Why Incoming Festival is heading to Manchester this year

Incoming Festival was founded five years ago by Eleanor Turney and Jake Orr at the New Diorama Theatre in London. Intended as a festival which offers a platform for emerging theatre companies, the organisation is now extending to include both a ten day run in London and in Manchester. Here, co-founder Turney explains why they've chosen now to head up north and what the challenges have been over the last five years since they began working on it.

Why did you first set up Incoming Festival?
Jake Orr and I used to run A Younger Theatre together. It was during the end of my time there as editor that we began to talk about what we were doing with AYT and how we could expand it. We had been batting the idea of a festival environment to support more young companies about. David Byrne, the artistic director of the New Diorama Theatre said: 'Stop talking about it and do it'. He pretty much said: 'If I give you my theatre for a week, what would you do with it?' It's a typically mad and generous thing for David to do.

How do you decide on the work that gets programmed?
It's work which has something that excites us. We see a hell of a lot across the year and often, even when shows don't work in one year, the company's next work, or the one after, will be ideal for us. We don't define emerging because it's such a nebulous term, we basically say if a company thinks 'emerging' is a label that they are happy to attach to their work then we're willing to consider them. Jake and I have very different tastes. If you know us you can usually see which shows we chose.

Why have you now decided to take the festival to Manchester this year?
It's been in the works for a really long time and it's actually coincidental that I now live in the north! Home in Manchester and the New Diorama have similar agendas in terms of supporting emerging companies. Originally we were imagining a Best of BE Festival model, where we pick the best of and tour them. But Kevin Jamieson, who programmes the studio space at Home said 'We'd kind of like all of it'. At which point we had to have a serious think about whether that was possible. It's always been our aim to make Incoming as non-London-centric as possible, while also having a London home.

Why Home?
It's a totally different set up to the New Diorama, Home is an arts centre, with a main space, gallery, cinema and restaurant. But we've found them to be generous, supportive and thoughtful about emerging companies.

Is it fairly simple to run it in two cities?
Logistically it's a nightmare, obviously. We are basically doing a ten day festival twice, across 15 days. The middle sections of the festival run concurrently. The whole point of Incoming is to support emerging companies, so we had to really think about how much it costs to send them round the country. We essentially had to make it as fair for people as possible and we have had some companies who said: 'We're really sorry but we can't make it work this time'.

Your Kickstarter campaign is still running until 9 June, will that money go towards this year's festival?
We've always done it on as tight a budget as we can. But doubling it this year obviously costs money. We are making sure everyone gets paid, company-wise, but we also looking to get some support for Jake and I. I've already written about why we wouldn't have an assistant when we couldn't afford one, even though there are plenty of people who would do it for free. So the Kickstarter is just the final bits and pieces. We have cut the budget to a point that we can make it work, the festival will happen no matter what, but the extra money will go towards travel and accommodation for the companies and other the things which will help make it successful.

What's been your highlight over the last five years?
The highlight of any festival is getting to write ‘sold out' over the chalk board. We always fight about that. But the best moments are when a company uses the festival as a launch pad to go onto the next level, then we've done our job. Kill the Beast is probably our biggest success story, they performed in the first and second year and have now gone stratospheric.

Incoming Festival runs in New Diorama Theatre, London between 25 June and 4 July 2018 and is in Home, Manchester between 29 June and 8 July 2018.