A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM: ABRIDGED ON A BRIDGE
FACING NORTH THEATRE presents an open-air piece of pocket Shakespeare. A truncated adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most entertaining plays, performed for the first time against Manchester’s urban skyline on the National Trust’s Castlefield Viaduct. Join some of Shakespeare’s best loved characters to celebrate midsummer for this fast paced, fun-filled farce.
Performed at Castlefield Viaduct, National Trust, Manchester – Summer 2023 & 2024.
FLIGHT PATTERNS
A goose engrossed in Eliot, a raven in a quiver over Forster, a crane and heron discussing Woolf and Mansfield. Belonging everywhere and nowhere, momentarily alighting in a garden in Bloomsbury, London. Watch this migratory menagerie take flight in our open air promenade performance and join them for a choral celebration of those that follow the wind.
A new collaboration between Facing North Theatre and Company Gabrielle Moleta, FLIGHT PATTERNS is performed by an international company of artists whose transformative moments of the animal into human question the timeless challenges of adapting to place, habits and identity. Who are these figures caught in transitory moments? What situations are revealed? What do we learn about the human condition? Responding to, and shedding new light on, pre-existing texts drawn from literary figures of the early twentieth century.
Presented at Bloomsbury Festival 2022 – Performed at Malet Street Gardens (The Sunken Garden), London 2022.
SEAHORSE 2019 & 2022
In a near future, sea levels are rising and the coastline of the British Isles is crumbling into the sea, causing the displacement of many UK residents. You’re forced to leave everything you know; comfortable surroundings, familial bonds, cherished memories and our emotional attachment to what we call home. It is an uncertain global position where geographical boundaries are being redefined – often at great cost to human dignity.
Are you ready to pack your life into a single bag and leave it all behind?
SEAHORSE is a promenade performance which moves around the public spaces of Arts buildings, guiding the audience through the walkways exploring the ideas of displacement and relocation. Our preconceptions of migration challenged by presenting it on our own doorstep.
The action follows a man’s attempt to embark on a journey with his son to a new life. What treasured items has he packed into his case? What could he not bear to leave behind regardless of the cost? Can familial bonds be kept in place when all around they are being torn apart?
First performed as a commission by The Lowry, Salford, 2019.
Developed with headphone technology, commissioned by Cheshire West and Chester Council, performed at and with the support of Storyhouse, Chester, 2022.
UNBROKEN
“I’m leading a double life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic tsar of the underworld, Mother.” ~Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Which is the underworld? The world we escape to or the world in which we stay?
Inspired by the figure of Tom in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, UNBROKEN questions what is it to feel restrained, to contain every impulse of pleasure and to tether the need for adventure.
Interrogating internalised shame in the LGBTQIA+ community compounded by the legacy of Section 28 and the continued influence of heteronormative ideals, UNBROKEN aims to reveal the authentic self as opposed to the censored self; what we lose when we camouflage and adapt to meet societal norms.
UNBROKEN was originally created for The Bloomsbury Festival 2020 and was conceived in collaboration with animal transformation practitioner, Gabrielle Moleta.
Performances to date:
Bloomsbury Festival 2020 – Performed at RADA Studios, London 2020
Physical Fest 2021 – Performed at The Unity Theatre, Liverpool 2021
TO EQUALITY & BEYOND!
Award winning Manchester Pride Parade commission for HOME Manchester, 2019.
A 50th anniversary celebration of both the Stonewall uprising, seen as the beginning of the Gay Rights movement, and the moon landing. Championing how far LGBTQIA+ rights have come in fifty years and also how far there is to go to fully achieve equality.
Creative team and parade participants comprising of HOME Manchester employees and wider community engagement.
DYSCHRONOMETRIA: IN TIME WE TRUST (DIGITAL)
DYSCHRONOMETRIA: IN TIME WE TRUST challenges the trust we place in our experience of time and what the sensation of the passing of time feels like in a theatrical context. The title is taken from a medical condition in which an individual cannot accurately estimate the amount of time passing, it is a distortion of the perception of time. The piece is an interrogation into an audience’s interpretation of the passage of time, especially in a digital context where recorded material could be distorted and manipulated to different effect. During the pandemic lockdowns of 2020/2021, our understanding of time was challenged, some days go painfully slow and events seem to repeat themselves in a perpetual ‘Groundhog Day’.
Does time move forward or backwards?
An original digital performance created for The Lucid House Performance Salon in New York 2021.
