unAwards

After 27 years producing new work for national and international audiences, in 2024 Unlimited Theatre embarked on a new chapter to create more opportunities for emerging and mid-career companies and artists. Our unAwards inspired by key moments in Unlimited’s history, aimed to enable greater collaboration, experimentation and inclusive practice for artists and creatives.

The awards were to be easy to apply for, with minimal reporting so that artists could focus their time and energy on making art, rather than making applications. Our aim was to support the next generation of theatre makers and, in our ‘retirement’, leave a lasting legacy that enables new creatives and audiences to embark on inspirational journeys that they might not otherwise have been able to.

The awards pots were made up of remaining cash reserves and a generous donation from an existing supporter.

Starting Out
Two companies – Hidden Keileon and Part of the Main – each received awards up to £2,500 to buy vital equipment.
In 1998, one year after Unlimited was founded, we successfully applied for a £2,500 award from the Princes Youth Business Trust. With that money we bought two pieces of equipment that we would never have been able to afford otherwise – our first computer and a Sony digital video camera. Both these pieces of kit were fundamental to our development and used by all six of the founder artists on numerous projects for many years.

This award was for early career artists of any age working within an arts producing organisation to buy equipment that:
• clearly and significantly contributes to the development of their organisation or artistic practice
• they would not otherwise be able to afford

unLab
Seven companies – Breaking Barriers, Time & Again, archipelago arts collective, The Herd, proto-type, Mad Friday Productions and Polite Rebellion – each received up to £5,000 to fund creative retreats.
For many years, a major part of our process in making new work was to ‘retreat’ – to find somewhere remote where we could escape from the daily pressures of our lives and other projects and just be together. Mostly this would be a week together where we would cook for each other, eat together, walk and talk, share films and books and articles and essays. It was time for us as artists to dream, to share and interrogate ideas at the earliest stage of their infancy, to begin the process of imagining what we might make next. We actively refused to set any outcomes in advance. Which annoys funders. Because they want to know “WTAF are you ‘artists’ actually going to do with this money?”. But a lot of the time we couldn’t answer that question. Because we didn’t know yet. Because we hadn’t had any time together to imagine that. So we earned cash from other projects to create this time to spend together. We came away from that time refreshed, excited and closer to each other as friends and artists and with exciting plans for what we would do next. This was our ‘laboratory’. We called it unLab.

This award was for artists at any stage of their career working within an arts producing organisation to retreat and begin to imagine their next project.

unLock
Two companies – Polite Rebellion and Ransack Theatre – each received £10,000 towards the full production costs of a new show.
Over the years, Unlimited made increasingly ambitious projects in collaboration with multiple partners across many sectors. As just one example…

…Future Bodies (2018) was a creative collaboration with RashDash that was co-produced by HOME and supported by the Wellcome Trust as well as Arts Council England. As well as a regular team of incredible stage, lighting and video designers (including Rhys Jarman, Joshua Pharo and Sarah Readman) we worked with deaf performers and creatives to incorporate BSL and ‘creative captioning’. Research partners included psychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian from the University of Cambridge, Dr Tim Constandinou from Imperial College London’s Next Generation Neural Interfaces Lab and Dr Anders Sandberg from Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Unversity. Among MANY others.

One of the reasons we were able to make new work at this scale was because, as an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, we were able to bring a level of ‘in kind’ support and cash  that unlocked support from other (often bigger) partners.

This award was for mid-career artists working within an arts producing organisation (that is not an NPO) to unLock further support and/or enhance an ambitious project that is ready for final production.