A festival which promotes the best theatre talent in the Midlands is to return in 2017 in an expanded form.
The First Bite festival will visit the East Midlands for the first time and will use venues in Leicester and Derby as well as Birmingham.
First Bite began in 2009 and is programmed by China Plate, an independent theatre studio committed to nurturing original theatre that plays with form and has narrative at its heart.
All the companies taking part are based in the Midlands. Several have taken inspiration from local characters and stories.
Noctium draws on the story of pioneering Coventry-born sound designer Delia Derbyshire, composer of the Doctor Who theme while The Bone Ensemble’s cabaret about chocolate takes inspiration from the Cadbury-Kraft merger.
Three of the companies performing at First Bite will be chosen to receive a £3,000 commission to develop the work and present it at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry in autumn 2017.
Previous shows supported by First Bite Festival include Caroline Horton's You’re Not Like The Other Girls Chrissy, which has toured since 2010 and has been seen by more than 10,000 people, and Lucy J Skilbeck’s JOAN, a Milk Presents and Derby Theatre presentation which won three awards at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.
First Bite 2017 will feature 18 companies who will showcase new ideas and extracts from their shows.
At Derby Theatre, associate artists Maison Foo will perform The Interlude, a piece of visual theatre that will explore themes of migration, home and sense of place through human body, puppetry and digital projection.
At Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre, immersive theatre meets urban gaming in a political espionage thriller, A Moment of Madness by The Other Way Works. On the eve of the vote on radical new legislation to combat climate change, the revelation of a politician’s clandestine rendezvous threatens to scupper the bill.
At mac Birmingham, Noctium tells the story of the BBC’s radiophonic workshop in The Woman and the Wobbulator while LaPelle’s Factory adapts Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat which “upends the sanctity of the text and is likely to upset a lot of fans of classic gothic literature”.
First Bite will be at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester on Saturday 25 March, Derby Theatre on Friday 7 April and mac Birmingham on Saturday 22 April.