Mayfest 2015: ten highlights

Pop Up Love Party
Sat 23-Sun 24 May, The Kitchen, Silver Street
The UK premiere of Canadian theatre company Zuppa Theatre’s delicious re-imagining of Plato’s symposium on love. Says Matthew Austin: “Staged in a restaurant with a menu designed by Michelin-starred chef Daniel Burns, Pop Up Love Party is a luscious, exuberant contemporary celebration of love, romance and desire. And the food is pretty special too.”

Salt in the Sugar Jar
Sat 16-Mon 18 & Wed 20-Sun 24: location revealed on booking
Bristol fiction/TV writer Nikesh Shukla (whose debut novel Coconut Unlimited was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award) presents his first theatre piece – a culinary remembrance of his mother.
A MAYK/Theatre Bristol commission, with additional support from Asian Arts Agency and funding from Arts Council England, Salt… is based on Nikesh’s award-winning autobiographical novella The Time Machine – and invites audiences into an intimate storytelling performance that combines the preparing, cooking and sharing of food with a funny and bitter-sweet reflection on memory, family and grief.
And yes, there will be food.
Limited capacity: advance booking essential.

Rites
Tue 19-Sat 23, Factory Theatre
Following 2012’s smash hit The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, National Theatre Scotland return to Mayfest with this provocative new production exploring the deep-rooted cultural practice of Female Genital Mutilation.
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. 

Before Us
Fri 15-Sat 16, Bristol Old Vic Studio
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.
The multi-award-winning Stuart Bowden creates lo-fi, offbeat, music-infused storytelling: past outings include She Was Probably Not A Robot, The Beast and Doctor Brown and His Singing Tiger.

Lippy
Fri 22-Sat 23, Bristol Old Vic
In 2000 in Leixlip, Ireland, an aunt and three sisters boarded themselves into their home and entered into a suicide pact that lasted 40 days. We weren’t there. We don’t know what they said. This is not their story.
Created by Bush Moukarzel and Mark O’Halloran, Lippy is a play about authorship and the role of the writer, bringing together fragments of tragic true events in a haunting and unforgettable way. “Like nothing else you’ll see,” enthused The Irish Times’ five-star review, while The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner labelled the show “a blinding, sometimes confounding piece of performance.”  

Political Mother
Tue 19-Wed 20, Bristol Old Vic
First-ever visit to Bristol for the much-admired Hofesh Shechter dance company. Shechter is one of the hottest choreographers around – and, if you think you don’t like contemporary dance, this could be the show to change your mind.
With additional music by Bach, Verdi and Joni Mitchell, Political Mother uses pulsating live music, extraordinary ensemble sequences, and cinematic editing to create a unique dance experience.
The show’s ten dancers and one special performer perform relentlessly against a backdrop of live and recorded music composed by Shechter himself – the seven musicians play hard rock on electric guitars and drums. The effect is like being at a rock gig combined with a dance performance – loud, powerful and forceful, but with moments of calm and reflection.
“Part dance show, part heavy-rock gig, Hofesh Shechter’s first ever full-length work is an audio-visual marvel… As ambitious and as heads-down, hair-prickingly exhilarating as modern dance get,” said the Daily Telegraph.

Blackouts
Fri 15-Sat 16, Bristol Old Vic
In Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols, drag artist Dickie Beau shapeshifts through a shadowy soundscape of lost souls in a theatrical trip to his subconscious underworld, leading audiences on an adventure in found sound as he channels the ghosts of his childhood idols. The show features never-before-heard audio from Marilyn Monroe’s final interview.
The “digital script” has been written entirely using audio artefacts and the performance incorporates much original source material, including the ‘Judy Speaks’ tapes – Judy Garland alone in a room with a Dictaphone, making notes for a memoir never to be written. The resulting show is a portrait of the ageing artist, a study of icons in exile – from society and from themselves – and the haunting impressions they have left for so many of us.

Of Riders and Running Horses
Fri 15-Mon 18, secret outdoor location
The new show from Bristol-based Still House, a Bristol-based company led by choreographer and theatre-maker Dan Canham. 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.
Matthew: “This new piece is an exciting departure: an outdoor ensemble dance piece for six dancers with live music composed and played by Sam Halmarack and Luke Harney (Typesun). Performed at dusk on the top of a multi-storey car park. Delicious, exhilarating and something quite out of the ordinary. Why would you not be there?” 

Dance Marathon
Tue 19-Thur 21, Trinity
This worldwide hit show by bluemouth inc. takes its inspiration from a physically gruelling spectator sport of Depression-era America, and asks the audience to join this interactive four-hour marathon in which the only rule is to keep moving your feet. The show features live music and DJs and is guaranteed to bring out your competitive streak. Bring your dancing shoes…

Confirmation
Fri 22-Sun 24, Bristol Old Vic Studio
The critically acclaimed, 2014 Fringe First winning show, written and performed by Chris Thorpe (Unlimited Theatre, Third Angel), developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin (The TEAM).
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”. Working with research into the phenomenon of confirmation bias, Confirmation is an attempt at a dialogue with political extremism – and to find out how we believe what we believe, and how we can end up so far apart.
Matthew: “We saw Confirmation in Edinburgh last year, where it was the talking point of the festival. Deeply, profoundly political, difficult and completely brilliant, it’s an 80-minute blast to the senses about how we look to confirm our own beliefs. Chris Thorpe chose to challenge his own open-mindedness by opening a dialogue with a white supremacist. Blistering, challenging stuff.”

Mayfest takes place from Thursday, May 14 to Sunday, May 24. Visit www.mayfestbristol.co.uk and b247.staging.proword.press/channel/whats-on/theatre-01 for more details – and see our interview with Matthew Austin here.