Applicant info and further details
We will select 5 artists to create their work from November until March, when there will be a showcase of New Work.
Backround
In 2026, Theatre in the Mill turns 50.
Fifty years of artists, audiences, experiments, arguments, performances, failures, friendships and ideas. Fifty years of people passing through the building — some documented carefully, others leaving only a trace.
For UNTITLED 5, we invite artists to enter the Theatre in the Mill archive and ask:
What does an archive remember — and what does it forget?
We are not looking for a nostalgic celebration of the past. We want artists to disturb it
Open the boxes. Follow a name. Misread a photograph. Resurrect an abandoned idea. Find the gaps between the official record and what people remember. Ask whose work was preserved, whose disappeared, and what those absences tell us
You might encounter an artist whose questions still feel urgent fifty years later. A programme that reveals how Bradford imagined itself at a particular moment. A photograph with somebody unnamed at its edge. A project that failed. A radical idea that was never realised.
Use the archive as material: steal from it, argue with it, perform it, remix it, contradict it or imagine what is missing.
And then look forward.
What might Theatre in the Mill need to become for the next fifty years? What should we carry with us? What are we ready to leave behind? What should be placed in the archive now for somebody to discover in 2076?
TASK
UNTITLED 5 asks you to make a new work in conversation with fifty years of Theatre in the Mill — not to commemorate its history, but to activate it.
The archive is not finished. What will you add to it?
We will select 5 artists to create their work from November until March when there will be a showcase of New Work. Each artist receives £2,500 with producing, technical, storytelling support and use of all our facilities at TiM.
How to apply
Applications open: 14/09/26
Applications close: 12/10/26
To apply submit one page that expresses your idea and what art form you will use to express the idea. Send this application to theatre@bradford.ac.ukfinal piece of work can be up to 20minutes of an installation or new performance.