From 2006ish until 2020, FF made work under the name fanSHEN.

If you scroll down, you can see some of the projects we made during that time. Although different in form to what we make now, these projects are FF’s foundations, through which we developed our process, met people who continue to be our collaborators today, and encountered the ideas which still inspire our work.

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Why change the name?

In March 2020, we changed our name, issuing this statement:

For over ten years, we’ve been creating work as fanSHEN. We’re changing our name - here’s why.

Fanshen is a Mandarin word. You probably wouldn’t know from how we say it, because we don’t speak Mandarin. We don’t have any links to China. A decade ago when we chose it, we liked the sound of the word and the meaning - a motion of turning. That doesn’t feel right any more. It feels like cultural appropriation. When East Asian artists are still massively underrepresented in UK theatre, what is a company led by white people from the south of England doing with this name?

Fanshen is also the name of a play which created through a process which put a playwright within the devising process. Back in the late 2000s, things felt far more silo-ed than they are now: new writing was incisive and political and devised work was visual and dynamic. We wanted our work to be all those things - giving our company a name with a nod to that felt hopeful and ambitious.

But the director of that play, Fanshen, was Max Stafford-Clark. Until recently, he was one of the most celebrated British directors - former artistic director of the Traverse and the Royal Court, commissioning plays by incredible artists like Caryl Churchill. Like a lot of people in theatre, we’d heard rumours about his predatory behaviour. In 2017, five women made complaints of sexual harassment. We began to think differently about this process that we’d previously been inspired by. Maybe it hadn’t been a supportive and collaborative atmosphere. Maybe there had been women in that room who had been frightened, or worse. Every time I said the company’s name, I thought about them.

Changing a company’s name is a risk, especially if -like us- you’re at the point where some people are beginning to have heard of us. But back in 2008, we made a bad choice. Everyone makes bad choices sometimes but we have the opportunity to change that now. We’re not ok with having a name that perpetuates a colonising and misogynist mindset. We’d prefer to take a risk than that. Sure, we’re not Colston Hall and we’re not kidding ourselves that we’re super well-known or anything. But we all need to sort out our own patch, make things better in the small ways we can.

So we are now Fast Familiar. Why? For us, art is a space to ask questions which are too complex or overwhelming for daily life. Often that’s about creating ways of reflecting on things we just don’t have time to think about - because life moves too fast for us to consider, ‘am I ok with that?’ or ‘what am I complicit in if I do this?’ or ‘what do I really think?’ Things are normalised so quickly, without us having had the time to think them through: a lot of our work is about problematising the fast familiar.

It’s also a design principle for us. Much of the work we make is audience-centric, it involves people doing stuff or making decisions. This can be exposing for those people. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can care for our audiences and create environments which feel intuitive quickly. This is especially true of work using technology - which can be intimidating for some people. One of our favourite pieces of feedback about The Justice Syndicate was when a woman told us she’d forgotten she had an iPad - the device through which everything in the show is mediated.

Lastly (and not leastly) a fast familiar could be a magical panther, like one of Philip Pullman’s daemons. Who wouldn’t want one of them?!