We return to the Trinity Centre following last year’s sell out hit The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart with this exhilarating song-play based on the 9th century epic poem.

Direct from New York City, the Herald Angel Award-winning Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage harks back to the raw and rousing style of storytelling in the old Scandinavian mead halls, turning the stage into a cacophonous swirl of explosive original music combining Weillian cabaret, 40s jazz harmony, punk, electronica and Romantic Lieder.

In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act effectively outlawed raves, banning public gatherings around amplified music characterised by “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

Beats is an award-winning new play written and performed by Kieran Hurley; a coming-of-age story exploring rebellion, apathy, and the irresistible power of gathered youth, with techno.

Lots of techno. Featuring a live soundtrack from DJ Johnny Whoop and psychedelic 90s-inspired visuals from VJ Jamie Wardrop, BEATS tells the story of Johnno McCreadie, a teenager living in a small suburban Scottish town at the time of the Act.

Maritime history and crochet come together in this year’s Mayfest and Theatre Bristol commission, Hook, Skip, Repeat by Cornish artists Jeremiah Krage and Heidi Dorschler. Appearing around Bristol during this year’s festival will be several large-scale rope ‘doilies’, structures created by Krage and Dorschler in collaboration with the people of Bristol. Using brightly coloured rope and a giant crochet needle, the artists will invite passers-by to help them weave these eye-catching spider’s web-like creations – a playful and interactive celebration of collaborative effort. Inspired by Bristol’s history of rope making and ship building, combined with the traditional ‘woman’s craft’ of doily making, Hook, Skip, Repeat is an invitation to make something together, with friends and strangers that we can proudly display for everyone to see.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the festival, we have teamed up with Bristol Ferment to commission ten brilliant artists to make a new work in response to one of the senses.

These ten new commissions, woven through the festival programme, invite you to explore new spaces and sensations, and offer ten new perspectives on how we experience the world around us.

Artists: Richard Allen, Jo Bannon, Benji Bower, Lucy Cassidy, Laura Dannequin, Sam Halmarack, Kathy Hinde, Tom Marshman, Sleepdogs, Tom Wainwright

FOUNDER Like some backroom carnival ride, or lo-fi sci-fi pleasure machine, Amusements is an intensely sensorial and breathlessly seductive headphone-theatre spectacular that asks what exactly we might want from our entertainment, and what it might want from us.

With the audience plugged wirelessly into its beating heart, the performance is both a hypnotic dance towards the limits of pleasure and an unsettlingly voyeuristic tribute to our private desires.

In an interactive installation, one performer delicately works through a series of conversations between her and her grandfather. Whilst she celebrates and maps his ageing process a confused world is built around her.

A tender, delicate investigation of mental health that invites an engaged audience to decipher a confused mind.

Imagine if your well-thumbed guidebook could talk. Think of the stories it would tell about the places it’s been, the characters it encountered and all the narrow escapes along the way.

This intimate installation invites you to take a seat at a desk in Bristol Central Library and investigate clues within a guidebook that magically comes to life as you turn the pages.

Jenna’s friend was the victim of a violent attack on the streets of London. Discovering that there were bystanders at the scene, Jenna began to explore why we choose to intervene, or not, and asks whether ‘one punch is enough’ to provoke an intervention.

Flâneurs is a new piece of live-art theatre that deconstructs the “bystander effect”, which states “the larger the crowd the less likely it is that anyone will intervene.”

An epic three-part disaster movie for the stage. A story of heroism and tragedy told with Lego figures, dinosaur slippers, microphones, business cards and Google Street View. Each part can be watched separately or experienced as a single piece spanning multiple evenings and multiple locations.

Located somewhere between a theatre show and a stadium pop concert, Sam Halmarack & The Miserablites are the bombastic pioneers of interactive stadium pop. Get ready for handclapping anthems and electro music to move and inspire. With songs, stories and a little help from you we will all come together to offer a unique take on what it means to be redeemed by music. A lightning-fast journey from the depths of failure to collective euphoria in the space of just a few songs.

Tucked up in the intimate Wardrobe Theatre, this is your chance to be entertained by inspiring new theatre talent for just a fiver. Every night is different.

The 100m Sprint. By Tumbling Hat Theatre.

Echo Beach. By Hannah Sullivan, in a double bill with Our Dads. By Stephen Voake and Troy Orchard.

Maskboy. By James Wheale

Wealth’s Last Caprice. By Chris. Dugrenier (pic), In a double bill with If Things Don’t Change. By Amy Louise Webber.

There May Be Explosions. By Carrie Rhys Davies.

Before their mysterious disappearance, the Spavaldo brothers performed their flying trapeze daredevil stunts without a safety net for over a quarter of century. Now they are back to tell their story and dare audience members to join them inside the big top, high up on the flying trapeze!

The Great Spavaldos is an immersive experience for two people. Fitted with video goggles and headphones you will be given instructions to take the lead role as a circus performer.

Not suitable for people with heart conditions or fear of heights.

More Beckett than Beckham.

As sports world bigwigs prepared to descend on London for the 2012 games, and bureaucratic busybodies tried to figure out how best to exploit the national fervour, Ridiculusmus created its very own satirical take on it all.

Picking over football systems, political wrangling and changing room banter, Total Football tackles the big questions of life; immortality, happiness and why England always lose.

Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed (The Smile Off Your Face, Mayfest 2009 and Internal, Mayfest 2010) return to Mayfest with the third part of their ‘Teenage Trilogy’, All That Is Wrong.

All That Is Wrong looks at the world from the point of view of a bored and lonely eighteen-year-old called Koba Ryckewaert. Koba knows that all sorts of things are wrong with the world, including her. She resorts to resolving these wrongs the best way she knows how, without a computer, without a family, without a lover. Fixing things on her terms.

Composer and choreographer John Moran presents the final in a series of theatrical portraits. Goodbye Thailand (Portrait of Eye) tells the story of Eye, a 19 year old in Bangkok who struggles to find a safe place for herself. Goodbye Thailand (Portrait of Eye) is accompanied by a live score by Derevo’s sound designer Daniel Williams, who adds his improvisational sensibilities to Moran’s precision choreography and sound-work.

Winter, 1974. A little girl waits for her mother to come home with a new baby. It’s twins! Summer comes and the three girls are caught on cinefilm, playing in the garden.

Cooking Ghosts is the moving story of a woman who has no choice but to leave her children. A tale of tenderness and laughter turns to sadness and confusion, and the children abruptly lose their innocence. In this surreal and raucous show, an attempt to understand the past becomes a daring journey through the veils of memory that yields surprises and awakens ghosts.

Cooking Ghosts is a fusion of visual story telling, puppetry, archive film footage and a specially created soundscape.

How is it that you know of this city? It is only now that I have dreamt of it. Still Night - Bristol, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, casts the city in the leading role. The show begins as a seminar on Bristol, seen through the eyes of a foreigner.

The city slowly drifts into the distance of our imagination as, in near darkness and surrounded by luxurious sound, we find ourselves in a corner of the gardens of Xanadu, considering the empire of the Great Kubla Khan.

Wild Thing I Love You examines our experiences of searching for a legendary mythical creature in rural America. Using recordings of conversation from people we met on the way, film, animation and live performance, we cross into a world where the wild and unknown can exist. Held in an intimate tent with a limited audience this is a beautiful exploration of the things we cannot see, the spaces they might exist in, and our desire to believe.

In a double first for Bristol, we welcome National Theatre Wales to the city, and we stage theatre at Motion, the vast club in the heart of the new Enterprise Zone. And what a show it is too. Enter the unique world of Praxis Makes Perfect. Become part of an immersive gig imagining the life of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the millionaire Italian communist at the heart of many of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century. Smuggle a manuscript out of Russia, be tortured by the CIA, play basketball with Fidel Castro. With Feltrinelli, anything is possible.

You just fucked up. Now what? Sometimes, fuck-ups are so massive, there’s no way back. In this Fringe First winning show, poet Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe examine the poetic guts of mistakes in a bundle of words and strip lighting. Fucking up is the truest, funniest, most terrifying moment you can experience.

The oh fuck moment is a conversation around a desk for brave souls to hold their hands up and admit they fucked up, or for people to laugh at us because we did.

The utterly brilliant Paper Cinema (King Pest & Night Flyer, Mayfest 2009) are in residence at Mayfest 2013, where they will be working with Bristol-based animators and artists to create West, an entirely new show inspired by the city we call home. Paper Cinema will create a laboratory of creativity in the heart of Bristol’s creative industrial home. Nestled between Bristol Old Vic’s workshops, Puppet Place and Spike Island, Bristol Diving School will be brought to life with paper, scissors, pencils and music.

‘These are the brains of Those Who Have Passed. Those who could not keep up. Those who lost, the disqualified, the eliminated-from-heats. The dead: the dead-to-us-now.’

Amidst the litter of brains of Those Who Have Passed, Jess, Chris and Ira vie for success.

Gym Party is at once a delicate and violent three-way contest and a hilariously confused call-to-arms. It will explore the psychology of winning and the nature of pride: the desire to be and get the most, in all its triumphant and ugly incarnations.

Presented here as a work-in-progress showing. Participation in awkward teenager dance following the performance is optional.

The Forest & the Field is a gently seductive, immersive piece of storytelling. Relaxed and informal, yet passionate and provocative, The Forest & the Field opens up an irresistible invitation not only to theatre makers and thoughtful audiences, but to anyone with an interest in how we live today.

The Forest & the Field creates a space for reflecting on theatre, from inside the moment of its happening. It asks us to consider what happens when we meet in a theatre space.

He who picks his words well, can turn the weakest argument into the strongest. In a virtuoso performance and sell-out hit from the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe, Valentijn Dhaenens pays tribute to 2,500 years of oration. Using fragments of well known and lesser known speeches, he shows that the tricks of the trade have hardly changed.

Zero is a world where nothing is certain, where women can be tigers and men snakes and where families, marriages and friendships are laced with sibling rivalries, frustrated desires and murderous ambitions. Heavens open and lives fall apart. Here, we are all at the mercy of the stormy weather. At least we can still sing the blues.

Visceral and emotional, Zero features an explosive cast of eleven performers and seven musicians. An exemplary band of musicians including, legendary harmonica-playing Bluesman Johnny Mars and trombonist Annie Whitehead playing Paul Clark’s original score.

Drawing on an eclectic range of references from the blues to Hurricane Katrina to King Lear, Zero is a turbulent mix of dance, music and theatre on an epic scale.

A surround-sound action-adventure which happens mostly in your head...

In a diminished world of screens and virtual-reality, join our resistance heroine as she sets out on a mission to break some glass and change the world.

Inspired by graphic novels and insurrectionist texts, A Thousand Shards of Glass combines an extraordinary solo performance, evocative sound design and a rich rhythmic text, to take you into a fantastical world. Be prepared for time travel, for exotic climates and to find yourself becoming complicit in a conspiracy.

You are meeting Eve at the cinema after she called you out of the blue. You cut contact with her when she got involved in the whole memory thing. The last time you heard from her, she was on the run accused of dealing mems. Now she wants to see you.

Set in a world where mobile phones can record and replay memories, The Memory Dealer is an interactive experience. In multiple locations around the city centre, memories have become trapped in everyday objects and you’ll encounter members of the underground mem-user subculture. Eve is desperate to prevent the government giving a single corporation ownership of all recorded memory. How far will you go to help a friend?

Using live music, choreography, stunning visual imagery and talent from Belarus, the UK and Australia, Trash Cuisine explores issues behind imprisonment and torture with particular focus on the death penalty in a dynamic, affecting and nerve shredding performance.

The Beautiful Machine is an a-cappella chorus led by composer and director, Jennifer Bell.

As the sun goes down, this song cycle gives voice to the unspoken dreams and desires we have to keep the lid on in the workplace. Temple Songs is an intricate, heartbreaking celebration of the quiet victories of every day.

Performed in the vast gymnasium, and featuring a choir and professional gymnasts, the piece responds to the 2012 Games by exploring the athlete’s drive and determination to achieve physical excellence.