Pure Imagination is a storytelling collective spanning puppetry, music, theatre and art. Born out of extravagant cabaret nights across London, we champion the potential of collective creativity through radical imagination and audience interaction.
We are passionate about accessibility to the arts and empowering underrepresented voices through our unique storytelling. Drawing on rich folk tradition and mythology, we seek to highlight the surrealism and absurdity of life to help people reconnect with and appreciate their environment.
PURE IMAGINATION
THE TEAM
T H E B E A R
Mallika Joy
Mallika is a costume, puppet and performance maker and has collaborated extensively across cabaret, theatre and puppetry. Credits include The Almeida, Little Angel Theatre, SAVVY Theatre, Shambala Festival, Sadlers Welles and The Big House. Mallika also works as a facilitator for creative workshops and is passionate about the potential of creativity for community building, wellness and radical imagination and silliness in envisioning alternative futures.
T H E J E S T E R
Will Pegler
Will Pegler leads a double life. By day, he uses his years of workshop experience to manufacture and construct stages and art installations at various festivals around the world; by night, he composes, records and produces music under various monikers.
Driven by the old adage 'variety is the spice of life', he is as at home on a building site as he is performing improvised medieval dance music as a member of the inimitable Merry Men. His back catalogue is a celebration of contrast, evidence that there is no sample too strange, no concept too obscure and no lyric too close to the bone in the pursuit of creative satisfaction.
T H E R A V E N
Kat Pegler
Kat is a multidisciplinary artist, musician + producer with a focus on creating works that connect people with the climate emergency in new ways. She runs Kerbside Collective, which explores the intersection of art and sustainability through a global-lens, and is co-founder of Leo, an award-winning reading platform for neurodiverse people in the creative sector.
Recent works include Ivor Novello nominated Estuary Sound Ark, with recent exhibitions across sounds and arts spaces in Europe, and her climate arts research being presented in Canada. She is part of the Space Ecologies Arts and Design Network, CLEA's ArtScience community, OutdoorArts 2023 Cohort and is climate ambassador for Climate Outreach.
Kat is a Morris dancer with the Belles of London, and enjoys creating drone harmonies with the caws of the crows.
T H E A L C H E M I S T
Ted O'Shea
Ted is one of Pure Imagination’s very own Merry Men, joining the band as a songwriter, performer and musician.
Ted is a first class Phytology graduate who spent most of university skipping genetic-biotech lectures in favour of performing in pantos and writing absurd, anarchic comedy. Now he splits his broad interests from ecology to the esoteric between Logic Pro X and bic pens, utilising his abilities as a writer, multi instrumentalist, performer and music producer.
He is currently writing his first novel, the absurd and maximalist ‘Highway Vonnegut’. His previous projects include: a TEDx talk “why plants are the future”, writing an original pantomime adaptation of Snow White, lead actor in the short film GAURANGA, acting in numerous pantomimes (predominantly as the love interest, a fact he never brings up), hosting a comedy radio show, producing and writing educational music for children, sound designer in an avant musical and performer in an improv comedy troupe.
T H E H I G H W A Y M A N
Jack Hoban
Jack Hoban is a sound, performance and visual artist, writer, actor, musique concreteist, painter, occultist and casual martial arts practitioner. Incorporating and exploring elements relating too surrealism, absurdism, magical thinking, dada-ism and discordianism.
His versatile skill-set ranges from acting roles in obscure short films, appearing in Gucci campaigns, collaborating on experimental literature projects with the likes of comedian Duncan Trussell and composing scores for commercial high fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton and Calvin Klein.
Jack will gladly throw himself into almost any creative exploit with enthusiasm however he is by his own admission, a pretty terrible dancer.
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T H E S A G E
Jordana Belaiche
Jordana Belaiche is a British-Algerian writer and performer who trained as a dramaturg at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on the MA Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy course and at SOAS, University of London. Jordana began writing for stage in 2017, when their first play Knowledge is Power won the Best New Writing prize at the London Student Drama Festival and went on to receive a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the same year.
Since then, their work has been received in several London theatres including the Pleasance, the Courtyard, the Almeida and the Golden Goose. Performing credits include: Little Lord Fondleroy (The Space), Abigail's Adventures in Boston (Theatre Deli), Blue Eyed Hag (Almeida), Common as Muck (Ivy House) Billy Bonker and the Everlasting Knobthrobber (Bonkers Bar), W*nkers (Theatre Deli), Bulldogs (Edinburgh Fringe), Mary Poppins (Prince Edward), Les Miserables (Sondheim), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Palladium).