12 artists and companies awarded Another Route Fellowships

Artsadmin is proud partner of Another Route and we are thrilled to be able to announce the 12 artists and companies that will form the Another Route Fellowship. These artists and companies will travel with us over the next 18 months on a remarkable artistic journey to internationalise their creative practice. 

• Alisa Oleva
• Demi Nandhra 
• Figs in Wigs
• Gillie Kleiman
• Hugh Malyon 
• Jamal Gerald
• Natalie Reckert and Mark Morreau
• The Revel Puck Circus
• Rhiannon Armstrong
• Sh!t Theatre
• Verity Standen
• Yolanda Mercy

Scroll down to find out more about each artist. 

Another Route is a project 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 & ZU-UK. The project is supported by Arts Council England, the British Council and Jerwood Arts.

Nearly 400 artists and companies applied to be a part of Another Route. Thank you to everyone who applied to be a part of Another Route. Each application went through a thorough two-stage application process to arrive at this group of 12 artists. You can read more about the application process on our website.

We cannot wait to get started on this journey with these brilliant artists. Follow that journey on Artsadmin and Another Route’s Instagram. 

About the artists

1. ALISA OLEVA (@alisaoleva)  

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.  

2. DEMI NANDHRA

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.  

3. FIGS IN WIGS (@figsinwigs)

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. 

4. GILLIE KLEIMAN (@GillieKleiman) 

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. 

5. HUGH MALYON (@ymmv2019) 

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. 

Hughs 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 legitimises his lived experience as a disabled body to create original  performance and engage audiences on a human level. 

6. JAMAL GERALD (@jamiboii) 

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. 

7. NATALIE RECKERT AND MARK MORREAU (@natalie_inside_out) 

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. 

8. REVEL PUCK CIRCUS (@revelpucks) 

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.  

9. RHIANNON ARMSTRONG (@armstrongtactic) 

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).  

10. SH!T THEATRE (@shittheatre) 

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. 

11. VERITY STANDEN  

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. 

12. YOLANDA MERCY (@yolandamercy) 

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.