Guest Blog: Why we're bringing back Incoming Festival

On 1 June, Jake Orr, David Byrne and I will kick off Incoming Festival 2015, a ten-day whirl celebrating the best emerging theatre companies we could find from across the UK and beyond, and bringing them to a London audience.

With 23 companies presenting work over ten days, we've got six world premieres, four London premieres, a whole lot of sleepless nights and copious amounts of gin ahead.

So why are we doing it? Well, when Jake and I started working on A Younger Theatre, we had no idea it would grow into the behemoth it currently is. While we are incredibly proud of how the website has grown, for a long time we had a nagging feeling that we weren't doing enough.

AYT offers a platform for young writers, and provides a service to younger or emerging companies in the form of reviews (often for shows that other publications simply can't cover). However, we wanted to do something more to support these companies, to go beyond critiquing their work but actually support the making of it. In a moment of madness, we floated the idea of running some kind of festival.

In another moment of madness, the wonderful David Byrne of New Diorama said "go on, then". Suddenly, we had a theatre to fill for a week. The team at New Diorama have been our cheerleaders, indefatigable supporters, sounding boards, fairy godmothers and gin-providers. And they're letting us do it all again.

'Audiences deserve to see exciting new work without risking too much money'

Audience and company feedback from the first Incoming Festival demonstrated that there really is a gap in the market for this kind of festival – also shown by our audience figures from last year, where 12 of the 18 shows sold out. Emerging companies need support. And new audiences don't grow on trees.

Every ticket to every show at Incoming will cost you just £5. As a direct result of this, and by marketing the Festival through AYT, 75% of last year's audience were in the 18-34 age bracket, and 84% were new to New Diorama.

We're running Incoming again because these companies deserve support. They deserve a chance to share their work with a new audience, and to meet their peers in a supportive festival setting. Audiences deserve to see exciting new work without risking too much money.

With Ideas Tap probably about to disappear for good and funding being squeezed ever-harder, anything that offers support (and cold, hard cash) to young and emerging theatre makers can only be a good thing. Incoming Festival is a small drop in a big pond, but we hope that the platform it offers will be a launch pad – as it has proved to be for some of last year's companies.

Kill The Beast, which sold out two shows last year, have gone on to win a Peter Brook Award and successfully tour The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, as well as selling-out their run in Edinburgh with He Had Hairy Hands. We're delighted to welcome back Smoking Apples and RemoteControl Theatre with their new shows, and excited to share the other 20 companies we've programmed with you all.

There's new writing, physical theatre, guitars, puppetry and a bit with a dog – something for everyone, we hope. These are the best companies you've probably not yet heard about. Why not take a chance, pay your fiver and come down to New Diorama in June?

Eleanor Turney is co-director of the Incoming Festival, along with Jake Orr and David Byrne. Incoming Festival runs from 1-10 June at New Diorama