Programme

A Folded Path is a pedestrian speaker symphony, a soundtrack for the city, carried through the streets by you, experienced by everyone it passes. Comprising of thirty custom-built, location-sensitive portable loudspeakers, each playing a different element of originally composed music. One might be playing a voice, another a sweeping violin or glistening electronic tone. The work creates a stunning and evocative cinematic layer over the city streets. The audience, divided into groups, takes a different route through the city, coming together at certain points to create moments of harmony and resonance between them.

Pull up a sun-lounger and enjoy your place in the sun. This all-inclusive holiday experience offers the complete package of wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony, around the glorious pool. Tom Marshman went on a holiday and viewed it through the filter of the seven deadly sins. From lounging by the pool, to hedonistic nights out and all-you-can-eat buffets, in his quest for ‘a place in the sun’ he discovered a world riddled with prejudice and xenophobia. A Place in the Sun explores the pleasure and pain, the highs and lows of all-inclusive holidays.

‘Afterlife’ - expands our longstanding interest with revealing unspoken narratives that change how we perceive life, to include mortality. It draws on visceral experience and insights from forensic anthropology, ecology and aesthetics. ‘Woodland’ - is one from a multiple set of audio narratives that invite listeners to reflect on what happens to their body after death in different environments - a woodland visitor turns to stone, a museum viewer becomes a desiccated figure, a canal user becomes sand – with each narrative compressing decades into minutes.

Before Us is the story of a creature, the last of an undiscovered species, facing extinction. It features an abnormally exuberant combo of live music, storytelling and dangerously impressive body movements. It’s a raucous, surreal, experimental melan-comedy about death, family and loneliness.

Birthday is a participatory artwork made up of large-scale drawings that commemorate the births and deaths that are happening everyday across the world. We use data to quantify the world, yet even on such pertinent themes of birth and death, once we pass a certain scale the information seems abstract and incomprehensible. Birthday is a work that addresses this subject by using drawing and storytelling to give us a context in which to understand some of these larger movements in life.

In Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols ‘Drag fabulist’ Dickie Beau conjures the spirits of celebrated Hollywood icons, leading you on a bewitching adventure as he channels the ghosts of his childhood idols. Dickie secured exclusive access to audiotapes of Marilyn Monroe’s final interview conducted by journalist Richard Meryman. Published in LIFE magazine just two days before her death, Blackouts includes material never before heard in the public domain and sees Dickie shape-shift through a shadowy soundscape of lost souls in a sensational trip to the subconscious underworld of his future self; bringing to life these audio artefacts. Blackouts is a study of icons in exile from society and themselves, and the haunting impressions they’ve left behind.

The Blind Tiger is Mayfest 2015’s late night speak-easy cabaret bar. It runs throughout the festival in Bristol Old Vic Basement. It acts as a post-show meeting point for artists and audiences, and is an opportunity for anyone to ‘do a turn’ on the stage. It was created as a reaction to the less-than-welcoming bar at Bristol Old Vic.

In previous years we have ‘themed’ the Blind Tiger. Its various guises have included 1960s Clockwork Orange style Milk Bar, a retro oriental theme and its original look as a New York prohibition era speakeasy. We’d like to return to this look for 2015, as we feel that it’s been the most successful. Think Hyde and Co / Milk Thistle; secret bars and jazz bars. We’re looking for low-lighting, slightly opulent (but also a bit seedy).

Confirmation is a show about the gulfs we can’t talk across, and about the way we choose to see only the evidence that proves we’re right. In an election year, where new voices have appeared in mainstream UK politics, Chris Thorpe and The TEAM Artistic Director Rachel Chavkin examine the phenomenon of confirmation bias through an honourable dialogue, real and imagined, with political extremism.

In Dance Marathon, there’s only one rule: keep moving your feet. Award-winning Canadian theatre collective bluemouth inc. bring their worldwide smash hit Dance Marathon to Mayfest. It’s theatre, it’s a party, it’s a dance contest and it’s completely exhilarating. Based on the 1930s Depression-era American dance marathons, you are invited to dance the night away under the watchful eye of the referee on roller-skates, the ticking clock and accompanied by live music from our very own Dance Marathon house band.

In a three-hour endurance contest, compete with your fellow dancers to be crowned Dance Marathon champion. Those with two left feet can simply sit back and enjoy the fancy footwork. bluemouth inc. create immersive site-specific performances that marry choreography, text, original live music, and film.

Because we can’t talk to the dead but we can talk to the living. Dead Line invites you to confront your own mortality, to ask another what you daren’t even ask yourself. A one to one encounter which will help you sleep at night.

Dead Line is a publicly sited work which is part- installation, part theatre performance, for one person at a time. Dead Line is a live encounter that creates a space to talk openly, or a little more openly, about our fears, hopes and desires for living and dying.

Would you let a child make you over? Well, now is your chance. Step inside the Fashion Machine with this unique combination of performance, art and design, where teams of local kids interview selected audience members who then give up the clothes on their backs. The kids then have 55 minutes to stitch, cut, sew, accessorize, and turn the brave audience members’ outfits into new works of wearable fashion art. Live close-ups of the kids at work fill one wall in a giant projected slideshow. The audience circles a Dr. Seussian workshop space as the kids go wild. The climax is a fashion show where the patrons don the new duds and walk the catwalk.

Interviews with the kids at the end of the night see them discussing the creative choices that inspired chopped-off sleeves, altered necklines and blinged-out accoutrements.

An interactive true storytelling piece for one audience member at a time that takes place in a parked car. It’s about being a teenager and those moments when you’re on the verge of something exciting.

It’s just me and you, and it kinda feels like something could happen.

In September of 2000, lighting designer Itai Erdal received a phone call telling him his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer and had nine months to live. Itai, a recent film-school graduate promptly moved back to Israel to spend every moment he could with his dying mother. During that time he shot hours of film and hundreds of pictures, documenting the final months of her life. In a starkly simple yet deeply profound new work, Erdal invites us to witness the story about the circumstances surrounding his mother’s passing. At the heart is Mary Erdal’s vibrant personality, the strong bond she had with her son and how she faced her imminent death.

How to Disappear Completely is a personal yet universal story of life, death and the special tie between a mother and her son.

I have a message for you from the past. Ok, it’s a message from this morning, so it may be the recent past. But it’s still the past.

This is an invitation to remember a previous version of yourself, to imagine a future version and to wonder who that makes you now. Hurtling is an outdoor performance for one with a cassette player and headphones that is re-made for each location in which it’s performed. It’s a glimpse of a fleeting moment as it zooms past; an attempt to grasp at a slippery present.

Will we ever get used to living in the new house? Are the neighbours really feeding cats to their dog? Why do they smell like lemons and cat wee? Where has Dad mislaid the children this time? Can he be unarrested before Mum gets home? And why is that car on fire?

Ed Patrick (aka Kid Carpet), is a Bristol-based theatre maker of nonsense music and rock’n’roll theatre shows. His funny and moving new show uses music, puppetry and projection to look at what it’s like to move into a new house in the city and find your place there.

Fifteen years ago in a small Irish town, four women decided to die. Over 40 days they prepared themselves for the end, destroying every trace of their existence. They left nothing behind. So this is not their story. We’ve just put words in their mouths. This show brings together fragments of tragic true events in a haunting and unforgettable way.

What would we hear if, on one night, we could enter into a museum of sounds – the sounds that have resonated through the site of Leigh Woods across its history? The echoes of a fire crackling through an ancient camp, or tidal rhythms above a tropical sea bed, three million years ago? Perhaps the sound of the Earth slowly turning, or the groaning of oak trees upon arctic tundra?

Following a year-long residency with the National Trust, performance artist Tom Bailey and sound artist Jez riley French invite audiences to go with them on a re-exploration of a beloved Bristol landscape, wandering with field recordings in the dark.

Night. We find a space in the margins of the city in which to gather: to start an ad hoc ceremony, to stamp our feet and shake our limbs, to dance in the face of an ending.

Of Riders and Running Horses is a stirring and visceral new dance event by Still House created as a communal animation of urban spaces. Six female dancers and a live band conjure a new kind of old dance, an insistent rhythm, a joyful step into what it means to move together.

The music is a rider and we are running horses.

Pulsating live music, extraordinary ensemble sequences and cinematic editing make Political Mother a dance experience like no other.

Performed by Shechter’s internationally acclaimed dancers, and accompanied by his visceral score featuring a band of live drummers and electric guitarists, Political Mother promises to draw audiences to Shechter’s world.

Astonishing unisons, percussive grooves and raw, honest physicality mark him as one of the most exciting artists to emerge in recent years.

Pop-Up Love Party is a philosophical feast, a multisensory contemplation of love and desire supplemented with a seven-course snack menu by Michelin-starred New York chef Daniel Burns.

After making shows about dying family members, war, and the end of the world, Zuppa decided to make a show that rattled and buzzed with joy. Pursuing the thrill of late night conversation, flirtation and intellectual illumination, Pop-Up Love Party is a riff on Plato’s Symposium - a classical text about a drinking game and the surprising nature of erotic love.

Rites is a powerful and provocative new production exploring the deep-rooted cultural practice of Female Genital Mutilation.

This ritual of enforced cutting has been performed for centuries and millions of girls worldwide, often as young as five years old, are still subjected to it. The reasons are complicated

Rites is based on recent interviews and true stories from girls affected across the UK; mothers who feel under pressure to continue the practice, and the experiences of midwives, lawyers, police officers, teachers and health workers trying to effect change in communities. The show weaves different perspectives into a multi-voiced production exploring the complexities, misconceptions and challenges involved in trying to change, what is to many, a fundamental rite of passage.

“In 2010, when my mother died, I was clearing out the freezer to make room for dishes sent by well-wishers and I found some of her old curries. My sister and I ate them. They were the last things my mum ever made that we would taste. They resurrected her briefly, in our minds. I then realised that I never learnt to cook like her, because she wouldn’t write the recipes down. To conjure my mum, I began learning to cook her dishes with my relatives, all burnt pans, sliced fingers and misshapen rotis. This is the story of that journey.”

Based on Nikesh’s award winning autobiographical novella, The Time Machine, Salt in the Sugar Jar invites you to an intimate site - specific storytelling performance that combine the preparing, cooking and sharing of food with a funny and bitter-sweet reflection on memory, family and grief.

In STAND, six activists – or at least, six people from Oxford who have chosen to act – take the stage and step in to the spotlight, portrayed by six actors: and the ideas to which they are devoted could hardly be bigger or more important. They’re ideas about how we make for ourselves a better, more sustainable future; how we live more equitably alongside those with whom we share our planet; how we protect from harm the places that tell us who we are; how we build our families and communities and raise our kids to have an instinct for bravery and kindness. And, most importantly perhaps, how we keep moving forward in the face of greed and corruption, and our own doubt and fear.

SURTITLE is about a few things....the unknown, light and shade, big-bold words, communicating... but most of all it’s about you and me and I’m really not too sure about you.

The Secret Slowness of Movement is a gentle invitation to dance and to be slow.

Visitors can join at any time and stay as little or as long as they wish.

It is open to all.

A motor-mouthed collage of spoken word and storytelling. Tales of paranoia, young love and ultra-violence. From the desk of Christopher Brett Bailey comes a spiraling odyssey of pitch-black humour and nightmarish prose.

With echoes of Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, beat poetry and B-movies, THIS IS HOW WE DIE is a prime slice of surrealist trash, an Americana death trip and a dizzying exorcism for a world convinced it is dying...

This Last Tempest is a sequel to The Tempest and begins where Shakespeare left off. Caliban and Ariel are left alone on the enchanted island, as Prospero’s ship sails over the horizon and out of view.

In the hours that follow, the magician’s former servants, the “savage” and the “airy spirit” are free to tell their unheard versions of the story. They use the magic of the words their master taught them to conjure-up their own brave new world, where spirits and monsters are people and inanimate things are alive. They perform a tempest and, as the wild waves roar around them, they begin again together.

A week of fresh new performance from emerging artists and companies.

Nothing - Barell Organ

The hours before we wake - Tremolo Theatre

Particles - Josh Coates

It is a story about this evening, one evening and every evening; a story of two men meeting in the middle of their lives, and at the outer edges of their friendship. As they strive for common ground – as they fight and fail - as the wine is drunk and the world falls apart - the possibility of the theatre as a place for community and change comes alive. From the creators of An Oak Tree, The Author and Adler and Gibb comes this spirited, funny and thought-provoking play about finding oneself and finding togetherness.

Wrecking Ball is a text to be read by an audience and two performers. It is a conversation about consent, authorship and putting words in other people’s mouths.

It is a story about a male celebrity photographer and a female celebrity. It is a question about how far we’ll go, how much we think we’re in control and how much we’re prepared to ‘go with the flow’.