Before founding DAUR, Mydd was a central creative force within Wildworks for 19 years, from 2005 to 2024, contributing to and creating every production during that period as designer, director and core theatre-maker. He helped pioneer the company’s groundbreaking approach to large-scale, place-based performance, placing community collaboration at the heart of bold artistic work.
His portfolio includes landmark productions such as The Passion in Port Talbot with Michael Sheen; Enchanted Palace at Kensington Palace; Wolf’s Child; I AM KEVIN (both the live production and feature film Cinema release); and Stranger Beasts — work spanning epic community performance, immersive installation and cross-disciplinary storytelling.
From 2020 to 2024, he served as Artistic Director of Wild Works, leading the organisation through a period of significant artistic ambition and delivering the ‘We Are Shining’ programme through The Good Growth Shared Prosperity funding – combining large-scale artistic vision with deep community engagement.
That chapter is now complete.
Mydd Pharo – Artistic Director
DAUR is led by Mydd Pharo – Director, designer and theatre-maker with over 25 years of experience creating ambitious, site-responsive/specific and immersive work across the UK and internationally.
Mydd has made work with leading organisations including Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe, alongside major festivals, arts organisations and landmark venues. His practice spans large-scale landscape spectacles, intimate performance, community collaborations and ambitious cross-disciplinary productions.
DAUR builds on that experience but is not defined by it.
Here, Mydd brings decades of directing, designing and pioneering collaborative practice into a new interdisciplinary company rooted in courage, experimentation and radical kindness. The scale remains. The ambition deepens. The form continues to evolve.
DAUR is the next body of work, shaped by experience, driven by curiosity, and focused on what has not yet been made. An invitation to alchemise courage, wonder and imagination into works that genuinely feel unlike anything else.
Mydd is energised by the opportunity to build this new body of work with trusted collaborators developed over decades, while actively inviting new artists and perspectives to shape this next body of work.
Mud, Myth & Making
Wherever I am, cliff edge, rehearsal room, car park, quarry, cathedral, stood in the rain, I try to make space.
Space for people.
Space for feeling.
Space for the world to become a little more possible.
I practise courageous play.
I work with care.
I trust strangers quickly.
I believe kindness is foundational.
Collaborative to the bone, visually led, neurodivergent shaped, working-class rooted and quietly queer,
I build worlds rather than shows, gatherings rather than productions.
I chase the moment when a place remembers it is alive.
I come from story, council estates and old magic living side by side.
My brain runs diagonally (autistic, ADHD, dyslexic), so I rarely move in straight theatrical lines.
Instead I circle, collect, listen, walk, cook, build fires, talk to communities and wait for landscapes to answer back.
I am drawn to mud, ritual, weather, memory, myth, belonging, ghosts, softness, spectacle, care, joy and grief,
especially with people who didn’t think theatre was for them.
For decades I’ve made work on beaches, in mines, across towns, in homes, in the cold, sometimes in the rain at 4am with a choir of strangers. I’ve learned the epic can be made from the intimate, and that communities are not participants but authors.
A story becomes true when many people carry it.
Now I make work through DAUR, a dare toward courage, experimentation, radical kindness and imagining otherwise, building shared experiences that find their own language as they unfold.
My practice is sculptural and emotional. I think in images:
a procession across water
mirrors in a storm
milk poured onto the earth at dusk
a bonfire reflected in empty windows
unspeakable words surrendered to the unseen
This is where the work arrives.
I am drawn to edges, land and sea, ancient and contemporary, spectacle and tenderness, community and solitude, the mundane and the mythic.
I want audiences to feel they haven’t watched something, but lived through it. Like ritual.
I am trying to make theatre that behaves like weather, uncontrollable, shared, sometimes frightening, often beautiful and impossible to own.
Work that lets us rehearse being human – Softly, Bravely, Together.
