We are so excited to announce that we have been successful with our third attempt at Arts Council funding. We won't lie, it's taken a ridiculous amount of thinking, zoom meetings, planning, writing and rewriting, but we're very grateful that at last a 'yes' has come through. The funding we have received will enable us to start a new project - Cautivas, which we're creating for non-theatre spaces and will be structured around community engagement work with audiences in South Leeds.
We, as independent artists, value transparency with our peers and within the community. The first time we applied was at Christmas 2020, and we were told that we needed to strengthen our audience engagement. The second time we applied was in April 2021, where we were told that other applications were preferred, so we flipped it back round in two days and were finally successful. We've received just over £11,000 which will fund:
20 days of studio based research
62 hours of community engagement reaching an estimated 90k people
Mentoring and support from 10 different creative specialists
Valuable reflection, evaluation and development time for ACCA as a company
We will be updating the website with a brand new Cautivas page, where you'll be able to follow the project in blog posts, livestreams and various engagement activities. If you're not already on our newsletter, you can sign up here to find out first what's going on! However, if you have any questions, or you want to know what we're up to, feel free to get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!
Finally, and most importantly, we wouldn't be in this place with the support of Alan, Matt, Ruth and everyone else at Slung Low who from the moment we walked in have been the kindest, most friendly people, who we are honoured to work with as a partner for this project (and hopefully in the future). Katie at The Dance Studio Leeds, Kirsty, Rosie and Julia from Yorkshire Dance and Kate & Rachel from Pro Dance Leeds have also been wonderful in the process so far and we're super excited to have them as partners moving forwards for this project. Thanks also goes to our producer João who is now going to take the reins on the behind scenes and just let us focus on being creative, which feels like such a luxury.
For now, we'll be taking a little bit of a pause over August and then diving right into the R&D over September and October, so stay tuned!!
Massive love,
Anna & Charlotte x
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