Emerge Company is our training and professional development program that brings together emerging theatre makers aged 18–25 to collaborate, train and create their own work as a company, under the direction of one of Canberra’s leading theatre practitioners, Christopher Carroll.
- Engage in an intensive 20-week program, two evenings a week, in the creative and practical work of making independent theatre.
- Receive specialist masterclasses from industry professional guests in Voice, Playwriting, Producing, Design, and more.
- Conceive, devise, produce and perform an original work of theatre, to be staged at Canberra Theatre Centre.
- Be supported by an experienced team of theatre professionals to help your work reach its full potential.
- Gain industry knowledge and connections to kick-start further career opportunities.
- Develop a network of collaborators with a shared creative language, laying the foundations to form an independent theatre company.
Emerge Company equips participants with the skills, experience, and industry knowledge to launch them into professional practice. Previous Emerge productions have explored the disorientation of entering adulthood in an unstable world in Carpe DM (2021), the online culture of digital natives in 503: Service Unavailable (2022), and a kaleidoscopic playlist of theatrical fragments about communication in Sympathetic Resonance (2023). Emerge alumni are among the most dynamic up-and-coming theatre artists in Canberra today.
We encourage theatre makers, actors, writers, directors, as well as artists from other disciplines to apply.
Meet your Lead Artist
Christopher Carroll
Christopher is a professional actor, writer and director from Ireland, trained at The Samuel Beckett Centre, Dublin, and Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris. He is recognised by audiences, critics and peers as one of Canberra’s most respected theatre artists.
As artistic director of Bare Witness Theatre Co., he has produced eleven shows to date, in Ireland, the U.K., France and Australia, creating theatre with a keen-eyed political conscience and physical élan. Recent work has included a searing solo adaptation of The Stranger by Albert Camus at Gorman Arts Centre (2021); a climate-crisis countdown about the dark arts of marketing, Smokescreen, at The Q (2022); and the cyberpunk surveillance epic, I Have No Enemies, at Gorman Arts Centre (2023), which will tour to Explosives Factory, Melbourne, in 2024. He has appeared regularly on-stage at The Q, The Mill, Smith’s Alternative, Belco Arts, and The Street Theatre, with acclaimed performances in Art (2022), Metamorphosis (2019), and Tourmaline (2018) to name a few.
Since 2021, he has been responsible for developing and leading Canberra Youth Theatre’s training and professional development program, Emerge Company. Through this intensive five-month program, an ensemble of emerging artists aged 18—25 are equipped with the skills, knowledge, and practical experience to produce their own work. Through Emerge, Christopher has directed the devised works Carpe DM (2021), 503: Service Unavailable (2022), and Sympathetic Resonance (2023), raising up an ambitious new generation of Canberran theatremakers.
Our Emerging Artists programs are made possible thanks to the
Jeremy Spencer Broom Legacy.
