Board

Dymphna Callery (director)

Dymphna's theatre credits include Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Edna O’Brien’s Virginia, together with original plays Olywyn: For One Woman and Cello, Skinning the Hare, and stage adaptations of Thérèse Raquin and Women In Love. She has a Masters Degree in Writing Studies and her poetry collection What She Said and What She Did was published in 1996. She moved to Wolverhampton in 2000 from Liverpool, and teaches on the Drama and Performance degree at the university. Her book Through The Body, a practical guide to physical theatre, was the first in this field and sells well globally. She is developing a new book on devising with colleagues at the university. Dymphna was introduced to Foursight's board through Kate Hale. Her major theatrical interests are physical theatre and playwriting - hence her particular interest in Foursight’s work. She has given up other board memberships (including Total Theatre) to stay with Foursight because it’s such good fun!

Preya Chauhan (director)

Preya's experiences of the arts began aged 4, performing folk dances at her local temple.  Guided by strong, intelligent women (including her mother and dance teacher) she joined a dance company; and from that point, was hooked!

After completing university she was accepted on a Fast Track ITC Arts Management training course, and enjoyed a placement at Birmingham Rep working on audience development. She worked freelance in community arts before being selected by the Channel 4 Researchers Training Scheme, after which she worked with BskyB, Channel 5 and the award-winning BBC2 Arts and Culture show Desi DNA.

Preya has worked with many fantastic people and organisations, set up education projects, and worked in events management and youth work. Most recently she has found herself back at her roots, with her current role as Regional Youth Dance Coordinator at DanceXchange: the National Dance Agency in Birmingham. She enjoys advocacy for the arts across sectors and also setting up opportunities for young people to get involved in the arts. 

With around 10 years of a range of experiences in the creative industries she relishes being able to give back by lending her guidance and support to Foursight.

Sally Cook (Acting Chair)

Sally joined the Board of Foursight several years ago and served as chair from 2003-2005. In addition, she serves on the board of Village Playhouse – all this for an inveterate non-theatrical. She is currently also heavily involved in running Whitmore Reans Credit Union - a community-based, profit sharing, financial co-operative - in a voluntary capacity. Paid work is in the form of gardening, regularly for one and intermittently for a second elderly person.

Sally is 52, the mother of 4 adult-ish children and lives in Whitmore Reans with the youngest of them, her partner Tom and friend Chris. She has lived in Wolverhampton since 1988 and has previously lived in Telford, Bristol, London, Sheffield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Barton under Needwood, a large village. She will never willingly live in a village ever again.

Having positively chosen to care for her children at home as they were growing up, Sally has had a spasmodic but varied work history since graduating in the distant past. She has worked as a nurse, library assistant, bar person, conference planner, information officer, social work assistant, child minder, life model and gardener. Previous voluntary work has included 5 years as a counsellor with Shropshire Rape Crisis and 10 years on the Management Committee of Whitmore Reans Community Day Nursery. She has also served for a total of 16 years as a school governor in the Wolverhampton primary and secondary sectors. She has always been involved, to varying degrees, in politics including the Labour Party (in more hopeful times!), Bristol Women’s Council, Latin American Solidarity, CND and Miners’ Support Groups. She is currently a paid-up but non-active member of both Amnesty and the Palestinian Support Group and regards her commitment to and work with the Credit Union as political in the most potent sense.

Sally’s passions are her family as widely defined - including her extended family and friends-made-family - gardening alone and peacefully, and history. The qualities she most values in people and thus aspires to are kindness and constancy.

Louisa Davies-Foley (director)

For Louisa, having moved around a lot as a child, something that was always a constant was music. She began violin lessons aged 6, whilst her mother sang in a local choir, and her late father, a percussionist, took her to folk festivals all over the country.

Whilst at university in Norwich, reading English and Film Studies, she got really hooked on playing traditional music, and also became the President of the university's Performing Arts Society and took part in a number of theatre productions. She discovered that she really enjoyed organising events, and decided to pursue a career in the arts.

Since completing an MA in European Cultural Policy and Administration at the University of Warwick Louisa has worked for Birmingham Rep, artSites Birmingham and mac. She is currently part of the small team planning the reopening of mac. Her main art form interests at work are physical and experimental theatre, work for young people and live literature. These days she sings in a choir, and plays fiddle and sings in two folk bands. She is delighted to be part of Foursight Theatre.

Kate Hale (director)

Kate is one of Foursight Theatre's Associate Artists and a founder member of the company. She trained at the University of Exeter and subsequently with Philippe Gaulier in London. She was an Artistic Director of Foursight for 11 years and involved as a director on Pink Smoke in the Vatican, Slap!, Shoot The Women First, Boadicea, and The Trout Sisters. She performed in Hitler's Women, Shoot The Women First and Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen . In her capacity as Education Director of Foursight (1998-2002), Kate created and directed several plays for schools, youth theatres and universities. As an Associate Artist since 2002, Kate has continued to work with the company as a director, a tutor on the Serious Play actor training courses and, during research and development projects, as a devising actor. She most recently worked with the company as dramaturg for Thatcher the Musical!. Kate also works as a freelance artist for other arts organisations and is a senior lecturer in Drama at the University of Wolverhampton, where her teaching focuses on Applied Drama, Theatre of the Oppressed and devising techniques. She is currently working towards a Practice as Research MA at the University of Warwick which asks the question, "What systems are needed to ensure that collective, actor -centric devising processes remain truly democratic?”