Contact Theatre

Find out more about the cast and crew that have worked with Contact Theatre. If you are interested in working with Contact Theatre or similar companies, join The Mandy Network and get alerted of upcoming job opportunities.

Contact is a space where new kinds of theatre are created.

Contact is a place where artists can meet, develop, explore and take risks.

Contact is a young people’s theatre, where you can grow, learn and make decisions as a young artist, audience member, organiser or leader.

**********************

Contact is a pioneering theatre venue in Manchester. The building includes three theatre spaces – Space 1, a 350 seat end-on theatre; Space 2, an 80 seat flexible studio, and Space 3, a rehearsal, workshop and performance space. We also create performances and events in our ‘lounge’ area, which has a stage, a bar, and plenty of room to dance! And our website is a space for debate, artistic showcases, insight into our processes, and sharing of ideas.

Our focus in on young adults (ages 13-30). The majority of our audiences come from this age group, though we welcome audiences and artists of all ages.

Participation is at the heart of our work, and we run a huge range of activities where young people and artists can join in, learn and develop. These activities range from outreach projects with a wide range of communities, to drop in sessions, to intensive artistic development programmes such as our Young Actors and Young Writers groups.

Young people are also encouraged to become involved in planning and decision making at Contact through a range of opportunities including our Open Contact forum and our Action Contact groups.

Contact provides a wider range of development opportunities for artists, with a particular focus on emerging artists. We run residencies, training courses, and we provide a lot of support and advice.

We believe that it’s important to collaborate with people in order to achieve the best results. Our partners range from local, national and international arts organisations who come to Contact to present or make work, to specialist agencies working with particular communities.

We are known as a company that embraces diversity. We believe that dieversty is a strength – providing us with many viewpoints, ways to solve problems, and creative ideas. We actively pursue diversity at all levels – including board, staff, participants, artists, audiences and partner companies.

We have won many awards for our work, including, in recent years the Art 04 and Breakthrough awards from the Arts Council, the Eclipse Award from TMA, plus many awards for our artists, writers and shows.

The theatre we produce can be described as lyrical, visual and passionate. We embrace music and the cultures surrounding music, a full range of visual media, and writers who are poetic, experimental and collaborative.

Many of the most exciting artists at Contact have developed through our participatory projects, but we welcome artists at all stages in their lives.

International collaboration is very important to us. We regularly invite artists from across the world to perform at Contact, and programmes such as our theatre exchange festival Contacting the World help to develop new kinds of artistic understanding.

We are constantly exploring new ways to develop, to learn and to create exciting theatre. We bring together passions, fashions, moods, moves, sounds, networks, anger, engagement, words, rhythms, visions and visuals in our theatre. And we are always ready to add new things to the mix.