Bold Makers is back. This award has been set up to support and facilitate emerging theatre companies in the development of a new piece of work at an early stage of development. Each selected company will be paired with a specialist mentor to support the development of new work.
CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FOUR WINNERS
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ALPAQA
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KASSNA
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MotoBR Team
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Sweet Treat
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CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FOUR WINNERS ✳︎ ALPAQA ✳︎ KASSNA ✳︎ MotoBR Team ✳︎ Sweet Treat ✳︎
Our Winners for BOLD MAKERS 2026
ALPAQA
ALPAQA is a queer & migrant-led theatre company, making ‘Trojan Horse theatre’: using raucous humour and high camp to interrogate urgent political themes. Our practice blends in-the-room devising with poetic writing and music, tempered by a clowning background. Fighting for change whilst being as silly as possible.
We reject the fourth wall, treating audiences as active co-conspirators in a sweaty, ecstatic, and dangerous theatre that prioritises migrant joy as a form of resistance.
Our debut show JEEZUS! won the 2025 Untapped Award and The Stage’s Fringe Five. Previous collaborations with other Alpaqa members include: The Dirty Thirty, Playing Latinx & Eating Myself.
KASSNA
KASSNA, meaning “a woman wearing a man’s hat” in the southern part of South Korea, is an interdisciplinary performing arts collective advocating for East Asian female and migrant working-class voices in the UK. Led by Namoo Chae Lee and Suyoung Park, KASSNA explores postcolonial female bodies, migration, and the tension between cultural inheritance and contemporary identity. We create bold, poetic, socially engaged work across movement, music, visual imagery and collaborative practice. Built on trust, generosity and care, KASSNA tells stories between cultures, identities and forms, tracing how history, migration and power shape everyday life, society and bodies.
MOTOBR
MotoBR is a co-creation project developed by Gustavo Dias-Vallejo alongside five Brazilian delivery workers in London (Naira Brandão, Luiz Queiroz, Ane Silva, Alexandre Vásquez, Dyogo Costa) produced by Weronika Dwornik. The show is part of a longer creative collaboration between the group including a short documentary, an exhibition in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts and a collective performance for the Totally Thames Festival 2027. The co-creation performance project gives participants a platform to creatively speak for themselves while illuminating aspects of the relationship between migration, cheap and unregulated labour and technology in the 21st century.
SWEET TREAT
Sweet Treat makes work that is playful, unsettling and a little dangerous. Formed by performers and makers across theatre, film, dance and music, we create actor-led worlds where humour and darkness sit side by side. Rooted in ensemble and play, our process explores the strange chemistry that emerges when people are pushed beyond themselves. We are interested in transformation, power, devotion and the messy space where performance and reality begin to blur.
Our mentors
told by an idiot
IN BED WITH MY BROTHER
dante or die
This award has been funded generously with the support of Southwark Council.