Theatre / mayfest
Mayfest 2020 programme announced
Mayfest, Bristol’s major festival of contemporary theatre returns in May 2020, welcoming genre-defying national and international artists working across visual art, dance, opera, music, cabaret and drag.
Curated by MAYK, one of the UK’s leading producing organisations, Mayfest 2020’s themes range from the global to the personal: the ecological crisis, our relationship with Europe, chronic pain, trauma, disability, motherhood and loss, and how we find strength and joy in challenging times.
MAYK’s Kate Yedigaroff and Matthew Austin, co-directors of Mayfest 2020, said: “Our Mayfest 2020 programme is a triumphant celebration of the incredible richness and diversity of this city we call home. Bristol has a unique community of creatives – makers, thinkers and disrupters – and it is in this context that we invite artists to come together with audiences in Bristol to explore what it means to be human.
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“This year we feel more acutely than ever the importance of spaces and environments that allow us to listen deeply and to celebrate the power of the human spirit to triumph in adversity. This is what this gathering shines a light on – artists making work that looks beyond borders both geographically and socially, that acknowledges complexity and that offers audiences an authentic and memorable good night out.”
Among the higlights, A Crash Course in Cloudspotting (led by Lost Dog co-founder Raquel Meseguer) is an installation-cum-verbatim-theatre piece that tells stories of people who need to rest throughout the day. It is an ode to invisible disability and to acts of bravery that often go unseen. Audiences are invited to take part in the subversive act of lying down in public, and to experience an audio-visual installation that articulates something of what it is to live with chronic pain.
In ‘A Crash Course in Cloudspotting’, audiences are invited to take part in the subversive act of lying down in public. Pic: Stephen James Moore
Performances by international artists include the UK premiere of Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey’s 50/50 old school animation, from New York. The deceptively simple performance, a diptych of monologues for two women, is a haunting meditation on voyeurism, misogyny, and our capacity for cruelty.
Elsewhere, Belgian artists BERLIN [Bart Baele & Yves Degryse] with Cathy Blisson present an immersive hybrid of documentary film and theatrical installation, Zvizdal [Chernobyl – so far, so close]. Pétro and Nadia are a couple in their eighties who were born and raised in Zvizdal, Ukraine – and remained following the town’s evacuation in 1986. Zvizdal builds a portrait of solitude, survival, poverty, hope and love between the couple who are surrounded by colourless, odourless but omnipresent radiation.
Mixing documentary film and theatrical installation, ‘Zvizdal’ follows a couple surrounded by the ongoing radiation from Cherbobyl. Pic: ©BERLIN[berlinberlin.be]
Two shows consider motherhood. Bryony Kimmings opens Mayfest with her critically acclaimed, sell-out show (Battersea Arts Centre, London and Edinburgh Fringe 2019) I’m a Phoenix, Bitch. Kimmings weaves a powerful, dark and joyful masterpiece about motherhood, heartbreak and finding inner strength. Meanwhile, Oh Mother follows RashDash’s award-winning Three Sisters. Abbi and her mum explore having (or not having) babies and becoming mothers.
RashDash return with ‘Oh Mother’
An eclectic mix of performance art and drag gets the festival party started. The genre-defying, Afro-futuristic Brownton Abbey weaves together a dance party, club-ready ritualistic performance art, and an experience of radical inclusivity that is out of this world. Created by and centering queer people of colour, especially those with d/Disabilities (aka s/Super Powers), the party’s fleet of ‘Noir Wave’ performance artists hail from the UK and as far as South Africa (festival headliner and rising star Dope Saint Jude). See the Mayfest website for DJ/artist lineup.
Mayfest 2020 also features an unveiling for a major new Bristol arts venue, as Bristol-based dance-theatre outfit Impermanence presents an eco-drag-cabaret-tarot-reading-ritual exploring anxiety, ecology, sexuality, gender, freedom and love through the magic of The Major Arcana tarot cards to launch new venue The Mount Without.
Mayfest 2020 May 6-24, various venues. For more info, visit www.mayfestbristol.co.uk
Read more: Upfest 2020 launches crowdfunder
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