After the success of our 2024 unAwards, we reopened the applications for round 2 in September 2024. We want to make sure that we are responding to the artists who are applying for these funds, and we found that there was an overwhelming desire for artists to retreat together to plan for the future. With that, we decided that the best way to support that was by using the £5,000 that we had allocated to the Starting Out pot to support an additional unLab company. We are for artists and by artists, and we want to respond to the needs of the industry in the most responsive and important way.
So, with that being said, let us introduce you to our 3 unLab companies as well as our unLock company 2025.
unLab – Up to £5,000 award
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.
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.
Polite Rebellion is a disabled-led company facilitating the practice of Leeds-based artist Ellie Harrison.
Polite Rebellion is radically gentle. Playfully subversive. In an age of relentless noise it dares to be boldly quiet. It needs to be both beautiful and useful.
We cant wait to hear more from these companies and how their unAwards funding has been able to support their development as artists.