CLAIRE MORRIS
Director • Performer • Educator • Community Arts Leader
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“Theatre, in Claire’s hands, becomes more than an art form. It becomes rehearsal for life.”
A Life Spoken in Theatre
There are people who enter the theatre because they want to perform, and there are those for whom performance has always been inseparable from life itself.
For Claire Morris, there was never a moment before music, movement or storytelling. Born into an artistic family - her mother a drama teacher, her father a musician - she grew up in a world where creativity was not treated as a hobby, but as a language. Singing, dancing and acting were as natural to her as speaking.
That instinct soon became discipline. Claire trained at the Elizabeth School of Dancing before progressing to Tiffany Stage Academy, Italia Conti in London and finally Rose Bruford College, where she completed her degree in Theatre Studies. Throughout her training, she worked professionally as a singer, dancer and musical-theatre performer, appearing in touring productions and developing the stamina, versatility and emotional precision demanded by live performance.
Yet Claire was never interested only in the person standing beneath the spotlight. Her wider training included prosthetic arts and special-effects makeup, leading to work on the BBC medical drama Casualty, where she helped create broken bones, injuries and practical effects for the screen. She also worked in photographic studios, gaining a detailed understanding of makeup, visual storytelling and the quiet technical craft that supports every successful production.
By nineteen, Claire’s creative ambition had already outgrown the boundaries of a conventional career. From the top deck of a bus, she founded a record label and travelled across Britain and Europe, performing while discovering and gathering new talent from the communities she encountered. It was audacious, unconventional and entirely characteristic. Claire has never waited for somebody else to create the opportunity. She builds it herself.
Creating STARZ Performing Arts Academy
At twenty-five, Claire founded STARZ Performing Arts Academy in Colchester.
From the outset, STARZ was conceived as more than a private theatre school. Its purpose was to provide professional performing-arts training to children whose financial or personal circumstances might otherwise prevent them from accessing it.
Supported initially through regeneration funding and Arts Council projects, its workshops were delivered free of charge. These were not diluted community sessions or token opportunities. Claire wanted young people to receive serious, ambitious and professionally informed training, regardless of the income of their families.
As funding structures changed and demand grew, STARZ developed into a private academy. Its founding principles, however, did not. Claire has consistently resisted the belief that prestige must come with exclusion. STARZ has grown into a respected academy while maintaining affordable fees and a determination to ensure that talent, commitment and imagination - rather than wealth - decide who gets to participate.
Under her leadership, students have accessed opportunities connected with the O2, His Majesty’s Theatre and Sadler’s Wells. Claire has also been invited to direct within a National Theatre project, creating opportunities for up to thirty students to experience the professional world surrounding a major production, both onstage and behind it. For Claire, the significance of these venues lies not in their status alone, but in the message they give to young people who may never have imagined themselves belonging there: you are allowed into this room; your voice deserves to be heard; your future does not have to be defined by where you started.
PROFESSIONAL TESTIMONIALS
"Watching Claire working with her young students is like watching the finest composer conducting."
E.V Franks (Retrovolution)
The Children Who Needed Something Different
Alongside her professional theatre career, Claire spent approximately fifteen years working within specialist SEND education. She supported children and young people who were not thriving in mainstream environments - many carrying complex educational needs, emotional distress, anxiety, disrupted experiences and years of being misunderstood. This became one of the defining areas of her life. Claire learned that education cannot always begin with obedience, written work or conventional measures of attainment. For some young people, it begins with safety. For others, with movement, rhythm, storytelling, role play or the discovery that an adult is finally prepared to listen. She used drama, music, creativity and art-based therapeutic practices to help young people reconnect with education on terms they could understand. Her task was not to force children into a rigid system. It was to find the doorway through which each individual could enter. Sometimes progress meant completing a piece of work. Sometimes it meant speaking in front of another person, remaining in a room, regulating an overwhelming emotion or daring to believe that failure was not inevitable.
Those years gave Claire a deep and practical understanding of neurodiversity, behaviour, trauma and communication. They also reinforced a conviction that has remained central to all her work: confidence is not a reward given after a young person succeeds. Confidence is often the condition that makes success possible.
The Year Everything Stopped
Then Claire became seriously ill. For a woman whose life had been defined by movement, responsibility and caring for others, illness brought everything to a halt. She spent a year in treatment and ultimately stepped away from the education career that had shaped so much of her adult life. It was not simply a professional interruption. It was a confrontation with vulnerability, uncertainty and the possibility that the future she had assumed would always be there could no longer be taken for granted. Claire had spent years teaching resilience to others. Now she was required to find it within herself. Recovery did not return her unchanged. It sharpened her. It removed any remaining appetite for waiting, postponing or living cautiously around the edges of her own ambition. Having been given what she describes as another chance at life, Claire decided that she would not spend it simply returning to what had existed before.
She would use everything she had learned - as a performer, educator, director, mentor and survivor - to create the work she had always believed was possible. Her illness became a dividing line. On one side stood the woman who had spent decades building opportunities for others. On the other stood the woman who now understood, with absolute clarity, how quickly opportunity can disappear.
Resilience as an Education
Claire’s recovery also made her increasingly conscious of something she believes many young people are being denied: the opportunity to develop resilience through meaningful responsibility, challenge, disappointment and achievement. This is not a criticism of young people themselves. It is a criticism of the environments that too often lower expectations, remove risk without replacing it with purpose, or identify vulnerability without giving young people the tools to move through it.
Claire knows that resilience cannot be taught as a slogan. It is developed when a young person is trusted with something real: a rehearsal, a deadline, a technical responsibility, a frightened performer depending upon them, an audience waiting beyond the curtain, a mistake that must be corrected rather than hidden, or a production that will only succeed if every member of the company turns up and contributes. Her own recovery strengthened her commitment to creating precisely these opportunities. She wants young people to understand that fear does not mean they are incapable, that adversity does not make them lesser, and that confidence is often built after the first terrifying step rather than before it.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
It was through Claire’s growing community outreach that she encountered Dom “DB” Morgan and Underdog Crew Studios. The connection was immediate.
Claire arrived with decades of experience in theatre, musical performance, choreography, specialist education and inclusive community practice. Dom “DB” Morgan brought a multi-award-winning background in filmmaking, visual storytelling, youth mentorship and building unconventional creative environments for young people who had often failed to thrive elsewhere. They appeared, in many ways, to be opposite sides of the same coin. Claire’s world had been shaped by the stage. Dom’s had been shaped by the screen. Claire understood how to build a company through rehearsal, discipline, movement and live performance. Dom understood how to create cinematic scale, visual identity, narrative momentum and fearless original work.
Yet beneath those different disciplines lay the same instinct. Both were drawn to the outsiders, the overlooked, the neurodivergent young person whose abilities had been buried beneath descriptions of what they could not do, and the emerging artist who needed somebody to take their ambition seriously before they could take it seriously themselves.
Their collaboration did not begin with a business plan. It began with recognition. Each saw in the other a refusal to lower expectations for marginalised young people. Both believed that inclusion should never mean offering a smaller dream. They wanted young people to experience professional standards, ambitious projects and the genuine exhilaration of making something that mattered. Creatively, their worlds collided. And almost immediately, something much larger began to emerge.
A Night at the Mangled Mare
Their first major original collaboration is A Night at the Mangled Mare - a bold new theatrical production combining Claire’s extensive experience in live theatre with Dom “DB” Morgan’s award-winning filmmaking and visual storytelling. The project brings together musical theatre, gothic mystery, original music, choreography, practical effects, filmmaking, technical production and large-scale community participation. But its real ambition lies beyond the spectacle.
At the centre of the production is a year-long empowerment and mentorship programme through which marginalised, SEN and neurodivergent young people will become part of the company creating the show.
They will not simply be invited to observe professionals at work. They will be performers, filmmakers, musicians, technicians, designers, prop makers, makeup artists, stage managers, promoters and production assistants. They will learn that theatre is not created by one person standing in the light. It is created by a community of people depending upon one another.
For Claire, this project represents the convergence of everything that has shaped her life: professional performance, specialist education, community outreach, illness, recovery and an unshakeable belief in the creative potential of young people.
For Dom, it extends the established Underdog Crew Studios model into a new theatrical world of live performance, music and spectacle. Together, they believe they have found an extraordinary creative synergy. Claire brings the knowledge of how theatre breathes. Dom brings the instinct for how a story explodes beyond the stage. Between them stands a community of young people ready to discover what they are capable of becoming.
The Work After Survival
Claire does not romanticise illness. She would not describe suffering as a gift. But she understands what surviving it demanded of her - and what survival has now given back: urgency, clarity, tenacity and a refusal to waste time. She has emerged from treatment with an intensified determination to create ambitious work, to challenge the limitations placed upon marginalised young people and to ensure that her remaining professional life is driven by purpose. She knows that resilience is not the absence of fear, pain or uncertainty. It is the decision to continue creating while carrying them. That understanding now sits at the heart of her directing, her mentoring and her collaboration with Underdog Crew Studios. Claire Morris has spent her career creating stages for other people. After illness forced the curtain down upon one chapter of her life, she has returned not merely to resume the performance, but to build an entirely new theatre around it.
A Night at the Mangled Mare is the first production to rise from that renewed purpose.
It is the beginning of a creative partnership between two artists from different disciplines, united by the same conviction: that marginalised young people do not need their ambitions made safer, quieter or smaller.
They need opportunity. They need mentorship. They need somebody prepared to see the artist before the artist can see it themselves. And sometimes, they need a stage large enough to show the world exactly what it failed to recognise.
Meet the team behind 'a night at the Mangled Mare' musical theatrical production, youth training and empowerment project for Colchester City.