Tom Bailey

Theatre maker

Tuesday, 29 April 2025 - The EFFEA Stage: emerging artists at the core of festival making - Arts Festivals Summit 2025

Tom Bailey is a theatre maker based in Bristol, England. For over 12 years he’s been creating contemporary devised, touring performances through his award-winning company, Mechanimal. The company’s shows have received both a Herald Angel Award and widespread critical praise in the UK and internationally.

The severity of climate issues generates a toxic atmosphere of negativity and fear surrounding nature. Tom makes art to change this. For him, nature is a fascinating, creative, unfolding thing that pushes the limits of possibility and imagination. Climate change, scary as it is, offers an urgent opportunity to look closer and explore this bizarre, ephemeral and deeply mysterious planet in ways we haven’t imagined. It offers a fresh challenge to completely rethink so many aspects of how we live; and, for Tom, a calling to re-examine how and why live performance is created, and what function it fulfills for those who experience it.

Tom’s work entails an evolving exploration of these things, taking him on artistic journeys through bird migration, extinction, resource extraction, Arctic geopolitics, and algorithmic patterns in sea shells. Amid the Anthropocene, he is drawn to explore the fragile spaces between the Human and Non-human; the No-Man’s-Land where the Human ends, and Other presences begin.