Birmingham's annual summer festival of international performing arts BE FESTIVAL will in 2018 welcome artists from Spain, Turkey, Switzerland, France, Germany and Greece and beyond.
Festival co-director Isla Aguilar said, “for over a decade we’ve been traversing and living in Birmingham and Madrid, forging partnerships between these two unique and spirited cities and across the continent.
“These amazing networks and partnerships have supported us year on year, yet as we mark the ninth edition of the festival we’re under no illusion about the potential for change and the repercussions on our festival and the cultural sector post-Brexit.”
One of the highlights will be P-Project from Bulgarian / UK artist Ivo Dimchev, an interactive performance in which the audience is invited onstage to perform in exchange for money.
Three Rooms (Syria / UK / Turkey) is a “hybrid-live digital performance” that will take place simultaneously in Paris, Istanbul and Birmingham REP's Studio. It uses Skype to overcome the obstacles of border crises and visa lockouts that faced refugee artists Amal Omran (Syria) and Onur Karaoglu (Turkey), preventing them from meeting Kathryn Hamilton (UK) in 2016.
Someone Loves You Drive With Care (UK) features performance artist and “professional liar” Tom Cassani, a “crafty specialist of deception” who “challenges the borders of his own body using blunt and scary-looking objects akin to the classic sideshow stunts made famous in vintage US circus”.
One of Europe's “most distinctive disabled artists”, Belgian painter and performer Thibault Delferiere, collaborates with Jack McNamara, artistic director of New Perspectives theatre company, on Sisyphus.
West Midlands theatre maker Paul O’Donnell will show he is living on a prayer in “the almost entirely imagined” Bon Jovi musical We’ve Got Each Other.
BE FESTIVAL runs at Birmingham REP from Tuesday until Saturday, 3 until 7 July.