Register your interest by
Sunday 7 September 2025 at 11PM
Behind the Scene is an ongoing series from Bradford Producing Hub that allows Bradford's performance makers to observe rehearsals and R&D processes.
Next in our Behind the Scene series is a 3-day observation placement with The Javaad Alipoor Company during rehearsals of their explosive Northern drama Elmet – created especially for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and coming to Loading Bay, Bradford this October.
Placement dates:
Tuesday 30 September – Thursday 2 October 2025
Placement times:
Approx. 10AM – 6PM
Placement location:
Media City, Salford
Elmet is a gutsy story of family, revenge and the ultimate price of freedom – set in the wilds of the West Riding, conceived and directed by Artistic Director, Javaad Alipoor, based on the novel by Fiona Mozley, this brand-new production receives its world premiere at Bradford 2025.
Cathy and Danny live apart from the world with towering bare-knuckle boxer Daddy, who’s built them an idyll amid the trees on a land “made of myths”. But a great reckoning is coming, led by all-powerful local landowner, Mr Price – and it threatens to smash apart everything the trio hold dear. Elmet comes to life on stage with muscularity, gut and grit, with movement from Deb Pugh (Ad Infinitum), new music from folk pioneers, The Unthanks, and design by Good Teeth, building to a jaw-dropping showdown finale.
Over the 3-day placement, we will:
- Pay you a bursary of £75 per day for your development time
- Provide £150 towards travel and/or accommodation costs
- Contribute towards any other access costs you might have, such as childcare, caring, interpretation etc.
The successful participants will join The Javaad Alipoor Company at at Media City in Salford on the following dates:
- Tuesday 30 September 2025
- Wednesday 1 October 2025
- Thursday 2 October 2025
Sessions are from roughly 10 AM until 6 PM each day.
Due to the location of this placement, we will cover travel as well as accommodation on the Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Candidates must meet the following eligibility criteria:
- Aged 18 years and over
- Actively making live performance relevant to the placement, or returning to making work after a break
and - Live in or make work in the Bradford district
or - Have a strong and demonstrable connection to the District and are likely to make work here that will benefit local creatives
The venue is fully accessible.
To make the registration simple and the selection process fair, we allocate places through a ballot.
How the ballot process works:
- You enter the ballot via a simple registration form linked below
- After the deadline, we enter all eligible registrations into a ballot
- We select a participant through a random selection process
- We inform all applicants of the outcome week commencing 8 September 2025
We will pay a bursary of £75 per day to participate in this placement, a total of £225 for the 3 days.
Due to the location of this placement, we will also contribute £150 towards travel and/or accommodation.
If you require financial support towards access costs, we will send you a form detailing these requirements with your offer of a place. Access costs might include childcare or other caring costs, interpretation costs such as BSL or other language support, access worker costs, or other access costs.
If you have an access rider, you’re welcome to send this to us when you register – you can email this to hello@bdproducinghub.co.uk.
If you need support with completing the form, or you need to submit your expression of interest another way, please drop us an email at hello@bdproducinghub.co.uk
About The Javaad Alipoor Company
The Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) makes ambitious, risk-taking, contemporary theatre, rooted in experimental and multi-platform practice. Our work leans into complexity to interrogate the key issues of our time. We ask questions and make connections, led by internationalist values and spearheaded by diverse voices, to understand the world we have made and can make differently.
TJAC was founded in 2017 by Javaad Alipoor, the Bradford-raised now Manchester-based British-Iranian artist, writer, director, actor and political activist. Over the past eight years, with Alipoor at the helm as Artistic Director, we have developed a signature brand of theatre that explores the complexities and contradictions of the 21st century informed by our Manifesto. Past productions include Made of Mannheim, a trilingual reimagining of Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans, and a trilogy of plays – The Believers are but Brothers, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World – about how technology, global politics and fracturing identities are changing the world. This autumn, The Javaad Alipoor Company returns to where it all began — Bradford — for the world premiere of Elmet, our bold new production commissioned by Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
