A day-long festival of new work from Midlands-based artists, Bite Size Festival, is back with “an eclectic line-up of full-length shows and in-development shorts” at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on Saturday 30 April.
Independent producer China Plate is behind the festival, which will feature nine 20-minute extracts of new work including Frankie Thompson’s takedown of politicians’ sexual scandals The Sex Party, Casey Bailey’s exploration of stolen artefacts in British institutions Please Do Not Touch and Shane Shambhu’s journey into parenting a mixed-race child, Fatherhood.
Proto-type Theatre will close the festival with Dead Cats which “grasps at the slippery nature of language and how neat phrases like ‘extraordinary rendition’ cover up the reality of lived experience”.
Other highlights include Keiren Hamilton-Amos’s Pulled, a depiction of a man’s attempt to find love during the global pandemic, and Georgia Kelly’s Blood, an introduction to a group of lesbians in 1980s San Diego who tirelessly campaigned to help the AIDS crisis.
Major Labia take their eponymous vaginal comedy show to the festival which features Mary Berry as you have never seen her before.
Two shows on the bill delve into the British education system. No More Mr Nice Guy by Cal-I Jonel in association with Noveau Riché uses spoken word, storytelling, music and movement to tell the story of a secondary school music teacher who is at breaking point. Neal Pike’s 5 Years employs the theatre-maker’s personal experience of navigating his teenage years at a special educational needs school in Nottinghamshire.
Billy Read’s Forbidden Identity looks at what it is like to be a deaf child growing up in a hearing world without a deaf community around you.
There will also be a double bill at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre on Thursday 28 and Friday 29 April. Hannah Walker and Rosa Postlethwaite's Gamble is about having a relationship with a recovering online gambling addict while lanaire aderemi’s protests, hymns and caskets is about a 1947 feminist protest in Nigeria to remove colonial taxation.
Bite Size Festival producer Rosie Kelly of China Plate said, “after a tough couple of years for everyone, we’re so excited to be able to celebrate the brilliant, inventive and diverse theatre-making culture of the Midlands in front of a live audience.
“As always, this is an amazing opportunity to see a huge range of work, all in one place and in one day.”
The full programme is available at the China Plate web site.