Twisted Roots - Artist Incubator

To celebrate our 30th anniversary, we launched a 9-month incubator with seven partner venues in March 2025. We have selected seven British East and South-east Asian artists/ companies who are using a heritage art form in their modern theatre practice and support them as they create exciting works-in-progress as part of the Twisted Roots Festival.

• What is an incubator?

  By incubator we mean a development period which is supported by a commission, residency, and mentoring. During March - September 2025, the artists work towards a 20min performance extract to be shared publicly as part of the Twisted Roots festival.

  After this, September - December, we will evaluate with the artists and the venue partners what the next steps for their projects might be.

• What is a heritage artform?

  We are calling any traditional art form from the ESEA countries a heritage artform.

  We don’t necessarily expect people to use this art form in a traditional way, we are incredibly interested in how artists can incorporate this in a modern narrative performance practice, in the context of British theatre making.

• The objectives of the incubator:

  • Create space for contemporary approaches to ESEA Heritage Artforms in the modern British theatre landscape.

  • Provide BESEA artists with useful industry networks, tools and knowledge to develop their own work.

  • Develop BESEA artists and their craft to thrive independently and feedback into NET future projects where appropriate.

As part of the Incubator, we :

• Provide £2,000 to each of the selected artist/company

• Mentor the artists to move their project forward in development,
  provide bid-writing support where needed.

• Provide a platform for artists to showcase their work as part of our 30th Anniversary in September 2025.

Our performance venue partners are:

• Bush Theatre

• Sheffield Theatres

Our host venue partners are:

• Camden People’s Theatre

• New Diorama Theatre

• The Pleasance

• Sheffield Theatres

• Contact MCR

• Theatre in the Mill, Bradford

• Mercury Theatre Colchester

Our Supported Artists are:

Aya Nakamura with Akutagawa

hosted by Camden People’s Theatre

Phoebe Chan with Drifting 漂浮

hosted by Theatre in the Mill

Dragonboiz (cabaret collective)

hosted by Pleasance Theatre

Alisha + Alysha with Mahsuri

hosted by New Diorama Theatre

Jasmine Teo & Peiyao with Ahma and Louise

hosted by Mercury Theatre

Crossroads (Grace Waga Glevey, Haley Yiu and Yanni Ng)  

with Pamana

hosted by The Sheffield Theatres

Lumen Hirata Smith, Isabella So and Georgia Murphy

with Not That Asian

hosted by Contact Manchester