Young artists secure yearlong opportunity to develop new works responding to Rage, Revolution, Grief, Love
Boundless Theatre announces the four artists selected for the next iteration of its yearlong Accelerator artist development programme, created in response to the shrinking landscape of opportunity for theatre and performance makers in the UK to experiment, develop and test new work. Emily Faye Baldwin, Isaiah James-Mitchell, Néa Ishana Ranganathan and Sam Smith will be supported to develop new performance works in response to a creative brief written by the Boundless young Advisory Group, titled Rage, Revolution, Grief, Love.
Previous editions of Boundless Accelerator have supported early-stage development of works such as For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron and Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates X) by Jade Franks, along with artists such as Bruntwood Prize-nominated Yasmine Dankwah.
The four projects ask what happens when the future becomes uncertain, impossible or radically different; what we hold on to, and how we find new ways to live, connect and imagine what comes next. From bodies shaped by the systems around us, to alternative maps of London and artists trying to create and love in the shadow of an apocalypse, each project explores transformation, unknowing and the possibility of building something different.
Actor, writer and movement artist Emily Faye Baldwin who recently graduated from Trinity Laban, is developing a dance-play inspired by her own experience of ballet training, exploring femininity, teenage culture, pleasure and shame in the Ozempic era.
An alum of Emma Rice’s School for Wise Children, actor-writer Isaiah James-Mitchell is developing Requiem for a Failed Minstrel, a one-man black comedy about a professional cellist who, on the brink of a life changing orchestral opportunity, is forced to reconsider his future by a sudden onset disability.
Durational live artist, transmasc Tamil archivist and anti-imperialist organiser Néa Ishana Ranganathan is creating A London Hour, an imagined oral history and auto-performance of a lost tube line which stretches across a liberated South London.
Award-winning queer and trans* writer, director and dance-artist Sam Smith who is also the Founder of Mad Jacks Theatre, is developing BIG SKY!, a play with dance and music about young artists navigating love, art, grief and political uncertainty against an on-crushing apocalypse.
Accelerator supports early-career performance makers from underrepresented backgrounds, with a particular focus on Global Majority, migrant, trans and disabled artists, from or living in Croydon and South London.
Throughout the programme, the artists will receive financial support to the sum of £4,800, a collaborative residency, mentoring and creative development time, alongside a culminating showcase at New Diorama Theatre.
Pavlos Christodoulou, Creative Director & Co-CEO of Boundless comments:
“The Boundless Manifesto invites us to care more, to dream and be curious. These values were embedded in this year’s Accelerator, within the call out, the selection and the design of the programme itself. I’m most excited by our residency this month, which will resource the artists to have time to focus on creative practice. Residencies have increasingly become a part of our programme and feel vital in a time where artists have so little space to dream, build community and take risks. Like the work the artists are developing, we are keen to respond to the moment, and our antidote to the times we are living in is to create the space to play, fail and care for artists, young people and ultimately everyone we work with.”
Boundless Accelerator 26-26 is supported by the Idlewild Trust and Cockayne Foundation, along with Arts Council England through National Portfolio Organisation funding.
Meet the Artists
Emily Faye Baldwin (she/her) is an actor, writer and movement artist who has recently graduated from Trinity Laban with a BA in Musical Theatre. Her dance background is rooted in classical ballet and contemporary dance, while her theatre training grounds her work in the human experience. In both her practice and her work she focuses on moving with intention, both within and beyond the form of dance.
As an actor, her credits include: Andor (Disney+), You Are Here (Southbank Centre), Beauty and the Beast (Rose Theatre Kingston), The Trials R&D (Donmar Warehouse).
@emilyfayebaldwin on Instagram
Isaiah James-Mitchell (he/him) is an actor and writer whose work is often centred around Power. Be that the abuse of it, what the want for it does to people and society, or how people can play with it. Isaiah is on the Joy Artist Development Programme with Turtle Key Arts and is an alum of Talawa Theatre’s Introductory Writers’ Group and the Lyric Hammersmith’s SPRINGBOARD training programme. As a writer, he has a strong taste for the taboo and uncomfortable and is passionate about creating stories that induce empathy towards the most alien and weird of experiences and people. Music is Isaiah’s first love and he composes mainly vocal and instrumental music in his spare time.
Acting credits include: Bindweed (The Ambassadors Theatre/ATG), Aladdin (Lyric Hammersmith Theatre), and The Caretakers Band at Green Man Festival (Emma Rice Company). Writing and directing credits include: BODY + SOUL WIP (Riverside Studios Light Bites Festival).
Néa Ishana Ranganathan (they/he) is a transmasc durational live artist, archivist, and anti-imperialist organiser.
Néa’s practice centres the documentation of Tamil homeland through participatory land-based mapping, food/feeding, and broken translation. He is interested in sculpting with bodies in landscapes and divided waters as a way of imagining moments for ancestral grief. Néa loves building and collecting ephemera for objects, zines, texts, and booklets as a way of archiving practice.
As an organiser and artist, Néa strives towards humanising freedom fighters and building spaces for anti-fascist political education. Néa makes site-responsive work in the curatorship duo shelf/break, which invites and hosts transitional spaces for emerging artists through intimate moments of community.
Néa has freelanced for meaningful organisations such as Bold Mellon, Healing Justice London, Raze Collective, Artsadmin, and The Yard Theatre. Most recently, shelf/break have curated an intergenerational night at The Southbank Centre called WITCHING HOUR in collaboration with Boundless Theatre.
Sam Smith (they/she/he) is an award-winning queer and trans* writer, director and dance-artist based between London and Surrey, as well as the founder and artistic director of Mad Jacks Theatre. Their practice is led by form, intimacy, coming-of-age and dissocia, spanning new writing, dance-theatre and devising.
They grew up dancing, both at Philomena School of Dance and Laine Theatre Arts; after performing as a young adult, they did half a Liberal Arts degree at King’s College London and started working as a theatremaker. The two most significant pieces of theatre in their life are Sally Cookson’s adaptation of A Monster Calls, and the original West End production of Billy Elliot. Sam is also a violent Hello, Dolly! enthusiast.
Their work as a writer-director includes: “Crush” (Anatomy Lecture Theatre); Scenes with boys (Riverside Studios, Pleasance); ACNE ROMEO (The Place); THIS SWOLLEN THING (WIP) (Camden People’s Theatre); OLDER, I–III (Riverside Studios).