Another Route is a project designed by artists for artists, built upon a spirit of internationalism and a shared understanding of the benefits of ensuring generosity, mutuality and collaboration are central to how we connect with the rest of the world. It will bring together brilliant practitioners based across England, particularly those historically excluded from opportunities to work internationally, with a broad range of exciting international and UK partners and collaborators. In spaces across the world they will have the opportunity to begin talking, imagining and making new performance together.
Nearly 400 artists and companies applied to be a part of another route. Those applications went through a thorough two-stage application process, with the final selection panel made up of Artists, Producers, Programmers and Curators working across circus, dance, live art and theatre over 5 continents.
The selected artists and companies are:
Alisa Oleva treats the city as her studio and urban life as material, considering issues of urban choreography and urban archeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Her projects have manifested as a series of interactive situations, performances, movements scores, personal and intimate encounters, parkour, walkshops, and audio walks.
Demi Nandhra is a neurodivergent artist and writer based in Birmingham. She makes and curates both solo & collaborative performances, live art, theatre with a focus on Mental Health, Care & Trauma.
Demi and Rafia Hussain received a Jerwood Arts 1:1 FUND award in 2021. Find out more here.
Figs in Wigs are Rachel Gammon, Suzanna Hurst, Rachel Porter, Sarah Moore and Alice Roots. Together they make semi-epic, genre-bending performance that sits somewhere just outside of live art, music, theatre, comedy and dance. Their work is recklessly joyful, highly visual and unashamedly revels in tackiness and trashiness. With an irreverent sense of humour Figs use puns, bad jokes and pop culture references to charm and disarm audiences of all ages.
Figs in Wigs received a Live Work Fund award from Jerwood Arts in 2020. Find out more here.
Gillie works with and in dance and choreography, creating performances, texts, events and pedagogical encounters.
Gillie’s work has a persistent interest in both the figure and the activity of the non-professional, and many of the projects have involved participation of non-professional collaborators or of the audience. In 2020, Gillie initiated a new cycle of thinking and working about fat and fatness.
Gillie is a Jerwood Arts Artist Adviser. Find out more here.
Hugh is a south-west based disabled artist who’s practice sits between the space of digital and live performance. Hugh wants to directly challenge categorisation, re-writing notions of what is disabling about being disabled. Shifting perceptions of disability towards positive identity drives his creative work, from the mundane to the theatrical.
Hugh’s work sits between theatre, performance, dialogue, live art and digital media. He’s interested in the flow between performance and space – a dynamic approach to explore, understand, question and ultimately challenge ‘othering’.
Hugh received a Jerwood Arts Jerwood Bursary in 2020. Find out more here.
An artist and writer based in Leeds, Jamal’s work is conversational, unapologetic and provocative with a social message. He makes work that he wants to see, intending to take up space as a Black queer person. He is the Artistic Director of Dudaan (du-darn), a Black queer enterprise – set up in November 2021. It produces his work – and creates opportunities, brave spaces and support systems for Black queer artists in the North. In 2018, he was awarded the Arts Council England Artists’ International Development Fund to do research in Trinidad and Tobago. His work has also been shown at Kampnagel (Hamburg), SPILL Festival of Performance, Royal Court, Battersea Arts Centre and the Barbican.
Jamal is a Recipient of a Jerwood Arts’ Live Work Fund Award in 2021. Find out more here.
Natalie Reckert and Mark Morreau
Playful, didactic, beautiful and highly skilled, world-class hand-balancer Natalie Reckert and digital artist Mark Morreau use technology and video projections to turn our conventional ideas of circus upside down and inside out.
Fusing circus and interactive technologies to examine the inner workings and fragmentation of the body, Natalie and Mark playfully investigate the relationship between the actual, and the mediatised body. Exploring the intersection of live acrobatic performance, close up video and spoken word, they embed movement on stage into projected landscapes on screen, to reveal the underlying mechanics, emotions and motivations of the circus body.
Based in East London, The Revel Pucks creative output is based in the belief that to create work of universal appeal does not mean a sacrifice of artistic integrity. Touring in big top tents, outdoors and in untraditional spaces, the Revel Pucks are striving to make and take their work to everyone, from everywhere.
Rhiannon Armstrong is an interdisciplinary artist who brings the audience-focus of a theatre background to work that has recently included radio documentary, sensory performance, and digital art interventions like The International Archive of Things Left Unsaid and The Slow GIF Movement.
Rhiannon’s practice is a form of deep listening that often results in gently interactive works made with unfiltered audiences in mind. Driven by collaboration, context, and an activist impulse, these are often designed as interventions in public space, for both the built environment and online. In recognition of this inclusive practice Rhiannon was awarded the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance (2019).
Rhiannon received a Jerwood New Work Fund award in 2019. Find out more here.
Sh!t Theatre are Rebecca Biscuit & Louise Mothersole. They make politically-engaged performance art using song, humour, pop culture & multimedia in a unique live documentary style. They research, write and perform their own work. They’ve been researching, writing, performing and drinking together since 2010 and have toured to some places and won some awards.
Verity Standen is a composer, director, performer and choir leader. Her work focuses on the human voice – gathering people together to sing, and exploring different ways that people can experience music. Verity likes to play with vocal music in ways that ask us to listen differently. Her projects take a range of forms – concerts, theatre pieces, films, installations, community events – but they always start with the voice.
Verity was commissioned by Situations in 2016 with Jerwood Arts support. Find out more here.
Yolanda Mercy is a BAFTA Nominee and Award Winning British Nigerian Writer and Performer for Screen, Stage and Audio; who works nationally and internationally.
Previously named an “Artist to Watch” by the British Council, part of the BFI x BAFTA mentoring scheme under the guidance of Anne Mensah and a winner of the prestigious channel 4 Playwright award, Yolanda is carving out a career across a variety of mediums. Her writing has featured in Huffington Post and she is a published author with Bloomsbury Books for her award winning play Quarter Life Crisis.
Another Route is designed by a consortium of UK independent performance companies led by Forest Fringe, Total Theatre Network and Artsadmin and supported by 1927, Action Hero, Candoco, Coney, Forced Entertainment, Gecko, The Javaad Alipoor Company, No Fit State Circus, Quarantine, Stan’s Cafe, Tania El Khoury and ZU-UK.
The project is supported by Arts Council England, the British Council and Jerwood Arts.
