About Us
Bounce Theatre creates original work with children and young people. We work in schools, community spaces, and the places people already gather, creating performances, projects, and creative work shaped by the people in the room.
WHAT WE BELIEVE
Everyone deserves access to ambitious, joyful theatre and everyone has something to bring to it.
We make work that starts from that belief. When the work is shaped by people who communicate and experience the world differently, the art gets richer.
“At home, I’m mum to two children, one of whom is a minimal talker. We meet each other in different ways, and I see the world differently because of it. That experience sits underneath everything we make at Bounce.”
Louise Pendry, Founder
HOW WE MAKE OUR WORK
Our practice is inspired by our name. We bounce ideas together.
We begin with a starting point and offer it into the room. Children and young people pick it up, respond to it, reshape it. It returns changed. We meet it where it's landed. The idea moves forward through the group until something begins to hold.
Our artistic team read the room constantly, adapting, listening, changing the form of the work in real time to how participants respond. Visual art may shape storytelling. Movement can open up how narrative can be felt. Working in non-traditional theatre spaces allows us to reshape the relationship between performer and audience.
We're interested in what theatre becomes when it's built from different ways of communicating, thinking and responding. Our work doesn't begin with a fixed form. It emerges through attention, listening, and care.
Sometimes that becomes a show. Sometimes a story. Sometimes joyful play.
"As a teenager, I see spaces for kids and I see spaces for adults. This was a space for me."
Participant
We make theatre that is ambitious and always made with children and young people. Their participation is part of the art. Through the process of making, we hope to grow confident thinkers, imaginative storytellers and generous collaborators.
