss and identity. And if this isn’t enough to fill your ears, the amazing young musicians of M@THOT (Music at the Heart of Teesdale) perform their own arrangements of local folk melodies and songs.

Proudly supported by TransPennine Express and Esk Valley, The Middlesbrough Storytelling Festival and Middlesbrough Council.

📍 Middlesbrough Train Station
🗓 Sat 27 June
⏰ 11:30am - 3:30pm

🔗 Find out more about Sonic Arts Week 2026 on our site:



We are Middlesbrough

🌱 workshop: Foraging For Stories with Carmen Marcus & Grace Stubbings 🔊

Foraging For Stories is an exploratory workshop inviting young people to connect with nature through words, sound, and sensory experience. Guided along a sensory trail, participants will respond to creative prompts, experiment with writing, and take part in deep listening activities using microphones. Together, they’ll create a “word journey,” where individual contributions come together to form a shared piece. As part of the wider Foraging For Stories project, voices and sounds gathered during the workshop will contribute to a larger audio experience exploring the ecology of Teesside.

This workshop offers a space to slow down, notice, imagine, and create in response to the environment around us.

This workshop is for people aged 11-16 years old.

📍 The Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough
🗓 Wed 1 July
⏰ 5pm - 7pm

🎟️ This is a free ticketed event, sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/foraging-for-stories-tickets-1990393233742

🔊 welcomes We Make Sound 🎵

Through their songs, soundscapes and radio interviews, We Make Sound tell local stories, explore new ideas and express themselves creatively, these projects are then broadcast and exhibited across the region. We Make Sound has featured on BBC Radio Tees, Sonic Arts Week, Wintertide Festival and Hartlepool Carnival. The project leaders are highly experienced professional musicians. We Make Sound meets at The Studio in Hartlepool.

Inspired by all the Sonic Arts Week artists and performers? Come and make your own sounds at this drop-in workshop with We Make Sound. You don’t need any previous experience - our friendly team will get you making your own fun sounds in no time. Listen in headphones or join in with others, WMS will introduce you to different easy-to-use sound and music making machines and technology. Have a go, have fun and find your inner sound artist.

Suitable for ages 8 and above.

Proudly supported by Borderlands.

📍 Captain Cook Square (Next to Waterstones), Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 27 June & Sat 4 July
⏰ 11am - 4pm

🔗 Find out more about Sonic Arts Week 2026 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🔊 welcomes Experimental Sonic Machines 🤖

Experimental Sonic Machines is Peter K Rollings & Ernie the robot drummer, based in Lincoln UK. It started in 2010 with performances at open mics using homemade instruments & costumes & has progressed to machines that play paper discs to create original basslines & rhythms. To this, he plays a single-string guitar made from oak from a skip, & old keyboards given to him, & the WUI (Wind-Up Instrument) that has a homemade generator on it such that it doesn't need a battery.

📍Former House of Fraser 37 Linthorpe Rd, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 27 June
⏰ 12pm - 12:30pm & 1:30pm - 2pm

🔗 See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🎶 welcomes Jack Supertramp 🎶

Welcome to the world of Jack Supertramp, a street performer and live looping guitarist known for his playful pedalboard packed with an array of wonderful sounds. He explores a wide range of genres, including but not limited to drum and bass, hip hop, house, and UK garage. Oh, and sometimes he’s in a gorilla suit.

📍 Former House of Fraser, 37 Linthorpe Rd, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 4 July
⏰ 11am, 12pm & 3pm

🔗 See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🌱 x Common Ground Sound 🌱

Common Ground Sound has been developed during the Common Ground programme in collaboration with participants from across Middlesbrough. Recordings made at Saturday sessions, Creative Community Meals and at special events with the Creative Minds group at Newport Community Hub, have been compiled into two unique sound pieces.

Firstly, the story of Common Ground, a community food growing initiative being developed at The Auxiliary, and secondly, food stories developed by the women of Creative Minds with Teesside storyteller Rumana Yasmine. Sound artist Nell Catchpole has worked across Common Ground Sound capturing the sounds, stories and ideas of the Middlesbrough Community. Alongside the sound pieces sits a series of photographs captured during the Creative Minds meetings by photographer Rachel Deakin.

📍 The Auxiliary Project Space, 31 Station Street, Middlesbrough
🗓 Fri 26 June - Sat 4 July (closed Mon)
⏱️ 10am - 3pm

🔗 See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🗣️ welcomes Me Lost Me & TUAIM 🎶

Me Lost Me delights in experimenting with songwriting, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre. The Project of Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent who takes influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music, her work has been described in The Guardian as "stripping folk back to its bones while letting its future echoes bleed out". With her prolific writing and extensive touring schedule, her unique sound has won much support across the musical spectrum.

Translated from Irish as “sounds that occur in nature”, TUAIM is a new solo project by neuro-queer artist and musician Rupert Philbrick - a performative thesis exploring the resonance and vibrations through which all sound is experienced. Improvised live performances weave together drones, field recording, guitar and voice to create soundscapes that transport the listener into an uncanny realm, aiming to bridge the gaps between the ambient, experimental & electronic music they have absorbed since their teens, and the folk and traditional music that has become an integral part of their artistic / teaching practice over the past 10 years.

📍 Captain Cook Square, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 4 July
Me Lost Me: 1pm - 1:30pm & 2:30pm - 3pm
TUAIM: 12:30pm - 1pm & 2pm - 2:30pm

🔗 See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🎷 welcomes Izzy Neish 🎶

Izzy is a trained actor-musician from Stockton-on-Tees. Having graduated from Rose Bruford in 2020, she has been working professionally on stage at theatres including Liverpool’s Royal Court, Theatr Clwyd, The Barn, The Pleasance, The National and Oxford Playhouse. She is also a skilled musician, with professional credits playing clarinet, keys, sax, bass and guitar. She released her debut single, Starlings, in 2021 and is currently recording more original music.

📍 Roaming around Captain Cook Square, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 4 July
⏰ 12:45pm - 1:30pm & 3:30pm - 4pm

🔗 Find out more on our website: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/

🎼 welcomes Music at the Heart of Teesdale 🎶

M@HoT was established in 2011 to research and revive the lost folk music and dance traditions of the Durham Dales, unearthing over 250 tunes, songs and dances that highlights the wealth of our regional cultural heritage.

Through their dedicated work with young people in SW Durham, M@HoT have brought new life into the music they share - establishing 3 youth folk bands, encouraging young people’s potential to explore their heritage, develop a sense of place and ideas of home through access to music making opportunities.

M@HoT also creates opportunities for artists and community groups to co-create work together, delivering artists commissions and partnership work with cultural institutions, heritage sites and local schools; and hosting a wide range of public concerts, ceilidhs and music masterclasses suitable for all ages and stages.

📍 Former House of Fraser, 37 Linthorpe Rd, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 27 June
⏰ 1pm - 1:30pm

🔗See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/saw-artists-26

🎶 welcomes Jasmine Padgett & Jorge Boehringer 🎵

Jasmine Padgett is an experimental human person who is capable of many things. She finds herself in this present moment, on a curious quest to find ways of expelling imaginary sounds from her internal world outwards into the external world, for other human persons to consider, muse upon and possibly enjoy.

Jorge Boehringer is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, performer, and researcher based in Newcastle Tyne, UK. His practice spans environments, ensemble music, spatial audio, performance, text, and art, using sound to explore attention, instability, temporality, and ecology. He performs solo as Core of the Coalman, releases music as On Growth and Form, and collaborates in Kneeling Coats with Eleanor Cully.

Proudly supported by Kiwi Trading, Hartlepool.

📍 Outside former House of Fraser, 37 Linthorpe Rd, Middlesbrough
🗓 Sat 27 July
⏰ 11:00am - 12:00pm & 2:00pm - 3:00pm

🔗 See the full lineup for SAW26 on our site: https://www.sonicartsweek.com/saw-artists-26