Offering a £10,000 commission, the Arch 468 Hope Prize is now open for submissions for a new play that offers a vision of hope. Hope is the fuel that drives every innovation, every attempt to advance the sum of human knowledge, every revolution and every leap of faith. Arch 468 are working to ensure that hope is not allowed to fade from public discourse.
The past few years have felt pretty challenging: from economic crisis, political polarisation and rampaging climate change to the global pandemic that has changed life as we know it. Many people have been struggling in the dark; it’s been hard to imagine a future bright with promise. But hope is important. It keeps people going, it helps imagine a better way of being and creates the curiosity needed to find ways to get there. Hope is what prompts us to make friends and fall in love, to make art, to have children, to protest, to vote, to learn. It is the lifeblood of life itself.
Arch 468 are looking to commission a new piece that offers a vision of hope for now and the future. The commission is for a full rehearsal draft for a new mid-scale play which Arch 468 will commit to produce in a fully-staged professional production. They will also offer dramaturgical support and creative friendship, supported by R&D resources as needed.
Submissions are open for a broad spectrum of forms and subject matter that challenge habitual assumptions about the world and people within it. Arch 468 is a project funded touring company that works across the small and mid-scale – the play must be something that can realistically be produced on those terms in both the live and digital realms. As a company, they are most excited by plays that are more than simple naturalism. They like the unusual, unsettling and uncanny and value theatrical experiences that speak to human instincts and emotions above the purely cerebral.
Rebecca Atkinson comments, We want to be surprised and inspired by a work that gives us a new vision of what our world might look like. That doesn’t mean some naïve Panglossian fairytale; we want to be truly convinced that the future can be bright and we want to share that hopeful surety with our audiences in a way that sticks. We want authentic feeling stories in dialogue with the world we live in now. We believe in the power of brilliant leaps of writerly imagination.
