Twisted Showbiz brings together the work of a growing generation of international performance-makers determined to dismantle and reconstruct this thing called ‘theatre’. Here, mutations of theatricality turn our understanding of truth and fake upside down. Equally influenced by reality television, mtv, CCTV, chatrooms, and karaoke as any history of theatre, this programme is riven with false endings and swan songs, stagger-throughs and star turns, bad impressions and failed illusions. Here theatre teeters on the edge of uncontrollability then stumbles to its feet again.
Please note, performances marked !! contain adult themes or imagery. Parents/guardians should exercise caution when taking under 16s along.
Events that are open to non Festival Pass holders are marked throughout the site with ticket prices and also below. Please note, because Festival Pass holders get priority booking, some of these tickets will only be on sale from Weds 1 February from 9.30am (phone) or 10am (in person).
This Performance is a magical place in which apparently nothing takes place and yet an enormous amount happens. Director, David Weber-Krebs manages with minimal resources to breathe life into empty space until the audience no longer knows who is the performer, ‘us’ or ‘them’.
For five years Miguel Pereira’s performances have been dominated by a nameless pop star, a shimmering rock n’ roll icon, embodying glamour and grime, loneliness and connection, perfection and failure. But now he must die. Pereira has shifted the obsessive, symbiotic relationship between performer and audience by inviting ten non-choreographers to complete the legend and choreograph the stars death. The results will be presented for the audience’s pleasure and a vote will determine the order of the Top 10 deaths.
In revealing the destructive love (or lust) at the heart of the entertainment industry, Pereira raises questions about authorship, audience and the role of the public in creating and destroying their icons
Presented for the first time since their critically acclaimed West End run, the end of a relationship has arrived. Speaking to each other rarely, both having taken on part time jobs, this show is presented separately from opposite sides of the stage.
The pair are acutely aware that your time is precious but there really is quite a bit of information to get through in their allocated time slot.
Don’t miss nobleandsilver run their show into the ground.
Interweaving overheard conversations, everyday interactions between lovers and observed habitual relationship patterns, Love Song Dedication is a fragile and raw exploration of the ordinariness of love. Working with notions of inconsistency and regret, Dennis evokes a compelling meditation about being in and falling in and out of love.
From the award winning Pacitti Company comes a major new work exploring myth, money and magic. A Forest is a place where skin is turned into wallets and straw gets spun into gold; where being an ass means looking an ass; where storming off alone can mean the difference between life or death.
Internationally acclaimed for their strong visual style Pacitti Company are well known for their uncompromising approach to image making. Made for limited capacity audiences A Forest is an intimate event fusing cutting-edge sound work with upfront live performance. A stab wound in the heart of an easy life, this is desperately uneasy theatre.
Crack Actor Crack. London arty underground honky-tonk Duckie come to Bristol for one night only for a mixed-up, post-gay, twisted-showbiz, big Saturday night shindig.Celebrate old time theatrical traditions in performance and installation as we put actors on the game, take a baseball bat to burlesque, piss our pants with stage fright, smash up our Olivier Award, tap dance in the toilets and wear too much greasepaint. This event is for pansies, performance artists, out of work actors, drugged dancers, hopeless students and old women.
DJs Readers Wifes play brilliant modern rock’n’roll for the straight people and crap old fashioned show tunes for the gays. Or the other way round.Society hostess Miss Amy Lamé presents a performance programme of up-to-date revuedeville.Visualist Simon Vincenzi puts performers and prostitutes on a pedestal.Duckie are south London’s premier pop and performance purveyors. Come and join us and ham it up for Inbetween Time.
“Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone sharing a shower.
Gene Hackman loading a gun.
Tom Cruise on an operating table.
Susan Sarandon’s head in a bucket.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in a room that is slowly filling up with human shit.”
Packed with death, danger, jetlag and sex, Starfucker creates a mischievous, imaginary movie conjured up in text and soundtrack alone. The viewer is invited to imagine a catalogue of Hollywood A- and B-list stars in a sequence of (unlikely) violent and intimate scenarios.
Lone Twin write, run and pant their way to the top of the world’s highest vantage point, the summit of Mt Everest. With only one hour to complete the five and a half mile climb, and with a thirty thousand word paper to read, Lone Twin place their trust in expensive mittens, John Denver and the biology of nostalgia.
A short performance written over the five days of Inbetween Time.
We’re interested in you, IBT’s audience. From the start, we’ll be amongst you, watching and listening. In the privacy of our hotel room, we'll write, rewrite and pull it all together. At the end, we'll stand up in front of you and deliver our review.
Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead make art that explores human identity, physicality, interaction, social rituals and the everyday public and private realms in which they are played out. Responding to unconventional sites, FrenchMottershead encourage participation and activate audiences through performance and mixed media. FrenchMottershead’s new work for the close of the festival subjects the audience to close scrutiny. In a reversal of customary reviews, they will examine, evaluate and critique audiences, not artworks.
“In Manuel Vason’s partnerships with artists…. a performance work is either restaged anew or developed specifically for his camera. These projects, works of pure collaboration, differ in principle from conventional performance documentation in that Vason, camera in tow, is always the sole witness to the singular live event, which also takes place in a non-theatrical space of the artists’ choosing…“As points of departure , each collaboration is predicted on a series of mutual concerns; a challenge to the role of the camera and of photography in relation to individual and group activity; a fascination with the body, in its multiple and radical diversity; and an interrogation of new forms of collaborative practice.” Dance Theatre Journal
