Departure Lounge, a summer festival of “fresh and exciting performance”, is to be staged at Derby Theatre for the ninth year.
The festival is organised by In Good Company, “the flagship professional creative and business development programme for theatre makers and companies in the Midlands”.
In-person and online events will be included in Departure Lounge which features new shows, works in progress and a panel discussion with industry experts. It will run from Thursday 15 until Saturday 17 July.
Some events will be held in Derby Theatre’s main auditorium. Others will be performed in the upper foyer or on an outdoor stage just outside the stage door entrance.
As part of the festival, Unanima Theatre, a Mansfield-based, disabled-led company, will present States of Independence on the Thursday at 8:30PM. Unanima's storytellers will take the audience through the tensions and messiness of being labelled as having intellectual and developmental disabilities.
On the Friday at 8PM, Ugly Bucket will perform Good Grief in which the company processes the death of a friend in the only way it knows how: “through a high-energy maelstrom of clowning, movement, verbatim and thumping techno tracks”.
Retrained’s In Bed with my Brother will present “something so meaningless and completely chaotic that everyone will leave in agreement that theatre is dead”. It will run on the Saturday from 8PM.
The panel discussion The Power of Independence is in response to the number of freelancers who are stepping up to be heard in a way they have not done before. On the panel will be Derby Theatre’s artistic director and chief executive Sarah Brigham, independent curator and educator Dr Cecila Wee, Sunita Hinduja and Adele Thomas from Freelancers Make Theatre Work and Amanda Parker of Inc Arts.
The digital discussion will be on Friday 16 July from 3:30 until 5PM and can be accessed through Zoom.