The BE FESTIVAL, Birmingham’s celebration of the best of European theatre, will showcase new performances from Spain, Italy, Denmark, France, Hungary and Germany among others.
Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the festival will have a new home: Birmingham REP.
The first week features an exclusive double-bill: Finger, Trigger, Bullet, Gun, written for Birmingham theatre company Stan’s Cafe by Serbian playwright Nenad Prokić, uses thousands of dominoes to signify the outbreak of World War I and Danish company Out of Balanz returns with its award-winning show from 2013’s festival, Next Door. The two productions can be seen in the REP Studio from Wednesday until Friday, 2 to 4 July.
Each night of the second week features four 30-minute shows with audiences offered the opportunity to eat dinner with the performers in the interval.
Festival highlights include an evening of solo shows from the participatory loops & breaks by Julia Schwarzbach (Austria) to Ilsa’s Garden, a “dark, probing silent cabaret” from Anna Peschke of Germany.
Radioballet—aka Hungarian dance artists Bea Egyed and Milan Ujjvaro—will perform in front of an English-speaking audience for the first time with From The Waltz to the Mambo while Iraqi actor and director Mikhallad Rasem (Belgium) will stage his meditative piece Waiting.
David Espinosa and El Local Espacio de Creación (Spain) explore whether bigger necessarily means better in Mi Gran Obra (My Great Work), and Jamie Wood (UK) stages his own epic Wimbledon final in Beating McEnroe.
BE FESTIVAL runs from Wednesday 2 July until Saturday 12 July. The full programme is available at the BE FESTIVAL web site.