Our Story

That's me on the left. And that's my best friend Josh on the right. I am an actor. Josh is a director. At least, that's what we want to spend our lives doing. We met at university, where Josh directed me in a show, and our relationship grew from there. Without Josh, I would never have been pushed to properly pursue a dream I had been quietly holding onto ever since I said no to studying medicine.

And then there's Madeline. She's the reason I was quietly holding onto that dream in the first place. Before I met her, a "creative career" didn't even feel like an option. Josh graduated university at the same time that I then graduated drama school. We kept rehearsing together on scenes here and there with friends to keep the engine going. But we often found ourselves feeling disconnected from the thing we actually wanted to be doing. I found myself working in tech. Josh stayed in the theatre, but increasingly behind a desk rather than in the room. After watching 'Inter Alia' at the National Theatre, Josh and I headed to a pub by Waterloo station. I told him about an idea I had been sitting on for a while. This was around the time everyone was writing think pieces about AI replacing everybody's jobs - including creatives. Most of the people behind that technology and sharing those articles had never stepped in a rehearsal room, never faced rejection from an audition, never had someone ask "oh really? Have I seen you in anything?" Yet they were confident they understood where the future of drama, and the arts more broadly, was heading. That felt strange to us. We created scenespace® to push back against that. And it's our offer to our peers. Madeline joined our duo to help us pull it all together and have something tangible to put out into the world. She'd been a part of this half-idea from the beginning and has shaped the look and feel of scenespace® today. Her eye for design and branding is on every page of it. scenespace® isn't intended to be a shortcut or a way to cheat the creative process. It's a space. It's a place where you can feel free to explore, learn, fail, rehearse, leveraging all the tools available to you. The aim is that when you step into a rehearsal room or an audition, you do so with confidence and belief in yourself and your unique ideas. scenespace® is designed for anyone who is creative and curious about the process of storytelling. You can use your scenespace to prepare safely, knowing that you're the central element in what makes art, art. Just like the craft itself, scenespace® is an evolving process. Josh, Madeline and I wouldn't have been able to build it without our community and some very special people along the way. And getting to build it with two of my closest friends has been the joy of it. We'd love for you to be a part of this journey with us too. We hope you enjoy using it. We hope it helps you land that next gig. Or even just helps you remember who you are, and who you want to be. Shahin, Josh and Madeline x