Follow the words, find the sound
Two Creative Central NCL commissions are set to bring poetry, interactive sound and a sense of community and city pride to The Late Shows 2026
For nearly two decades, The Late Shows has invited people to see Newcastle and Gateshead differently - not through daytime routines, but through after-hours exploration.
This year, more than 60 venues will once again open late across May 8 and 9, offering a choose-your-own ‘culture crawl’ through galleries, studios, heritage sites and performance spaces across the Ouseburn (Friday), Newcastle city centre and Gateshead.
Alongside the established programme, in recent years a series of event-specific artist commissions have become part of the mix.
Funded by Creative Central NCL - five-year initiative working to establish a thriving cultural and creative zone in Newcastle city centre - these works are rooted in place, asking artists to respond to the city itself.
For 2026, two commissions in particular offer distinct but complementary ways of experiencing Newcastle: through poetry and through sound.
Performance poet Amy Langdown’s brief was pretty straightforward.
“The commission was to create a poem about creativity… and the importance that creatives and creativity bring to the city,” they explain. “And I was like, well, that’s right up my street. I love that.”
The result is True North, a poetry trail spread across six central locations, including Alphabetti Theatre and Dance City, which both fall in the Creative Central NCL footprint.
Each verse is installed as a standalone piece, designed to be encountered individually as people move through the city. That structural constraint shaped the writing process from the outset.
“Each verse had to work on its own,” says Amy. “So if people only see that verse, it will still make sense.”
At the same time, the poem also exists as a complete work, accessible via QR codes that link to the full text and an audio recording. That dual approach - fragment and whole, text and voice - reflects Amy’s background in performance poetry.
“There’s a whole thing about accessibility with spoken word,” they say. “I think particularly for people as well who aren’t necessarily familiar with poetry… to hear it spoken takes on a whole new dimension - something that might not make sense when you read it does make sense when you hear it.”
Amy says while the commission required careful planning - mapping verses to potential locations and themes - the breakthrough came in a more familiar way.
“I wrote an initial draft, which was pants, so I left it alone for a week and knew no one would ever see it,” they laugh. “Then I went into town to Alphabetti to be in a different space. I shared some ideas out loud with a friend and I knew I had something. And once I had that, it only took a couple of hours to finish it off.”
At its core, True North is a statement about the role of creativity in Newcastle - not as something which is nice to have, but something essential and built in.
“I really think Newcastle is a place for curiosity and for asking questions,” says Amy, who runs a monthly poetry night, Out of Your Head at The Cumberland Arms in Byker. “We’re lucky to be a city that has wonderful fringe venues supporting art that might be ‘too wild’ or ‘too much’ or ‘too strange’ to try elsewhere.”
That sense of collective energy runs throughout the work. The poem speaks to a city that creates its own opportunities.
“There are so many barriers, but also so many people creating too.”
By placing the poem across multiple sites, the piece invites people to build their own route, mirroring the wider Late Shows experience.
If True North maps the city through language, SALT’s Seven Bridges brings it to life through interaction.
Set to be installed at Discovery Museum, the piece is a large-scale sound installation inspired by the Tyne’s seven bridges, and what they represent.
“Rivers divide people, bridges connect them,” the artists who run a recording studio at the top of Westgate Hill, say simply in their description.
That idea becomes literal in the work’s design. Seven ‘bridges’ will be suspended above the main space at the Discovery Museum.
Visitors will be invited to stand on pressure-sensitive pads positioned at either side of each ‘bridge’. When two people activate both sides at the same time, new layers of music are unlocked - strings, brass, choir - gradually building a full composition.
“The artistic idea is that nobody can affect the installation by themselves,” says one half of SALT, Paul Worthington. “It has to be done in community.”
It’s a simple mechanism (spoken like a true layperson!), but one that offers the chance to create moments of connection between strangers - a child and a grandparent, best friends, a couple on a first date, two people who have never met… all brought together through a shared action.
And for anyone doing the maths, you’d need 14 people simultaneously standing on the pressure pads to hear the track in its fullest form.
“You have made a connection with someone else,” says SALT’s other half, Joe Draper. “And when either of you steps off, the element of the composition fades away.”
The project also reflects SALT’s wider ethos as a creative studio focused on collaboration and artist development.
“We’re super passionate about art and artists from the North East,” says Joe. “There’s so much here, and we believe really strongly in helping people find that voice.”
That belief is embedded in Seven Bridges itself. The piece brings together more than 20 collaborators - musicians, singers, artists and technicians - all with a connection to the region.
“We wanted to involve as many people as we could,” Paul explains, “to support artists and reflect the sense of community and shared ownership of the piece.”
Those involved include Aurora Strings, the Welfare Collective, singers Robbie Anderson, Abisola Balogun-Katung and Nathaniel Makarimayi and artist, Marcia Ley.
The music at the heart of the installation has its own story. Originally a fragment recorded by Paul around seven years ago, it found its purpose through the commission.
“It almost feels like there’s a little bit of intention in that story,” he says. “I wrote it about the bridges and about my experience of having to work away - when your heart is here, but the opportunities are somewhere else. It’s about wanting to come back and that idea of a journey home.
“When we landed on the idea of doing something about the bridges, it seemed like a perfect starting point.”
From there, the challenge was both technical and creative: building a composition that works in multiple forms - as a standalone track and as an ever-changing interactive piece.
“You have no idea what combination will be playing at any time,” Paul says. “There will be the stripped back track which will play on a loop, and then the layers will come in as and when people make the connections.
“But every combination needs to work and needs to be rewarding.”
The result will be something that shifts constantly, shaped by the people experiencing it - a collective act of making, rather than a fixed performance.
While the two commissions take very different forms, they share a common purpose: to reflect Newcastle back to itself.
While Amy’s poem highlights the city’s creative identity - its curiosity, its resilience, its DIY spirit, SALT’s installation turns that same idea into an experience, asking people to physically connect in order to create something larger.
Together, they also chime in with the wider ambitions of Creative Central NCL, which aims to support artists and embed creativity within the fabric of the city centre.
Both works are also shaped by the specific conditions of The Late Shows - an event built on movement, discovery and chance encounters.
“It’s a really beautiful thing,” Amy says of the long-running cultural event. “You can just go to a comedy event, then come around the corner and hear a poem… then there’s a workshop or a theatre performance. I think it’s spectacular.”
The Late Shows take place on the evenings of May 8 (Ouseburn only) and May 9 (Newcastle and Gateshead). You can see Amy Langdown’s poem, True North projected onto six sites in Newcastle city centre (remember to look out for the QR code to read and hear the whole thing as it was written). SALT’s Seven Bridges will be installed at the Discovery Museum. You can hear the track on Spotify here.
For the full Late Shows programme, visit thelateshows.org.uk
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