Break New Ground 2026: Recipient Announcement
Dublin Fringe Festival is excited to announce Tanya Bridgeman (TAN) as the recipient of the 2026 Break New Ground bursary! After reviewing over 200 incredible submissions to the bursary, we’re thrilled to support Tanya’s innovative new work for this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival.
The Break New Ground bursary provides a €4750 award, €750 for mentorship, and €2000 in in-kind support to help bring ambitious live performance ideas to life. And this year’s chosen project promises to be nothing short of captivating.
For the Break New Ground Bursary 2026, Tanya will be creating a new piece, GRETEL, for Dublin Fringe Festival this coming September.
GRETEL
TAN & JWY
Hansel and Gretel, reimagined for the concrete jungle.
Homes don’t hold. Rules don’t always stick. A sofa appears. A bag must be carried. Two young people navigate a city where survival is learned and protection isn’t guaranteed. Bass travels, the story shifts, and the audience begins to question what they believe in.
With a live DJ on stage, this solo spoken word performance blends rhythmic language with bass, silence and sound to create a live experience where the story is felt as much as it is heard.
16 Sep, 18:45 (preview)
17–18 Sep, 21:15
19 Sep, 13:30 & 21:15
ABOUT TANYA BRIDGEMAN
Tanya Bridgeman (TAN) is a Bajan-Irish multidisciplinary performer, spoken word artist, facilitator, and writer from London. A queer, neurodivergent, working-class artist, her work blends folklore, verbatim theatre, physical storytelling, and poetic text to explore memory, identity, migration, belonging, and inherited histories. A Mountview-trained actor, Tan creates work that interrogates identity, connection, and the complexities of lived experience through visceral, embodied performance. Alongside theatre and musical theatre experience, her practice draws from immersive theatre, oral storytelling, headphone verbatim, and spoken word. She also facilitates poetry workshops and community rooted creative spaces centred around connection, voice, and storytelling, and has previously worked as a lecturer at Rose Bruford College and the University of Northampton.
Her debut play, Shoes to Fill, exploring the migration stories of her Irish grandmother and Bajan grandmother to the UK in the 1960s, received an OffWestEnd commendation. Her play White Island, developed through the Soho Writers Lab, was shortlisted for the Tony Craze Award.Her current projects include These Waves Whisper, an Arts Council-funded verbatim work developed from interviews collected across Barbados, exploring oral memory, climate change, ancestry, and humanity’s evolving relationship with the ocean.
She is also developing The Skin We Shed through the Screen Ireland Spotlight Scheme. Originally developed as a play through the Rachel Baptiste Programme at Smock Alley Theatre, the work reimagines the Selkie myth to explore race, identity, intimacy, and belonging.
