Anna Newell
With another year of Arts Grant Funding in place thanks to the generous support of The Arts Council of Ireland, in 2026 we are retouring Up In The Clouds a blissful ‘spa for the soul’ that will tour across Ireland for 14 weeks in the first half of the year, visiting schools and hospitals in partnership with The Network For Extraordinary Audiences – one of the largest venue networks in Ireland and the only artist-initiated network in the country.
Up In the Clouds will also have a limited number of publicly bookable shows during February half-term in partnership with our co-producers Riverbank Arts Centre at an offsite venue in County Kildare.
Summer and Autumn 2026 sees us back in the water once again with our joyful watery hydrotherapy pool adventure Sing Me to the Sea travelling to branches of Enable all over the country, to the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, to St Gabriel’s Foundation in Limerick and finally to Babóro Festival in Galway.
We’ll also be in residence with Up In The Clouds with Children’s Health Ireland and collaborating with them around a CPD project for their staff looking to future projects in partnership with the new Children’s Hospital.
Following our 2025 Research Project, we’ll be taking the next steps towards a unique CPD project for teaching staff in special schools called INSPIRE EMPOWER EMBED in partnership with schools in Dublin and Co Wicklow.
And, following our Wicklow Arts Office funded residency, Still Waters Run Deep (working title), at St Catherine’s School at the end of 2025, we’ll be messing around on a Playdate with composer Isaac Gibson (who created the stunning score forAn Attempt To Talk With The Beginning Of The World) towards a brand new adventure for our audiences of children/young people with complex needs for 2028 production.
In other news, BabyLovesMusic under the leadership of Eamon Sweeney will travel to Wee Festival in Canada where we presented I AM BABA in 2022. BabyLovesMusic will then head out on a mini-tour of Ireland over the summer!
Anna continues to mentor a diverse range of artists and companies both in Ireland and beyond, with new connections made as far afield as New Zealand.
We are delighted to continue to partner with Riverbank Arts Centre as our primary co-producer on into 2026 and beyond.
In other news, Four Go Wild In Wellies, created in 2016 for Indepen-Dance (Scotland) and now in its 10th year of touring continues to wend its way around the world!