Creation Theatre Company is celebrating news that it’s been awarded funding from Innovative UK’s Sustainable Innovation Fund to develop a new platform for digital theatre, create a new rep company to employ five actors permanently for six months, and to make the industry more sustainable.
Lucy Askew, Creation’s chief exec and creative director, is over the moon at news of the £165,000 grant and says: “We didn’t apply for the Cultural Recovery Fund because we didn’t feel we met the right criteria, so this is wonderful news. It means we can provide some much needed jobs for actors at a time when they are facing real hardship in the industry.
“We are also really excited about being able to develop a new platform for digital theatre that doesn’t rely on Zoom or other platforms, because we can make our shows even more immersive for our audiences by personalising them, making them more flexible, accessible and accommodating. We have already engaged some local business to help such as Charisma AI in Osney Mead, and Flipside further afield.
“Helping to reduce carbon emissions in our industry is also something we feel really strongly about, so having the means to now compile a roadmap for companies and the industry as a whole in how to achieve that, mainly through providing digital theatre, is also a really interesting project.
“We are not suggesting that we stop going to live theatre at all, but a meeting of the two worlds would be a happy compromise and something we will certainly adapt at Creation once audiences are allowed back into spaces to watch live theatre.”
Creation of course has excelled at providing high quality and world leading digital theatre since lockdown was first announced in March, its live digital work first emerging in the form of The Tempest which was then viewed all around the world.
Reviews in Time Out New York and global exposure continued throughout the next five productions which have included Alice, The Time Machine and The Merry Wives of WhatsApp.
And with Creation’s Christmas extravaganza Wizard Of Oz still to come in December, their success shows no sign of abating.
READ OUR REVIEW OF ALICE HERE: http://551.326.mywebsitetransfer.com/review-truly-a-shared-experience-why-creations-alice-is-leading-the-way-in-live-virtual-theatre/
“We are enormously grateful to have been given this opportunity which means we now have some security going forward. Sustainability has always been on our radar so to be able to contribute something positive is really exciting.”
