For four weeks, Battersea Arts Centre will be bringing underrepresented voices to all corners of building. As the UK faces an uncertain future, Homegrown Festival: Occupy will give a platform to rethink it from a fresh, internationalist perspective.
The month long festival will feature six world premieres, gig theatre, live games, virtual experiences, rap poetry and installations.
Highlights will include the London City Takeover, from 5th to 7th April, when Battersea Arts Centre, BFI, Roundhouse, Tate, Wired4Music and Young Vic all hand over space to a dynamic collective, aged 16 to 25, who will use this platform to share their visions of the future.
High Rise eState of Mind, 20th to 30th March, exposes young people’s fears of where they will live, their houses and homes, and the UK’s broken systems.
Radical teenage theatre company SOUNDS LiKE CHAOS, will take audiences on a hallucinatory trip into the future in WOW, EVERYTHING IS AMAZING from 4th to 12th April, and asks is technology shaping us, or are we shaping it?
A Land Without Jasmine, from 4th to 6th April, produced by the Sarha Collective, is the first ever Yemeni theatre production to be staged in the UK and tells a dark fairy tale about a mysterious disappearance.
The Sui Ensemble will create an immersive world from 8th to 12th April, shining a light on the shadowy corners of queer history, in La Silhouette.
Other highlights will include Four Women by Dylema, portraying the journey of migration, assimilation and diaspora culture through the story and character of four women; Exit Productions’ The Mission: Occupy Mars, an interactive theatre game of survival; and fanSHEN’s Looking for Love, which employs artificial intelligence and augmented reality to confound expectations in a personalised digital story.
Inua Ellams and others present The R.A.P. Party; Xavier de Sousa invites people to dine together and examine nationhood in POST; Joshua Idehen draws on his lively experience of working in pubs in Oi Barman!; and Elise Heaven explores non-binary identity in She’s A Good Boy.
Later in the month, Terry Huggett, Dayo Koleosho, Lee Philips and Xandri Selwyn – four of London’s leading learning disabled artists – bring their own unique perspectives to issues that Londoners face every day; and The People’s Film Club ask people to reject insularity and rejoice in solidarity in Beyond Borders.
When: 18th March – 12th April 2019
Where: Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill SW11 5TN
£: Ticket prices vary, depending on the event
More info: www.bac.org.uk