For the second successive year three weekends of free outdoor performances are to be staged around Birmingham Hippodrome.
Summer in Southside will involve more than 30 companies featuring regional, national and international artists transforming the city’s Southside district around Hurst Street, home of the Hippodrome, and Arcadian.
Visitors will be able to experience performances including drama, street theatre, contemporary dance, aerial dance and hip hop.
Paul Kaynes, Birmingham Hippodrome’s creative programme director, said, “Last year’s Summer in Southside offered visitors two weekends of great performances with audiences of more than 12,000.
“This year we’re producing a bigger festival over three weekends featuring the very best in outdoor performance culminating in a special Bank Holiday jamboree.
“Visitors of all ages will be able to experience the pick of Britain’s best outdoor performers and companies from across Europe. We’re especially pleased to be presenting so many Midlands-based artists as more and more are making outdoor work of exceptional quality and ambition.”
On Saturday 9 August from 1 until 7PM, Live and Local will include Talking Birds performing The Cricketers, Hereford-based 2Faced Dance Company presenting its new show Two Old Men which features the company’s trademark fusion of break, street and contemporary dance and Tin Box Theatre’s Pint Dreams, which interweaves storytelling with live music and puppetry.
Saturday 16 August is dubbed Euro Stars and includes De Fakto Company with a mix of contemporary dance and hip hop in Le Petit Bal 2 Rue, UK company Acrojou with Frantic which features circus, dance and theatre set within a wheel and culminating in a water finale and outdoor theatre company Wet Picnic with The Birthday Party.
A Bank Holiday jamboree will be held on Saturday and Sunday, 23 and 24 August. Candoco Dance Company will stage a double bill on Saturday of Studies for C and Two For C by Javier De Frutos, while Wired Aerial Theatre will perform Straw Dog, which “pushes the boundaries of two dance genres into unchartered territory”.
Southpaw Dance Company will stage an evening performance at 10PM on the Saturday of Goethe’s Faust which is said to “take British urban dance to new heights”.
On Sunday, Company Chameleon’s Push will be performed and choreographed by Anthony Missen and Kevin Edward Turner. Push “looks at the different stances we take as we relate to one another and how the complex nature of our psychology means at times we push to exert our dominance and control, and others submit and yield”.
Further information is available at the Summer in Southside web site.