The story so far

30 July 2011

A is for Atlas exists to create extraordinary live arts experiences: extraordinary for the artists who participate in making them, extraordinary for the audiences who participate in their having been made. We believe that inter-arts collaboration and a broad-based collaborative process are the essential ingredients to the success of this endeavour, and claim novelty in enshrining these ideals in our company mission.

Inside our creativity:
- A new project may be conceived by anyone, from any inspiration (image, text, theory, question).
- Input on developing the central idea of any project is sought from as broad a base of contributors as possible, from the arts and beyond, ensuring unique perspective within the project team.
- Each project requires its own unique process trajectory, but always involving intensive cross-collaboration between these differently disciplined practitioners, resulting on close co-creation of the work.
- The role of the director or project leader is to facilitate the co-creative process, to shape, mediate, and focus the work’s essential vision.

Our processes foster communication and understanding between a diversity of people, generate new methods of collaboration, and encourage artists to own both the creative process and its outcome.

The results are powerful performance works, which allow audiences into performance as something altogether new: a unique creative interaction that reshapes their experience of art.

A is for Atlas has created six new works since 2006, garnering critical acclaim for probing the edges of performance practice. Our audiences are consistently strong—our most recent work Heracles High 5 was the sell-out success of the 2010 Arts House Future Tense season—and their responses emphatic: we present vibrant new performances that have people reimagining the audience experience.

We’re not just doing it in the studio. We have been engaging communities in our creative practice through youth mentorships, creative programming in the local not-for-profit sector, and seeding long-term arts- based collaborations with community groups abroad; empowering communities, and particularly their young people, to creatively and collaboratively tell their own stories. Beyond that, we’re also building capacity in our creative community by partnering with independent artists and ensembles in the delivery of their own creative visions; some 31 projects to date.

We are also not content just to be doing it now. We are equally concerned with being here in 2020 to fulfil the next generation of creative inquiry, as with realising present creative goals. Our commitment to organisational development and structural sustainability was epitomised in 2010 by the forging of a triennial funding relationship with the Dennis Osborne Clarke Charitable Trust, managed by ANZ Trustees. The support of the Trust, and of our long-term company partners Design to Print, JCDecaux, Plakkit and Yarra Trams, has us reaching into the next five years—and the five beyond that—with great confidence in our mission.

With seven new works in or approaching development, the next chapter, at least, has us on the edge of our seats. Join us on our creative journey.