GAMESHOW and Emily Lim's GROWN UP Win Inaugural People's Theatre Award

Camden People's Theatre has announced the recipient of its inaugural People's Theatre Award: Gameshow & Emily Lim's Grown Up, a new project that explores the questions young people want to know about growing up - placing the words of adults in the mouths of young performers. The award will support a period of R&D in which the company works with young people and adults in the West Euston community to develop an initial scratch version of a show. The company will receive £1500 towards the project, as well as rehearsal space and mentoring.

Gameshow is a company dedicated to collaborative performance projects. Their previous work at CPT includes The HS2 Project and This is the Moon, That is the Earth (we are here, we are here). Emily Lim's most recent project (as co-director) is Islington Community Theatre's Brainstorm (***** 'Outstanding' The Times). She has previously created work at the National Theatre and Southwark Playhouse and has extensive experience working with marginalised communities.

With over 100 applicants and an exceptionally strong pool of applications, two further artists, Katy Baird and Venice as a Dolphin, have been selected to receive support as part of the People's Theatre Award activity.

Katy Baird will launch ReDress, a new project exploring the ways in which we construct our identity through consumption, which will see the artist re-living discarded identities of her past through a series of three year-long performances. The first year will include the selling of all the clothing she currently owns in various public locations including local markets and CPT - as well as online documentation, interviews and discussions around the topics the work explores.

Venice as a Dolphin's Camden People's Radio will be an internet radio station physically located at CPT that asks 'who are your people'? The project will provide a prototype for a highly localised theatre-based radio station, led by artists and based on grassroots engagements with the communities in the immediate vicinity of theatre.

Launched to mark the twentieth birthday of Camden People's Theatre, the People's Theatre Award is a new prize for projects that combine innovation with potential for public impact. It seeks to demonstrate the popular potential of new forms of theatre. The prize rewarded proposals that promised to engage new publics with CPT's work, while retaining a commitment to new and imaginative ways of making and performing theatre.

Brian Logan, artistic director of Camden People's Theatre, said: "We're delighted to announce the winners and runners-up of our new People's Theatre Award. The award was designed both to honour CPT's two-decade history, and focus our enquiry into the overlaps between popular and experimental performance. We were overwhelmed and excited by the volume and quality of applications, through which process we've struck up many fruitful new relationships and ended up with three projects we can't wait to help bring into being. This new work by Gameshow and Emily, and those by Katy and Will, rises thrillingly to the challenge posed by the award, to twist theatre into new shapes and, by doing so, connect new audiences and communities with theatre, and with CPT's work."

About CPT

Camden People's Theatre is a central London space dedicated year-round to supporting early-career artists - particularly those making work about issues that matter to people right now. Its mission is to refresh and strengthen the performance sector with a new generation of artists who bring a fresh perspective to contemporary concerns, and create new artistic forms with which to address them; and to present their work to a new generation of audiences.

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