Boundless Theatre has announced the four artists selected for the latest edition of its year-long Accelerator artist development programme, which supports emerging theatre and performance makers in creating new work.
Emily Faye Baldwin, Isaiah James-Mitchell, Néa Ishana Ranganathan and Sam Smith have been chosen for Accelerator 2026/27 and will spend the next year developing original performance projects responding to a creative brief devised by Boundless Theatre’s young Advisory Group.
Titled Rage, Revolution, Grief, Love, the brief invites artists to explore questions around uncertainty, change and the future. The selected projects examine themes including identity, disability, alternative histories, political transformation and the search for connection in turbulent times.
Actor, writer and movement artist Emily Faye Baldwin is developing a dance-play inspired by her own experiences of ballet training, exploring femininity, teenage culture, pleasure and shame in what she describes as the Ozempic era.
Isaiah James-Mitchell, an actor-writer and alumnus of Emma Rice’s School for Wise Children, is creating Requiem for a Failed Minstrel, a one-man black comedy about a professional cellist facing a life-changing disability at a crucial moment in his career.
Néa Ishana Ranganathan, a transmasculine Tamil archivist, live artist and organiser, is developing A London Hour, an imagined oral history centred on a lost Tube line that runs through a liberated South London.
Award-winning writer, director and dance artist Sam Smith is working on BIG SKY!, a play with dance and music about young artists navigating love, art, grief and political uncertainty during an approaching apocalypse.
Previous editions of Accelerator have supported the early development of acclaimed works including For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron and Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates X) by Jade Franks.
The programme is designed to support early-career performance makers from underrepresented backgrounds, with a particular focus on Global Majority, migrant, trans and disabled artists from or living in Croydon and South London.
Participants will receive £4,800 in financial support, alongside mentoring, residency opportunities and creative development time. The programme will culminate in a showcase at New Diorama Theatre.
Pavlos Christodoulou, Creative Director & Co-CEO of Boundless, said: “The Boundless Manifesto invites us to care more, to dream and be curious. These values were embedded in this year’s Accelerator, within the call out, the selection and the design of the programme itself. I’m most excited by our residency this month, which will resource the artists to have time to focus on creative practice. Residencies have increasingly become a part of our programme and feel vital in a time where artists have so little space to dream, build community and take risks. Like the work the artists are developing, we are keen to respond to the moment, and our antidote to the times we are living in is to create the space to play, fail and care for artists, young people and ultimately everyone we work with.”
Accelerator 2026/27 is supported by the Idlewild Trust, Cockayne Foundation and Arts Council England through National Portfolio Organisation funding.
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
