FEATURE Nov 2025 Creating Connections: Intimate Portraits and Difficult Conversations
An insight into the 'Turning Point’ project created by Sweet Patootee Arts
Marjorie H Morgan
Sweet Patootee Arts, Editing new film CORNWALLIS CLOTH , 26 September 2025 – Photo by Rebecca Goldstone
Writer Marjorie H Morgan caught up with Tony T from London-based arts and heritage organisation Sweet Patootee Arts, which he co-founded in 2017 with Rebecca Goldstone, and discussed all aspects of their mission, process and programming, from the creation of educational material to establishment of support networks and cross-generational collaboration in the following feature. Sweet Patootee Arts makes high-quality films and heritage projects drawing on oral testimonies and archive resources. Their films are then used for public engagement in museums, galleries, learning establishments, community hubs, and online, generating inclusive storytelling in order to amplify the voices of diverse communities whose experiences have often been ignored.
This is not a preview or a review, this is an invitation to be a part of an evolving series of works that are being created by the non-profit organisation Sweet Patootee Arts founded in 2017. The way into this adventure is through the ongoing presentation of the current 'Turning Point' project.
Tony Thompson (known as Tony T) is the co-founder and CEO / Artistic Director at London-based Sweet Patootee Arts; he works alongside his co-founder Rebecca Goldstone. Together they are currently spearheading a multifaceted arts and heritage project called 'Turning Point' that is developing across the UK.
'Turning Point' is a new research-based video installation that consists of a collection of four stories, from 1920s Barbados and Jamaica, that are presented as comedy melodramas. The selected stories address historical, political, and social themes, and are used as vehicles for the touring programme of heritage workshops that create spaces for new and continuing conversations across the length and breadth of the UK.
This work is focused on being participatory, providing public benefit, and offering learning opportunities. Participation is key in this new work, from the development, the making, and through to the performance and sharing aspects of 'Turning Point'; each step involves testing and developing the practice to suit the target audience groups.
To achieve these aims the 'Turning Point' programme offers vital skills in heritage research in the field of oral history, and provides culturally appropriate dementia support activities, alongside opportunities to engage in Caribbean folk singing, sewing skills and dance workshops in various locations around the UK. This wide-reaching vibrant project runs until January 2026.
In a recent conversation with Tony T, I asked him to explain the mission behind the 'Turning Point' project. To do this he suggested we first talk about the Sweet Patootee organisation and its ethos.
The two co-founders, Thompson and Goldstone, have worked together for around 30 years, and as the Sweet Patootee organisation has developed, they have scaled up their organisation to work with multiple project partners. An important aspect of the original Sweet Patootee mission that has never altered is the determination and desire to tell stories, the aspiration to enjoy the process of making stories, and for all project partners to also enjoy the collaborative process.
'Turning Point' is essentially a gateway designed to meet people where they are and open up the avenues of new and old conversations. The public engagement aspect of the project is an act of further collaboration, where physical and emotional space is made – like a democratic town hall of old – and people get a chance to share their views, offer suggestions, while Sweet Patootee Arts engages in active listening in order to learn, and often, further mould the work for other audiences.
The project offerings can be described as based on the traditional ‘Call and Response’ mode of interaction that is rooted in many African and Caribbean societies.
Tony T has a background in education, and it was this environment that proved instrumental in his change of direction into the arts and the start of this subsequent collaboration with Rebecca Goldstone - who had similar experiences, that aligned them as working partners in Sweet Patootee.
While working with teachers to develop resources and curricula they were aware of the landmark TV event British Heritage Storytelling called the People’s Century (1995 -1997) that used oral history storytelling which was unironically referred to in educational circles as “The white People’s Century”. This prompted Tony T to look at the blatant exclusion of Black people’s stories in this documentary, and the overlooked opportunity to better understand the experience of all aspects of British society at the end of the 20th century.
Throughout its history, Sweet Patootee has focused on telling stories through creating art, and equally as importantly, through creating resources to develop and extend the skills of people in communities nationwide. Sweet Patootee Arts aims to create content to inspire, educate, and include six target audiences: Schools (12-17), Young People (17-30), Elders, Dementia Support, mainstream arts and heritage, and the general public. This means the organisation is committed to working with different organisations who form the bridges to the audiences that Sweet Patootee Arts is focused on reaching. This is a tried and trusted method of building networks that have contributed to gathering the oral testimonies that were used as the basis of the 'Turning Point' film installation.
Tony T sees these connections as priceless because of the networks, relationships, and research chains that they construct through contact. This has involved financing journeys to the Caribbean to obtain firsthand oral histories and provide support networks for the survivors of the research period timeline.
Sweet Patootee Arts now specialises in oral history, producing quality media, and interpreting heritage. These outputs are achieved through meticulous research and shared by community members as well as artists of the highest quality, like Paterson Joseph and Suzette Llewellyn who each appear in a 'Turning Point' film.
Sweet Patootee Arts, Still from “Beulah’s Story”, Newham Windrush Day 2025 TURNING POINT screening at the Gate Library – Photo Sweet Patootee Arts
The current touring project, 'Turning Point', started with an R&D phase in 2018 and has continued to evolve over the past seven years. Tony T enthusiastically noted that the project was initially devised as a vehicle to explore and share vital aspects of the Caribbean experience at the turn of the 20th century using the forms of comedy and melodrama, and create work that could be expressed flexibly in different media thereby bringing diversity to the mainstream of society as a celebration of the people depicted in the stories.
This use of comedy and melodrama is not an accidental or incidental choice, as humour and carnival are essential elements of traditional Caribbean societies. Tony T further explained that Sweet Patootee Arts’ mission is to share the stories of ordinary people to continue to raise Black consciousness and enhance Black cohesiveness, thereby providing the opportunities for Black communities to better understand their own stories, and the history behind their global positioning – relating to factors including enforced migration through slavery and capitalism of the Western societies.
Tony T believes that everybody has a story to tell, and the benefits of telling one’s own stories increases personal well-being, is invariably transformative, and he says this has especially been evident in the dementia support groups where culturally relevant practices and resources have been shown to have significant benefits to the participant groups.
The video installation aspect of 'Turning Point' consists of four films that portrays four distinct stories which have been distilled from the direct collected oral testimonies of ordinary people: people trapped in extreme poverty, and those frequently socially excluded at the bottom of society. These sources were combined to create single main characters in the four-story thread.
The coherent theme that connects these stories is that it is ordinary people who change society when they unite together, as evidenced by the movements led by spokespeople like Marcus Garvey and Norman Manley. All the source information for the Sweet Patootee Arts stories is the product of diligent academic research, mixed with the irreverent humour often found in the Caribbean; this provides a perfect vehicle to access and interpret the experiences in other people’s worlds.
These Caribbean stories help to uplift people in the present, to aid them to understand their past and where they have come from, and simultaneously to enable them to build a firm foundation for their future destination; it is important to note that these elements are not present in the USA Black experience that is predominant in the Black History shared in UK schools and public arts programming.
The process that Sweet Patootee Arts follows is akin to the work of US portrait artist Kehinde Wiley who takes individuals, usually Black subjects, and renders them in beautiful intimate portraits in what can be considered unusual surroundings while they are in heroic poses, and set in the classical styles of Old Masters paintings.
In 2021 Sweet Patootee Arts worked with the Schools History Project to create lesson plans linked to the ‘Turning Point’ project. These resources were developed over a three-year period and are now being shared in schools nationwide to teach more about the decolonisation of history and the global legacies of slavery.
Sweet Patootee Arts has grown, from its establishment as Sweet Patootee in the 1990s to be a collective of arts practitioners, technicians and consultants who have been partners in many projects for 30 years when their primary remit was producing factual museum content or documentary style projects.
The Sweet Patootee Arts public programme that comes under the umbrella of ‘Turning Point’, has produced Black cultural heritage activities and events in cities across the UK including London, Liverpool, and Birmingham.
Sweet Patootee Arts, Still from “Cedric’s Story”, Newham Windrush Day 2025 TURNING POINT screening at the Gate Library – Photo Sweet Patootee Arts
In Bristol, the starting point of the tour, there was an exhibition and a public engagement programme using local partners; this model was repeated in Liverpool in May 2023, where collaborators The School History Project worked with Sweet Patootee Arts to encourage Liverpool teachers, and pupils to use the gallery and online exhibitions to explore the uncovered history, its legacies, and investigate areas of personal resonance. Another regional collaborator with Sweet Patootee Arts was Alicia Smith from Culture Liverpool who further encouraged dance as an element of the public engagement creative activities for the 'Turning Point' project.
Sweet Patootee Arts, Hibiscus Community Centre dancers perform at Sadler’s Wells East for ‘Get Into Dance’ - Photo Sylvia Belbouab
Tony T concurred with the idea that one of the public engagement activities could be a dance workshop inspired by any of the 'Turning Point' stories. This was implemented on the next legs of the project’s national tour.
The third city visited was Birmingham (2024), and 2025 has been a period of London-based touring and activities in the capital city.
In Birmingham, there was a Caribbean Folk Singing workshop series in collaboration with Abigail Kelly, and a dance and music workshop for young people in conjunction with locally based ACE Dance and Music - a national and international touring company.
Dance has also been a key element in the London productions of the project: at various locations, including Woolwich Tramshed, where there have been a Caribbean Dance Workshop with Sadler Wells, a day of sharing Caribbean Folk Song, and Dementia Support Workshops; while at Fulham Palace there was a Caribbean Dance Workshops with DanceWest. These workshops are complemented by other events like the ‘Sunday Best’ Heritage Research and Sewing workshop series held as part of the Newham Windrush Days celebrations.
The installations and workshops are available both online and at various London venues until the end of January 2026.
On 01 August 2025, an Emancipation Day event, described by Tony T as an “arts and heritage feast” took place in Woolwich, following 12 weeks of rehearsals and workshops with two project partners: Caribbean Social Forum and EthnoVox. The workshops, led by CeCelia Wickham Anderson and Colin Anderson from EthnoVox, engaged with members of the Caribbean Social Forum to create a new choir who produced powerful performances at the Emancipation Day event.
The Caribbean Social Forum is a weekly community group who have been meeting for the past decade, and are based at the Tramshed, Woolwich; this group of people aged 50+ is over 600 strong and find that regular meetings help with sharing and learning from each other while also combating isolation and allowing participants to recall ‘a taste of the Caribbean’ with the tools of various targeted activities such as educational talks, dancing, music, singing, discussion groups, writing activities and much more.
Fortunately, for those not able to be there as part of the live event on 01 August 2025, the whole event was recorded and will soon be available on the Sweet Patootee Arts website.
Sweet Patootee Arts, Exodus Crooks Deck of Defiance Workshop for TURNING POINT project at The GAP arts project, in Birmingham – Photo by Ella Marshall
Sweet Patootee Arts has constantly engaged with groups who are frequently marginalised in British society, like excluded school children whose input has proven, in some cases, more valuable to incorporate in the project deliverables than those who are regular participants in cultural activities. These focus groups repeat that they want stories that reflect them, and their experiences from a Black British perspective, and Sweet Patootee Arts, through the vehicle of 'Turning Point', is continuing to work towards achieving that goal.
Sweet Patootee Arts now have a Dementia Working Group as part of their organisation with specialists in practice, communities, and universities, these individuals test the work created by Sweet Patootee Arts for use within their communities in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London.
These combined works of the 'Turning Point' project are an opportunity to understand, and have empathy with the history of a people at a pivotal 'Turning Point' in time - it is an ideal chance for a new look at the sometimes hidden and silenced stories of a people. In this respect the umbrella of Sweet Patootee Arts is akin to pioneering gold prospectors going into unknown territories to find the nuggets, some known, others deliberately hidden, that are of immense consequence and present an opportunity to ‘right old wrongs’ when these buried stories are unearthed and shared, achieving a sense of justice, albeit delayed justice. Tony T enthusiastically stated that it is a “pleasure and a privilege” to create the work.
Before these offerings from Sweet Patootee Arts, the networks that they interact with responded to their queries with the belief that nothing significant happened in the Caribbean in WWII, they also believed that neither was there significant participation from the region in WWI - the facts and presentation of these stories will prove that long held belief and standard British education as incorrect.
These stories shed a light on the ordinary social experience of peoples of the Caribbean at that significant ‘Turning Point’ in time.
After being immersed in the experience of the 'Turning Point' project I spent time reflecting on this wide-ranging art package, and I knew it had enriched me and changed me on a cellular level. I also realised that this art is alive, and I whispered back to the people I had observed, "I see you, I hear you, I understand more."
Sweet Patootee Arts takes neglected stories and puts them centre stage. A prime example is the lyrics of Calypso songs that spoke about Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill, but these sources of information were often ignored. Calypsonians, frequently from Trinidad and Tobago like The Mighty Destroyer and Lord Kitchener, often served as news commentators, chronicling world events and local reactions to them.
Through the lens of precise academic historical research linked with oral history records, Sweet Patootee Arts continue to present a remarkable reinterpretation of the particular stories of peoples of the British Caribbean. Along the way they have captured the attention of practitioners from several fields, including dance, history, and demential health and wellbeing, and education.
The collaboration of the network with Sweet Patootee Arts’ reach has continued to produce exceptionally crafted works as a result of a deep exploration of Black identity and representation. These works are both politically conscious and personally important to the audiences they continue to reach: they are creating connections between and within cultures so that important and necessary conversations can take place.
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