A PARTNERSHIP between a leading Dorset theatre group and a women's fitness company has fought off an Oscar-winning film studio to land a prestigious award.

Curves, who run a number of women's fitness centres, teamed up with AsOne Theatre and won the TLT Solicitors Brand Identity Award at this year's Arts and Business South West presentation ceremony in Bristol.

And they pipped Aardman Animations, the creative team behind Wallace and Gromit, and the Bristol Silent Film Festival to the post.

The accolade is given in recognition of a business/arts partnership that has demonstrated maximum impact on a business' brand values and reputation objectives.

AsOne artistic director Jane McKell said: "We are so thrilled to have won. It is a pukka award and means a lot to us. When we won they told us that we had a quality that surpassed the other, bigger businesses.

"To win it, we had to show business acumen because it is getting harder all the time to get public grants and when we do, we have to prove that we can spend it wisely."

She added that the aim of the award, presented by Bristol-based Arts and Business South West, was to get artistic and commercial concerns linking up in innovative ways, rather than just putting their brand logos on everything'.

At the outset, AsOne Theatre were looking for a business to benefit from a partnership with touring theatre and because Curves had outlets in six of the towns visited by the theatre company, Jane felt they were the perfect match.

AsOne's tour target audience for the show Let's Do It! - a celebration of the life and work of Cole Porter and Noel Coward - was middle-aged women which was ideal for raising the Curves profile and expanding membership throughout five counties of Wessex.

Joe Hart, a business consultant whose wife Barbara is the franchisee of Curves centres in Weymouth and Dorchester, said: "It's just fantastic, when you think we were up against Aardman Animations and the Silent Film Festival, neither of which are exactly without funds.

"Jane McKell is one of our members and we were talking about their tour and I realised that six of the towns she was touring to - Weymouth, Dorchester, Exmouth, Ferndown, Wimborne and Salisbury - were places with Curves outlets so everyone would benefit through our involvement."

Jane said: "Working together, AsOne and the independent businesses, who individually did not have resources to develop such partnerships, built great rapport with the customer's experience at heart. It enabled both partners to reach new audiences, improve reputations, raise profile, and build brand identity in a creative way.

"The partnership and promotional synergies benefited both staff and clients and they supported Breakthrough, Breast Cancer Research with collections throughout the tour."

Now the partnership has triumphed, Joe expects the partnership to evolve, as and when the theatre company go on to stage suitable productions. And Jane hopes the award will lead to bigger and better things.

"Hopefully, now the Arts Council will sit up and take notice of us, see what we do," she said. "It underlines the fact that we have ideas and are writing new things. We are not just producing old work but are being innovative.

"The award will underline the fact that we are on a firm footing as a business and we work hard. It takes something like this for us to be able to put our head above the parapet and move forward."

Up and coming projects for AsOne include Tie A String of Pearls, which is based on the wartime memories of children and women and Hey baby!, a joint project with the government agency Surestart Dorset devising and creating a play with music and film about the journey from conception to birth.