Our Ferment programme announces artists to be part of major commissions project

Today we're delighted to announce the artists who will be part of the theatre’s new commissioning initiative, launched in May this year, with the announcement that we would be more than tripling Ferment’s commissioning budget. The aim of this pilot year is to road-test longer-term, more meaningful relationships with early and mid-career artists & companies and work with them in more accessible, varied and innovative ways. 

We are making greater financial and in-kind investment and deeper commitments to the projects below. Artists will be supported by Ferment to undertake projects that employ more people, pay themselves a fair wage and create opportunities for greater professional development for everyone involved. 

This has been made possible in part by a new grant from the John Ellerman Foundation, enabling the commissioning and support of early and mid-career artists.

Each project receives:

• A financial commission.
• Producing support to fundraise the rest of the project budget and deliver work
• A bespoke package of other in-kind support from Bristol Old Vic. 

Co-production commission are supporting projects and ideas that are fully developed and ready to be seen by the world. The artists might still have some questions about what the work looks and feels like but it will be possible to find the answers in the process of making it and sharing it with an audience in the Bristol Old Vic programme.

Development commissions are supporting projects or ideas that still need time and space to grow. It might be a brand new idea or one that the artists have been working on for a while, but there are still lots of questions about what the idea might look or feel like or who they might collaborate with to make it, a development commission will help answer those questions and the process will (hopefully) end with a fully developed idea, ready for the next steps.

The call-out took place in June and nearly 200 projects were submitted for consideration.  Of those, 60 projects were invited to submit a full application. 30 projects were then invited to develop a pitch to a panel comprised of the Ferment team, independent artists and our city-wide colleagues. At each step in the process the artists were paid an honorarium for the time spent on the application and offered 1-2-1 consultation before submission. 16 projects have been greenlit for processes taking place over the next 12-18 months. We have committed £91,000 of cash support to these 16 commissions and will then make a sizeable in-kind contribution to each one.

Find out all about these exciting new projects below: 

Co-Producing Commissions (between £10,000 - £20,000)

Timothy X Atack and Tanuja Amarasuriya: Babel's Cupid 

Babel’s Cupid, written by Timothy X Atack & directed by Tanuja Amarasuriya. Babel’s Cupid is a star-crossed love story set on the edge of global apocalypse, where the lovers share no common language. The play looks at how the languages we use exert power over bodies, land, hearts. Part political-negotiation; part ritual dance; entirely love triangle.  

Tanuja Amarasuriya is a director, dramaturg and sound artist. Her work as director includes Dark Land Light House and The Bullet and The Bass Trombone (Bristol Old Vic), Out of Sorts (Theatre 503), The Paper Man (Improbable). She was shortlisted for the Sir Peter Hall Director Award in 2021 and is currently assistant director on Dominic Cooke’s productions of Good, starring David Tennant, and the forthcoming Medea, starring Sophie Okenedo. She is co-founder of Sleepdogs and a resident at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio. 

Timothy X Atack is a writer and composer working across theatre, TV, film and radio. His plays include  Dark Land Light House and The Mopeth Carol. His play Heartworm won the 2017 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, and his audio dramas include the multi-award-winning podcast drama Forest 404 for BBC Sounds and numerous Doctor Who audios for Big Finish. He is currently developing original TV series in the US and UK. He is co-founder of Sleepdogs and a resident at Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio.  

Pete MacHale: Dear Young Monster 

Dear Young Monster is a solo show which centres on a young trans man in early stages of medical transition. Isolated and othered he finds comfort in a midnight screening of Frankenstein, leading him into a tumultuous exploration of gender euphoria and dysphoria, discovering what can happen when you embrace being the monster the world is telling you that you are. 

Pete MacHale is an actor and writer from Bristol, trained at Arts University Bournemouth. Pete has worked across stage and screen, and as both a writer and performer is interested in creating and sharing stories that explore queerness, identity, and otherness. 

Otic: The Colour of Dinosaurs

The Colour of Dinosaurs is a brand-new show for families inspired by Bristol based Palaeontologist Dr Jakob Vinther and his fascinating exploration of the Colour of Dinosaurs. Featuring soaring music and powerful poetry, it will spark imagination and encourage questioning minds to keep questioning. 

Otic are a Bristol based collective of musicians, makers and performers. We make playful, exciting shows inspired by science, curiosity and big ideas.  

Development Commissions (between £3000 - £5000)

Amy Mason: ODD MORTALS

ODD MORTALS is a bold, funny new play in development about the 1700s queer theatre-maker and writer, Charlotte Charke. It will be a raucous, riotous and invigorating call to arms for creativity, live performance and living authentically, made with an all-queer team.

Amy Mason is a comedian, writer and performer from Bristol. She has made three previous autobiographical shows with Bristol Old Vic (The Islanders, Mass, Hollering Woman Creek) and hosts Awkward Stage; a mixed bill scratch night. 

Amy Bethan Evans: LilyPower

LilyPower is a play about three generations of neurodivergent women told in a neurodivergent way and narrated by a chorus of intrusive thoughts. Amy is seeking to develop the piece with a neurodivergent creative team to and create access for neurotypical audience through neurotypical consultancy.

Amy Bethan Evans is a playwright, dramaturg and disability activist from Bristol. Her work includes Libby's Eyes (Bunker Theatre) and Tinted (Gilded Ballon Edinburgh Fringe).

Brenda Callis: Smalltown Boy

Smalltown Boy is a heart-warming play which explores grief, connection and queerness in a rural setting. We also want it to be an emotionally explosive drag show, and a great night out. This project will develop side-by-side with a drag artist to try to bring these art forms together, whilst using interviews and research time to strengthen the important themes of the play.

Brenda Callis is an emerging queer playwright from the South West, looking to incorporate collaboration and experimentation into her writing practice. Brenda will be working with emerging drag queen YuGiHoe on this project as a Drag Consultant.

Sasha Frost: Froggy

Froggy is a two-hander play in development based on real life events, part verbatim and part dramatisation. A young mixed-race woman works to rebuild her relationship with her estranged father Froggy, a legendary underground soundman, and she comes to terms with how his life has shaped hers, as family secrets and black Bristol history-are uncovered in a vividly personal way. 

Sasha Frost was born and raised in Bristol. She started acting in the Bristol Old Vic young company and then went on to train at The Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA). She recently won the best supporting female actor award at the 2022 Black British Theatre Awards. Froggy is her first play.

Elana Binysh, Maisie Newman & Ben Osborn: [Arguments for the Sake of Heaven] מחלקת לשם שמים

[arguments for the sake of heaven] מחלקתלשםשמים will be a speculative documentary fluctuating between the sacred and the casual; a poetic, reparative and tender exploration of assimilation and forgotten identity. This development process will concentrate on fragments of poetic artifacts, rituals, songs, arguments and discussions of the British Jewish experience. 

Ben Osborn is a director of Open Music Lab, a collaborative learning space for refugees and migrants in Berlin.

Maisie Newman recently won an Eric Gregory award for her poetry collection ‘Our Names were Oil’ & has been awarded the Bryan Forbes directing bursary at National Youth Theatre.

Elana Binysh is currently working on [lays hand on forehead, swoons over the corpse] (Omnibus Theatre) with her collective Hot Cousin.

All 3 of them work across performance, literature, sound and visual art.

Jenny Davies: The Roaring One

The Roaring One is developing as an anarchistic, queercore punk restructuring and reimagining of Middleton and Dekker’s Jacobean play The Roaring Girl, experimenting with video and sound technology to create a sensory audience experience connected to onstage visuals.

Jenny Davies is a Bristol based director that is committed to making regional work that is politically and socially engaged. Jenny’s work draws from her own experience as a neurodivergent creative.

Hazel Grian: We Sing in Fire and Blood 

We Sing in Fire and Blood is a trailblazing musical about violence - a collaboration between writer Hazel Grian and composers Duncan Speakman & Sarah Anderson. In 2010, alone at home in Bristol, Hazel was brutally attacked by an intruder & left for dead as the house burned. Immediately the city went above and beyond to help, transforming Hazel’s life, and this process will support her to develop her incredible story for the stage. 

Hazel Grian has been called a 'renaissance woman' for her work as an innovative and original storyteller in many different areas – writer, street performer, filmmaker, and pioneer of digital interactive storytelling.

Manu Maunganidze: untitled project

This untitled project will focus on the mythology of multicultural Britain and inequality with a specific focus on a certain street corner in East Bristol. Over the next year I will talk to, workshop with, and be inspired by some of the people who have an intimate connection to that street corner, the gamblers, the family people, the lost and found, the ravers, the migrants and keen-to-move. The hope will be to come out the other end alive and begin to develop something worthy of Bristol’s eyes, hearts and bodies.

Manu Maunganidze has dipped in and out of both writing and performance his whole adult life but re-found his love for stage after lockdown. He dabbles in spoken word, improvisation, devising performances in and out of traditional venues, esoteric dance forms and street-based theatre.

Beyond Face: Snapshots 

Snapshots is a limited series for stage. It is 5 episodes of theatre which explore snapshots into the lives of 5 women; Effie, Earl, Gina, Marilyn and Lisa. Co-written by Alix Harris, Corinne Walker and Shiquerra Robertson, Beyond Face plan to continue developing each of the episodes, using this opportunity to think about all of the ways that they might be shared with an audience.

Beyond Face are a South West based theatre company founded in 2015 with a vision to lead the region into becoming recognised for amplifying and celebrating Global Majority people in the arts and cultural sector.

Elizabeth Westcott: Izzy Gizmo 

Izzy Gizmo is an ambitious little girl who builds mad inventions... that often do not work. It is a story about determination, engineering and love. Taking inspiration from Izzy, the development of this adaptation will be bold and noisy, particularly with the use of original music making machines, dance and puppetry, combining to call attention to the importance of resourceful innovation in this swiftly changing world of ours.

Elizabeth Westcott has spent the last portion of her career performing with companies such as Kneehigh, Complicite and Bryony Kimmings as a violinist within onstage bands, this is her first time as lead artist. 

Leila Navabi, Priya Hall, Jasmine Morton and Pravanya Pillay: Taking it's Toll 

Taking Its Toll is a developing idea that refuses to make a point. It’s proudly and unapologetically pointless. It might be a show about 4 toll booth workers awaiting the reopening of the Severn Toll Bridge. They honour the sacred oath they took to safeguard this passage of the M4. This is their life. This is Taking Its Toll. As they wait the audience will probably wait with them and get absorbed into their surreal world. 

Leila Navabi, Priya Hall, Jasmine Morton and Pravanya Pillay are South West based artists, specialising in character driven comedy and storytelling. For them just existing can feel like a political statement, so their art is about having fun and embracing the silly. 

Leila Navabi has multiple television and radio stand up credits and has co-written and starred in the BBC iPlayer series - ‘Vandullz’.

Priya Hall has written and starred in her own BBC Wales television Pilot and BBC Radio Wales series of the same name, ‘Beena & Amrit’.

Jasmine Morton is a writer and comic based in Bristol. She is quickly becoming a hot ticket act on the U.K. Comedy Circuit.

Pravanya Pillay has written for the BBC Radio Wales series ‘Beena & Amrit’ as well as writing for the BBC Radio Wales sketch show ‘Welcome Strangers'. 

Florence Espeut-Nickless, Stef O’Driscoll & Tom Bevan: Blinded by Your Grace

Blinded By Your Grace is an idea for an epic ensemble community theatre show made with/by and for young people in the South West. It celebrates the power of community, of coming together and uniting in a time of trauma. It’s full of music, energy, celebration and dance, but also pain, heartache and loss.  

Florence Espeut-Nickless, Stef O’Driscoll & Tom Bevan are working together on Blinded By Your Grace, a cross artform collaboration between these Bristol-based artists, conceived and headed up by writer Florence Espeut-Nickless (DESTINY - UK Tour, The Odyssey - National Theatre/Trowbridge Town Hall), director Stef O’Driscoll (Love Reign - Young Vic) and producer Tom Bevan (DESTINY - UK Tour). Together they are passionate about working class communities coming together to make and experience high quality theatre where they can see themselves. 

Julia Head, Naomi Obeng and Cat Fuller: A Cherry Orchard 

A Cherry Orchard is an idea for a radical redevelopment of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, made in collaboration with designer Cat Fuller and writer Naomi Obeng. Set in the orchard of a decaying rural English estate, it follows a Gardener whose family has maintained the trees for generations and his daughter who will inherit nothing, alongside Lyuba whose family have owned the estate for generations and her daughter Anya who will inherit everything.

Julia Head is a director of live work from Bristol. She is the Artistic Director of FullRogue, a theatre company that exists to stress-test new writing and the limits of live performance. She is the Company Director of Young SixSix that collaborates closely with young people to make new work and supports them to realise their creative potential. 

Cat Fuller has an MA in Performance Design from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In 2021 Cat Fuller was named a recipient of the Linbury Prize for Stage Design and was also awarded the John Elvery Prize for Excellence in Stage Design. 

Naomi Obeng is a playwright and artist. She was recently part of NO BORDERS at the Royal Court and one of English Touring Theatre's Nationwide Voices 2021-22.