unLab – Round 2
up to £5,000
(a maximum of 3 awards in Round 2)
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 is for artists at any stage of their career working within an arts producing organisation to retreat and begin to imagine their next project.
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Please do not apply for support for projects that are already in progress or have been through any development process. Successful awards must be spent and accounted for by the end of July 2025.
Applications open on Monday 2 September. The deadline to submit an application is midnight Monday 30 September 2024.
Please read our Applicant Guidance before submitting your application. This includes our eligibility criteria and a copy of the application questions.
Download the guidance here: Applicant Guidance
Or listen to the audio version:
If you have a question, please check our FAQs (last updated 9 September 2024). If you’d still like to contact us, you’ll find details at the bottom of the document.
In Round 2 of unLab, we awarded 3 companies. Porto-Type, The Herd and Time & Again.
Proto-type are a company of multi-disciplinary artists led by Rachel Baynton, Gillian Lees, and Andrew Westerside.
They create original performance work that is diverse in scale, subject and medium.
Recently, this has included touring theatre (A Machine they’re Secretly Building), a two-week long theatrical experience using pervasive technologies (Fortnight), a multimedia concert-performance featuring a live laptop orchestra and animation (The Good, the God and the Guillotine) and a radio drama with the BBC (The Forgotten Suffragette).
They’ve been making work and supporting young artists in the US, the Netherlands, Russia, China, Armenia, France, Zimbabwe and the UK since 1997. Critics have called their work ‘an intriguing brush with altered reality’ (New York Times), ‘Smartly intelligent… coolly reasoned theatre’ (The Guardian) and ‘enthralling’ (Zambezi News).
The Herd brings children, young people and families together in playful spaces to share exceptional experiences. They play alongside children to create shows, installations and experiences that celebrate, interrogate and nurture the joy of childhood.
They believe in the transformational power of family arts and create experiences that children and adults can share together. They recognise that some children and families face barriers to accessing the arts and they proactively explore ways of removing
these barriers.
Time & Again are a multi-award winning theatre company with an innovative niche of exploring disability and mental health within a vibrant historical context. Their new writing pushes the boundaries of how a story can be told visually, whilst having accessibility at its heart via creative captioning, integrated BSL, and projections.
They are passionate about showing that disability, neurodivergence, and mental health aren’t new concepts – they have always been present throughout history – and they want to positively represent this on our stages.
They are particularly interested in giving voice to the lives of women who pushed boundaries, either by working in typically male-dominated industries, engaging in political or revolutionary ideas, or behaving in a way that wasn’t deemed acceptable by society at the time.