Unlimited is a charitable company of UK artists and producers making and telling inspirational stories for live performance in public spaces – theatres, festivals, galleries, museums, the streets of your city, on the internet and for broadcast. Our projects are born from the passions and obsessions of our six Core Artists who share a vision to tell stories that inspire audiences to join them in changing the world (for the better). You can find out more and watch interviews with each of our Core Artists on our team page
Our values are:
• Empathy, generosity and collaboration in partnerships
• Rigour, curiosity and optimism in processes
• Innovation, adventure and brilliance in presentations
While much of our work is for an adult audience, we have a significant and dedicated strand for families and young people delivered through the Unlimited Space Agency (UNSA). UNSA’s patron is the British astronaut Tim Peake, who supports us in our mission to “inspire the next generation of poetscientists and space explorers”.
Unlimited operates strictly not for profit, is a registered UK charity and a current Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. We’ve toured extensively in the UK and presented work at international festivals and venues in the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Zimbabwe, The Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Ukraine, Singapore, South Africa, the USA and even into space.
Welcome to the shows. We hope you can join us.
It's been an incredibly busy year at Unlimited with more work being developed and produced than ever before. We've consolidated and built on relationships with our existing producing and presenting partners and developed some incredibly exciting new ones. Hopefully the following pages will give you a strong sense of what everyone’s been up to in 2022.
There are significant changes ahead for all of us as at Unlimited as we respond to the Arts Council of England's recent decision to cut our National Portfolio funding. While we've never taken that support for granted and understand the programme is over-subscribed, we've been an NPO since 2008 and only ever had extremely positive reports from ACE with no indication that we were at any risk. So
the decision was a shock and, in honesty, very upsetting for all of us here.
Throughout everything this year and every year, the whole Unlimited team has been characteristically wonderful with their care- fi lled dedication and inspiring creativity. I'm deeply thankful for all of your work and support at all times and know that, together, we'll both leave an inspiring legacy and create the possibility for the brightest of Unlimited futures.
With love and in peace, J Core Artist and Chief Executive
After taking a radical step in developing our artistic leadership model in 2021, Unlimited now has a year under its belt after inviting five new artists to join cofounder J Spooner in leading the company’s artistic vision.
Last year, we retired the role of ‘Artistic Director’ and built a new structure that recognised the importance of developing the leaders of the future. As well as leading on their own new project for Unlimited, we explored areas of development with each Core Artist and curated a plan in response. At the beginning of 2022, our staff team hosted a series of 'Systems Workshops’ based on areas identified by the Core Artists in their development plans. The sessions looked at company formation and structures; fi nancial controls and operations; relationship building; income generation and fundraising.
Across the year, the Core Artist team have got together regularly for discussions of practice, realising ambitions, project development, training and more. They even grabbed a few days away together for a residency to explore each others work, their superpowers and how they might collaborate in the future.
In amongst all of this, each Core Artist has been developing their projects with Unlimited. Read on to find out how these have progressed in 2022. If you’re interested in supporting or partnering with us on any of the following projects, please get in touch using the details on the final page.
To refresh your memory, here’s our Core Artist team and a reminder of the projects they’re working on:
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Working on: Untitled Trans Musical
Outside Unlimited: Artistic Director at Jamie Fletcher & Company
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Working on: The Price of Bread
Outside
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Working on: Speed of Wood
Outside Unlimited: Co-Company Director at Barrel Organ
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Working on: Ancient Futures, Unlimited Space Agency
Core Artist & Chief Executive of Unlimited
Working on: Anansi The Spider
Outside Unlimited: Artistic Director of Anansi Theatre Company
CLICK THE ARTIST’S IMAGE TO SEE A FULL BIO ANDJamie Fletcher Tyrrell Jones Unlimited: Artistic Director at Knaïve Theatre Ali Pidsley
Afrofuturism inspired outdoor spectacular Ancient Futures blends contemporary circus and storytelling with Sound System culture and West African folklore. This is a collaboration with contemporary circus specialists Upswing and commissioned by Without Walls and Leeds 2023. Both a headline festival experience and a pop up installation, Ancient Futures fuses dance, circus, parkour, music and storytelling with design inspired by West African masquerade and Afrofuturism.
Each day, our flamboyant Afrinauts arrive as curious visitors to each festival and through the course of a day, build an encampment where they welcome willing participants to meet them, train with them and witness their unique community. At twilight, audiences are invited to join their spectacular dance party, a ritual to launch us into a new reality that promises to build a more vibrant, positive and inspiring future than we might otherwise be heading towards.
Conceived and directed by Vicki Dela Amedume (Upswing) and J Spooner (Unlimited) in collaboration with Quantum poet Oneness Sankara with new music by grime artist Afrikan Boy.
The first stage of R&D, supported by Blueprint: Without Walls R&D Investment Fund, took place across 2 weeks in 2021. This year, the team have been busy imagining and writing. The project was pitched at XTRAX Shorts in August, casting workshops held September, and in December the creative team and performers came together for stage 2 of R&D at 101 Outdoor Arts Creation Space Behind the scenes, both teams at Unlimited and Upswing have worked collaboratively to secure support for the project and we can now announce that Ancient Futures will premiere at Brighton Festival in May 2023 before touring to Coventry’s Godiva Festival, BD: Festival in Bradford, Leeds 2023 and Greenwich & Docklands International Festival among others.
R&D. After watching his talk at New Scientist Live, she got in touch with Dr Daniel Jolley at Nottingham University to discuss the social ramifications of believing conspiracy theories, which informed how to categorise these theories from harmless to dangerous. With support from project partner ARC Stockton, Rachael jumped into a week of R&D to begin exploration for the show. This proved monumentally helpful as after working alone for two days and then with dramaturg, Lydia Marchant, for three days, she was able to present a 20-minute sharing of a script written over the course of the week. Rachael now has 30 minutes of script that can
part autobiographical, part Ted Talk and all entertaining. There is a lot of space in the script to explore collective trauma more thoroughly and this is something Rachael hopes to do with the next stage of R&D, talking with therapists about how we can overcome collective trauma. We are looking to put in a funding bid for R&D in 2023 so that Rachael can interrogate these key points further and complete the draft on this studio length show. ARC Stockton will continue to support the piece in creation and in touring. There is also further interest from two Yorkshire-based venues to support the piece and Rachael’s own development as an artist.
Anansi the Spider is a new co-production from Anansi Theatre Company and Unlimited, led by Artistic Director of Anansi and Core Artist Lauren Nicole Whitter. Anansi is an Akan folktale character. Taking shape as a spider, he is the Akan God of knowledge, wisdom and stories. He is one of the most important characters in West African, African American and Caribbean folklore. Originating in West Africa, these spider tales were brought to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Anansi is known for being able to outsmart and triumph over more powerful opponents through the use of cunning, creativity and wit.
This project explores retellings of the Anansi story through movement, storytelling and music. To gather these retellings, Lauren recently led an R&D process with the support of ARC Stockton. She spent time in Stockton in December 2022, gathering a creative
team of talented womxn of colour. The team looked at different versions of the existing Anansi folk tale, different forms of storytelling and how movement can be used to bring these to life. They also met with local womxn from the Global Majority with the desire to create these retellings in workshops led by Lauren. The workshops are safe and welcoming spaces for the participants to bring in their own stories and ideas centred around the themes involved in the original folk tale.
We have another phase of R&D planned for February 2023, which will take place in Derby with the support of Derby Theatre. This next phase will take on learning from Stockton and be applied to workshops that will take place in community venues across Derby. The work created in both phases will go on to progress the development of a touring piece that we hope to begin staging in 2023.
It’s been a big year for our Core Artist Jamie with her work on the amazing Hedwig and The Angry Inch and Happy Meal. On top of all this excitement, she also began work on her project with Unlimited - a new mid-scale musical about the trans experience in the UK. This multi-narrative show will incorporate diverse stories from multiple generations and backgrounds, telling historical and modern day experiences of trans people (including non-binary) from across the UK. It looks to capture the success and euphoria of these lives as well as the challenges they have overcome along the way and that they face day-to-day.
The production will be multi-disciplinary in form, incorporating live music, dance, video, animation and puppetry - unifying multiple stories into a cohesive whole and celebrating the breadth and
diversity of what it means to be trans and from this community.
With support from Sheffield Theatres and Arts Council England, the first stage of R&D began in December 2022. Jamie has started to explore the published and collected stories that currently represent the trans community, included those archived with the Museum of Transology. In early 2023, she plans to assemble a ‘supergroup’ of the UK’s most brilliant established and emerging trans writers and creatives, working in the mode of a TV writers room, to create a series of fictionalised narratives drawn from real stories.
The show is still in its early stages of development and is currently slated for production in 2024/25.
Speed of Wood is an art-ecology project exploring what the worlds of collaborative theatre-making and woodland ecology have to learn from each other. With a focus on co-creation, the dream for the project is a series of skill and knowledge-sharing workshops hosted in various woodlands around Yorkshire. Initially these will be with collaborative theatre-makers, ecologists, scientists and woodland crafts-people, forming the basis of a piece of live performance. This year, Ali ventured out to Kirkstall Valley and Slung Low’s Holme Valley for site visits and has been developing relationships with scientists, ecologists and research partners. It is a process-driven project being given the care and time it needs to grow, much like our woodlands.
Linked with the development of this project, Ali, and singer-songwriter Sam Slatcher ran Woodlands Workshops for the University of Leeds’ Be Curious Festival 2022 in May. Through music and storytelling, they led young audiences on an imaginative journey into the woodlands we grew up in, the woodland we’ve been to, and the woodlands we haven’t created yet. It’s not every day you wander through Leeds and imagine you’ve found a 2,000 year old Canadian Redwood.
The Price of Bread (previously The Breadmakers) is a collaboration with Jordanian-based writer and storyteller Sally Shalabi and Amman-based dance company Studio 8. Envisioned as an intimate multisensory theatre show, it will combine dance, immersive sound, storytelling and bread tasting to explore humanity’s 12,000 year relationship with bread making, food production and loss of connection to its land. Tyrrell has been developing the project concept this year, shifting the spotlight to reflect a current focus on the ecological, human and economic cost of bread production. He has been working to secure early development support for the project, with interest from creation and touring partners established.
Alongside this and connected to a personal project of Tyrrell’s about men’s mental health, a new installation piece was also created this year and taken to Latitude Festival in July. Mancave is about the ongoing identity crisis within manhood and masculinity. It invites individuals to playfully reimagine their relationship towards manhood, dreaming about what men could, should or should never be. Together with fellow Core Artist Rachael Abbey and designer Hannah Sibai, Tyrrell created an intimate moment of connection amidst festival chaos. The audience’s willingness to discuss, share emotions and make discoveries about themselves was profound.
The Space Shed, UNSA’s HQ, hit the road again in 2022. The first stop on the tour was Bluedot Hosted by the Jodrell Bank Observatory, the festival is a unique combination of music, science, arts and culture. In amongst performances of How I Hacked My Way Into Space, the team got to meet Cadets and Team Leaders old and new and even catch up with UNSA’s patron, British astronaut Tim Peake. The following week, The Space Shed landed at Camp Bestival in Dorset for a weekend of performances and special interviews with astrophysicist and science communicator Jen Gupta, and Abi Wright, founder of Festival of The Girl, She Stands and Arrive in Politics. These were also the first outings for our Director of Human Spaceflight’s newly upgraded spacesuit focusing on inclusion for our LGBTQ+ Cadets - “Space is infinite. Love is Unlimited”.
In October, The Space Shed was invited back to this year’s New Scientist Live in London to become The Engage Stage. It was a hugely successful weekend, hosting performances; 30 speakers to live and online audiences; talks on astrophysics, gender equality, deep ocean exploration and more;
an interactive science-based D&D game and an Ask Me Anything with New Scientist Live’s editor and journalists. The festival attracted over 25,000 people, including children and families, as well as enabling thousands of people to tune in online.
As always, thanks goes out to our amazing producing and technical team for another great year of Space Shed touring.
Our UNSA digital offering also remains live and active. Our astronaut training adventure, The Astro Science Challenge, which is free to access for children at home or in schools, saw over 400 new Cadets sign up to the challenge across the year. The Mission resources, broadcasts (including our interviews with astronauts Samantha Cristoforetti and Suni Williams) and news emails from The Astro Science Challenge: LIVE! in 2020 are also available via the website.
Also free to access across the world is howtosavethe.earth - our starter kit of practical things children and their families can do to help fight the the climate crisis.
This year’s activity doesn’t stop there, we’ve still got so much more to tell you about! In addition to all these projects, Unlimited was also invited to manage a celebration event in June for the University of Oxford’s Science Together Programme which explores how local community groups can collaborate with researchers and scientists at the university. Facilitated by our Chief Executive and Core Artist J, the event was a great success.
Following on from our public statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the pledges for change we set in response and last year Restarting our Company Culture, the team took its next step and began a series of sessions to explore Inc Arts Unlock, an anti-racism toolkit for the arts. We analysed our employment, worker care and leadership practices and committed to actions across 3 years. The first set of actions were built into our targets for this financial year and progress is monitored by our Board of Trustees quarterly. We also continue to collect feedback from our workforce and parters on our Induction Pack. This informs updates to the public template for fellow arts organisations to adapt. You can find this by following the Restarting our Company Culture link above.
On the subject of sharing templates for fellow organisations, in September we published our Net Zero Roadmap to be achieved by 2030 (at the latest). We’re spreading the word far and wide to not only invite our peers, partners and audiences to hold us to account, but also to encourage other organisations to create their own roadmaps, using the structure and content of ours as a starting point. As with all the resources and templates we share, the roadmap is unfinished. We plan to revisit it regularly, adapting, expanding and re-shaping our goals against internal and external progress achieved and availability of resources.
Workforce development and investment remained high up our agenda. This year, we called on the expertise of our trustees - freelance Writer and Director Nickie Miles-Wildin delivered training in disability awareness and creative access; Caroline Hollick, Head of Drama at Channel 4, put together a session for our Core Artists on writing for TV and David Nicholson, an organisational development specialist, facilitated a 360 review process for our staff team. In addition to this, Leeds-based Kit Heyam ran a session for the company on trans awareness; Core Artist Lauren attended training in risk assessments for youth programmes; Core Artists Tyrrell and Rachael attended sessions in the Freelance: Futures summer programme and our General Manager Sarah arranged an Easy Read workshop with Access All Areas for all members of the Yorkshire Touring Network. Since the beginning of the challenges presented by the pandemic, we’ve closely monitored investment in our workforce, especially our freelance associates. We promised to match the number of people hired and the percentage of funds invested against total annual expenditure compared to previous pre-pandemic years. In 2020 and 2021 we matched and exceeded our promise. In 2022 we significantly raised the bar, with the number of freelancers hired increased by over 35% and nearly doubling our percentage expenditure in freelance staff
There were some fond farewells and happy hellos this year too. We welcomed new trustee Pippa Hough, Events Producer at the Science Museum Group, to the Board in April and in October we said goodbye to our wonderful Digital Comms Manager Holly Close who has moved her endlessly impressive communication skills over to web development. The biggest thanks goes out to Holly for helping us tell our story online over the last 3 years.
In May 2022 we submitted our application to Arts Council England to renew our funding as a National Portfolio Organisation. At the beginning of November, we found out our application had been unsuccessful. This decision will lead to significant change in the company when our current funding agreement ends in April 2023. The funding currently finances our core costs, including staff wages and Core Artist fees, and works to leverage funding for the multiple projects we currently have in development. We’re not in the position to tell you what Unlimited’s future looks like yet. The writing of this report comes just weeks after the decision and we’re currently in a collaborative process to explore our options and future possibilities.
What we do know is that R&D on our projects continues. We’ve had an incredible year and there’s more to come. Ancient Futures production will go ahead next spring and development of Panic Stations, Anansi The Spider and the untitled trans musical will continue. We also celebrate our 25th anniversary next year.
We’ll post updates on our artistic programme and organisational development, on our Projects and News website pages. You can also follow our progress on social media (links to each profile on the next page).
We thank our partners, peers and audiences for their continued support.
www.unlimited.earth www.unspaceagency.earth www.astrosciencechallenge.com www.thespaceshed.earth www.howtosavethe.earth Unlimited
Rachael
Javairya
