Massive Owl’s Castle Rock
When: 4th – 8th July 2017
Where: Manchester
£: Ticket prices vary, depending on the show
What is it?
Flare is Manchester’s international festival of new theatre, and Flare17 promises to be the best yet with around 60 theatre artists coming from across Europe and the UK, for the five-day celebration.
This year’s festival programme will present challenging, exciting and innovative theatre across the city’s major arts venues, including HOME, the Royal Exchange Theatre, The Lowry, Contact and The Flare Hub, situated in the old Cornerhouse building at No.70 Oxford Street. Future Flares, the student strand of Flare17, will take place in the Martin Harris Centre, at the University of Manchester.
This year’s highlights will include Party, by Spanish/Brazilian artists Beaches, an immersive theatre/dance show for an audience of ten that will be performed throughout the festival. The show will offer an intense mind and body experience somewhere between reality and illusion, and most of it blindfolded.
After critical acclaim across Europe, Flare brings Boose Provoost’s award winning Moore Bacon! to Manchester for its UK premiere. Presented at HOME in almost pitch darkness, the show plays with the spectator’s eye, creating form, texture and colour in the imagination as much as the reality of the stage.
Magician Tom Cassani will be at Flare17
In Blind Cinema, guests will be blindfolded in an underground cinema, as children describe the film that the audience can’t see. An intimate exploration of communication and language in this immersive and unique performance.
Highly energetic and interactive performance Molar by Spanish artist Quim Bigas Bassart, takes place in the beautiful setting of the Royal Exchange’s Great Hall, reflecting on human emotion and promising to lift your spirits for the rest of the day.
Massive Owl’s Castle Rock is a distortion of the film Stand By Me. As flashing neon lights descend upon the tracks, a boxing gloved boy with a death wish comes head to head with a white suited locomotive and a deer in black patent stilettos.
BOG collective’s One is a beautiful study of music and musicality using live and recorded sound. Double billed with BOG is K.U.R.S.K’s Leopard Murders. After being profiled around Germany and Switzerland, to both acclaim and controversy, Leopard Murders is a provocative and politically charged piece of new theatre using personal history to directly tackle the new political landscape.
Alicia Jane Turner uses music to focus on the act of breathing, exploring her own anxiety and expressing it through musical repetition and recording, addressing the sensory experience of being in the moment. She joins fellow Londoner, and trained magician, Tom Cassani in the double bill at The Lowry.
The immersive and unique Blind Cinema
Contact presents a double bill featuring returning artists Guillem Mont de Palol & Jorge Dutor with their visually stunning interpretation of the most performed opera in the western world. Turkish born Enis Turan follows with Beauty and the Beast, a complex study of gender norms and the societal pressures of belonging to gender. In a celebration of what makes us us, Turan leaves us questioning pre-conceptions and celebrating our diversity.
Along with a substantial amount of work programmed from Belgium’s thriving theatre scene, Flare’s emerging artist strand Future Flares platforms provocative work from some of the most bold and promising student, and recent graduate, artists working today.
The festival ends with an explosion of energetic gig theatre, focusing on a fictitious tribute band inspired by the troublesome and disturbed character of beat poet Charles Bukowski.
More info: www.flarefestival.com