Mayfest 2024

A custom-made video game about labour, technophobia and sharing the load of revolution, designed to be played from beginning to end in a live theatre.

Dan is joined in an intimate evening of play by performer and collaborator Christopher Owen (Joe Moran, Scottish Dance Theatre) where Dan takes back the power by being dominated on his own terms.

A daringly unaccommodated piece of theatre that switches between scathingly funny stand-up and an audacious act of collective imagining. Produced by Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh.

A tactile installation for curious fingers and unbelieving eyes. Subverting the format of a touch tour, this sumptuous work invites audiences to participate in a series of touch encounters with unknown objects, materials and matter. Produced by MAYK.

A programme of intimate, movement led performances curated in collaboration with IMPERMANENCE. Directed by Roseanna Anderson and Josh Ben-Tovim, Impermanence is an award-winning dance company resident at The Mount Without.

An immersive hybrid of documentary film and theatrical installation, which shows two people living in a ghost town. A portrait of solitude, survival, poverty, hope and love between two elderly people in their eighties surrounded by colourless, odourless but omnipresent radiation.

Lightly touching on the topics of abuse, Caribbean migration, alienation, belonging, addiction, and violence, Goner utilises the formal tools of solo authorship and the aesthetics of horror to create radical visual culture from the marginalised perspective, and to tease out and establish a Black tradition of horror for the live context.

Memory of Birds is an interactive sound installation in trees in collaboration with a trauma therapist and migrating birds. The work explores political violence that literally and figuratively gets buried in contested lands.

Imagine a colourful, tranquil wildflower meadow amidst the hustle and bustle of Bristol’s built-up shopping centre, Broadmead. With their new project Broad Meadow, artists Sylvia Rimat and Charli Clark are growing that very place.

A true tale of love and transition told through the story of Pinocchio. Set in a fictional film studio, you are invited to go behind the scenes of Cade & MacAskill’s creative process and their relationship, and question what it takes to tell your truth.

In this new piece, Bert and Nasi dance the end of their relationship, imagining what a future without each other might look like. In the vein of their previous work, it is a poignant, sad and funny account of the ongoing ecological crisis.

Join us as we pass the mic to two exciting emerging creatives, Marley Small and Aish Humphreys, who will be curating an eclectic series of live events and performances. Taking place in Bristol Old Vic’s Weston Studio, this is an invitation to step into the creative minds of some of Bristol’s most inspiring young creatives.

Kaleider’s Arch is an attempt to build a freestanding arch, made two thirds of concrete and one third of ice, witnessed by a vigil of human voices.

Touching audiences with themes of death, renewal, and hope, Arch points towards the extraordinary, yet flawed, systems humans create – and, inevitably, to the impact of these systems on our ecological system, and on ourselves.

Join us as we pass the mic to two emerging creatives; Marley Small and Aish Humphreys who are curating an eclectic series of live events and performances for this year's Mayfest.

An intimate guided trail in the wonderful nook that is Nightingale Woods. Created by Kitchen Table Photo Club (KTPC), artist Esther May Campbell and friends, this trail takes you on close encounters with the 'Anything Moving' trilogy of short films made by kids and animals, as well as a wander through 'what remains' of a month long Mayfest residency in these trees.