Boundless Theatre announces We Will Probably Never Meet. With support from Bloomberg, We Will Probably Never Meet is the first project within the Delivering Differently programme, which ensures that young adults can continue to access invaluable cultural and creative experiences. Alongside this, Boundless renews its commitment to freelancers and emerging artists by supporting the Freelance Task Force and launches a fundraising drive to match fund support for a vital programme investing in young adults and artists.
Boundless Theatre, like many organisations in the theatre sector has had to radically overhaul budgets, ways of working and projects. Their autumn production of Flies by Charlotte Josephine has been postponed and European project Extended Universe, co funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union will be extended to 2021.
Since March the lives of teenagers and young adults have changed dramatically following the closure of educational institutions, cultural and social spaces. This moment in time would normally be filled with rites-of-passage for many young people, and these are now being missed by a whole generation. With internships and work-experience falling through, missing out on vital early work experience has set this generation back enormously. Across the country, young people have been feeling lost, having been largely forgotten in this economic crisis. Previous periods of recession have shown that young people are the hardest hit over a longer period of time.
Taking the decision to continue work and not furlough any member of the team as well as cutting overheads and diverting more resources in to creating additional activity for young people and support for freelancers has allowed Boundless to start looking to the future. Over the summer Boundless will launch their new project for 15-25 year olds in Bermondsey, Spalding, Peterborough and Oldham We Will Probably Never Meet, a new piece of telephone theatre created by artists Ryan Gilmartin and James Monaghan. This will be followed by a series of projects in which young people take control and deliver their own cultural projects as makers, leaders and innovators supported through crowd funding for our Future Now Fund.
Artistic Director of Boundless, Rob Drummer said today: ‘The theatre industry in the UK is threatened with total collapse and young and emerging artists and freelancers have seen existing and future job prospects disappear. Guided by our Advisory Group of 15-25 year olds we are maintaining what feels like a radical optimism and keeping our focus on delivering differently through these unprecedented times. As an organisation we are facing huge challenges but today I am proud of the entire team, our board and all of those in our extended family for their vision, resilience and passion to see more young people supported through access to culture and creativity. We aim to do more and are committed to seeing our work evolve and gain new relevance over the coming months as well as learning new ways to engage meaningfully with more young adults.’
