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Meet the 2023 Boundless Accelerator artists

1 June 2023

We Are Boundless

The Boundless Accelerator supports extraordinary artists of the future, now. We look for bold, imaginative new theatre ideas and work that starts conversations with the world from diverse perspectives.  

We’re delighted to embark on our third year of Boundless Accelerator, which means we have four brilliant new artists to introduce you to. They’ll be working closely with us between 2022-23 to develop new pieces of work on the theme of Money.

We love Accelerator, as it allows us to get behind new work at a really early stage and help that work eventually find an audience.  For Black Boys… by Nouveau Riche, which transferred to the Royal Court earlier this year, is a great example of how Accelerator can support artists all the way through to production.

So, meet our next group of makers, movers, shakers and storytellers, and keep an eye out on their work across the next year.

Photography credits for 2023: Zbigniew Kotkiewicz

Yasmine Dankwah is a British-Ghanaian writer and performance poet born, raised, and based in South-West London. Using music, anything from High-life to R&B, and spoken word poetry she is really interested in looking at how resistance can be a springboard for joy amongst marginalised communities.  

Through Accelerator, Yasmine is developing Garage Girls. Set during the early noughties, Garage Girls is a coming of age, comedy-drama that follows four British-Ghanaian sisters, who run a garage in the backdrop of an impending recession. It’s an ode to Battersea, bad basslines and the beauty and conflict that resides in what it means to be British as a racialised individual.

Jade Franks is an actor and writer from Merseyside. She is interested in theatre for social change, specifically through young people’s work. She is a full time associate on The Royal Court’s participation team, is an assistant on the Old Vic’s Theatre Makers course and has recently performed at Theatre Royal Stratford East with their young company. 

For Boundless, Jade is developing a play called Eat The Rich (but maybe not me mates x). It is a play which explores the complexities of being working class in upper class spaces. The idea came from a stand up comedy show she performed at the university of Cambridge about her experience studying there. 

On The Common! are South London theatre makers, the most hilarious people on the planet and occasionally dip their toes into furniture removals. Abby, Kieran and Liv started the company after they left college to get their writing out there, and were then joined by their now associate artists Mia and Max. Their aim is to collaborate with young artists in our area who don’t really know how to get their foot in the door. 

On The Common! are are working with Boundless to create a show based around the theme of ‘Money’, or as we like to put it, ‘Grindset‘: a show centred around the stories of young people about the wild, fun, scary and interesting jobs they’ve taken in order to earn a pound or two.

Chris is a neurodivergent theatre maker, facilitator and founding member of the performance collective ClusterFluxSince graduating from Central in 2021, he has received Curious Directive’s Hypothesis Grant, been shortlisted for the Charlie Hartill Theatre Reserve and been awarded an ArtsDepot residency. His work is often devised and process driven. 

With Boundless, Chris will develop a new work based on his conversations with a man who robbed a bank and then threw the stolen cash over Taylor Swifts security fence – seriously! Working collaboratively with Boundless’ network of creative young people, the piece will explore masculinity, fame, late-capitalism and how we consume stories. 

Boundless Accelerator is supported by the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Arts Council England and is now in its third year.  You can find out more about all the artists and previous work here.  We will be searching for four new artists in 2023-2024 to be the first to hear more, join our mailing list.

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