The Company of International Artists is made by Brave Bold Drama, an award-winning theatre & community arts company based in Bristol. Agents Dali and Kahlo are played by Paul Lawless & Gill Simmons. You can find out more about us here.
We are a not-for-profit, working-class led, community interest company. Supporting us by purchasing a subscription means we can provide free performances and creative workshops for families, young people and people living with dementia in Hartcliffe and Withywood where we are based. These areas in south Bristol are some of the most deprived wards in the UK.
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Each month your child will receive inspiring printed creative missions, art postcards and classified codes direct through their letterbox. The codes will give them exclusive access to short films made by us to inspire them to take on each month’s creative mission. The first delivery will also contain an ART SUPPLIES STARTER PACK.
The art supplies starter pack we send with UK six, twelve and eighteen month subscriptions contains a lot of creative items. The idea is that your young creative agent is encouraged to get creative with anything that happens to be around. We've made a list of optional extra art materials here which may help.Please be reassured that our creative missions will never require specialist or expensive materials.
If your child has an active subscription during their birthday, you can opt for them to receive a personalised birthday card from Agents Kahlo and Dali.
A Company of International Artists subscription will introduce your child to a wide range of artists from all over the world in a playful, engaging way. The missions also encourage your child to create in lots of different ways including arts & crafts, creative writing and music making. It will help them to feel a part of something exciting, quirky and eccentric.
Photographs of your child’s artwork (and themselves if you wish) can be sent to us. We will display their artwork on the gallery page of this website and credit it with their secret agent name. We will send a personalised, handwritten note to your child with the following month’s mission congratulating them on their artwork.
When you order a TASTER MISSION you receive an A5 sketchbook branded with the CIA logo and a small box of coloured pencils along with a printed document, art postcard and codebook to unlock the taster mission film.
The creative missions are designed to be broadly accessible to children aged around 6-12 years, but older children and even adults could also enjoy this.
Make the purchase via the links on the SIGN UP page. We send an welcome email to everyone who purchases a subscription with a link to a quick online form where you can enter details about where you want the subscription posted to. It's also good for the main carer of the child to have our email address, so they know how to send in pictures of artwork the child creates for our online gallery.
We never write to children using their real names. The first thing we send is a Company of International Artists ID card which encourages them to create a new agent name for themselves. If the child's main carer emails us this name, we can then address the envelope to the child using their agent name.
We also credit artwork on our gallery using children's agent names, not their real names.
The costs of postage to addresses in the USA, Australia and Canada and would make this element prohibitively expensive.
Creative Missions are posted on the first Thursday of the month, and depending on local postal services, should be with you by the first weekend of the month for UK addresses, and some time after that if you're in the US or Australia. We can’t be held responsible for delays in receiving creative missions resulting from delays in postal services as this is obviously beyond our control.
The gallery is updated each week. Please allow at least 7 days for us to add agents' artwork to the gallery. Please note we can’t share pictures of children with their artwork without written permission from their legal carer.
We are unable to provide refunds on subscriptions. We are experienced creative facilitators and are confident that children will enjoy the content we are providing. We’re sorry if your child doesn’t enjoy the subscription service as much as you had hoped, but we are unable to refund you for this reason.
We are a small not-for-profit company run by 2 freelance artists. No-one receives a salary, and we have devised this subscription service as a means of covering our core costs which include insurance, costs of running our company van and accountancy fees. We’re sure you appreciate that for a small theatre company, it’s very difficult in the current climate for us to establish any kind of financial stability, and to provide refunds would challenge our efforts to remain financially stable.
We are based in an extremely underserved working class area of Bristol and use our profits to provide free performances and creative workshops for families, young people and people living with dementia in our community, which is one of the most deprived wards in the UK.
The information will be accessed only by Gill Simmons and Paul Lawless who are directors of Brave Bold Drama, the company providing this subscription service. We will never share any personal data with anyone else. Our data protection and confidentiality policy is available at the bottom of this page. You can find out more about Gill and Paul here.
Agents Kahlo and Dali sometimes break cover to perform playable family theatre adventures. Check out The Munch Mission and The Midnight Mission pages here for theatre intel.
We also sometimes run Creative Missions where agents can investigate art with us and also create their own. Check out the Events page for workshop intel.