Almeida Summer Festival 2009
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
THIS year, the Almeida Theatre’s Summer Festival (July 8 to August 1) will include performances by Slung Low, The TEAM (Theater of the Emerging American Moment) from New York, GULP and Tiata Fahodzi, who return to the Almeida following their success at last year’s Summer Festival.
The Festival opens with Slung Low’s Last Seen, which takes audiences on a multi-media journey from the stage of the Almeida onto the streets of Islington – from July 8 to 11 at 7pm and 9pm and July 12 at 6pm and 8pm.
In any one year over 200,000 people go missing. Most are found. Last Seen enters the world of those who have fallen through the cracks, a place for the unnoticed and a place where lost souls land.
The production will be performed by Lolita Chakrabarti (The Great Game, Afghanistan, Free Outgoing, John Gabriel Borkman, The Waiting Room, A Midsummer Night’s Dream); Francis Lee (The Sexual Neuroses of our Parents, Mother Courage and Her Children, A Taste of Honey); Barry McCarthy (Absolutely Frank, Kean, The Giant); and Richard Warburton.
Slung Low is a Bradford based company led by seven artists from diverse creative backgrounds, including movement, video, sound and direction. The company was created by Alan Lane and Matthew David Scott in 2000 after their success with Counter Balance at the National Student Drama Festival where they won the Sunday Times’ Judges Award.
In 2008, they won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award to create Helium – a theatre installation contained within 5 boxes, combining live and digital performance, which was presented at the Barbican Theatre as part of the BITE Festival.
Tickets: £15.
Next The TEAM presents the first public work-in-progress version of their latest show, The American Capitalism Project – from July 16 to July 19 at 7.30pm.
The production journeys across America in search of an unbiased portrait of American Capitalism told through cowboy ballet, wailing pianos and people with bank accounts. Las Vegas needs saving. A woman working in a casino says she is Joan of Arc, two outlaws are on the run and there’s murder in the wind. Where did our pursuit of happiness go wrong?
The TEAM is led by Artistic Director Rachel Chavkin and features Jessica Almsy, Frank Boyd, Heather Christian, Jill Frutkin, Elizabeth King, Jacob Margolin and Kristen Sieh. Choreography is by Will Tuckett.
Tickets: £12.50.
On July 24 at 7.30pm and July 25 at 3pm and 7.30pm, GULP presents its inaugural production Or Nearest Offer, a new play by Tanya Ronder, whose previous work includes a new version of Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Chain Play II (Almeida), and Vernon God Little and Peribanez (Young Vic).
Everything must go – beds, mobiles, dreams and babies. Going, going, gone. But what happens when you are all sold out?
Created in collaboration with fifteen young participants from the Young Friends of the Almeida LAB, Or Nearest Offer is directed by Vik Sivalingam and designed by Fabrice Serafino.
Tickets: £8.
Tiata Fahodzi return to present The Golden Hour, a new play by their award-winning commissioned writer Michael Bhim. Directed by Femi Elufowoju Jr, it will be rehearsed over three days and then performed, script in hand on July 29, 30 and 31 at 7.30pm.
Adrian is a triage nurse, British, of Zimbabwean descent, working in a London NHS hospital alongside his long-term English girlfriend, Jessica. Suddenly he finds himself drawn into a drama of ethics and loyalty when he encounters an African baby whom he suspects has been brought into the country illegally.
Tickets: £12.50.
The Festival ends on August 1 with the Tiata Fahodzi Festival Concert, British African Music from UK based Ugandan band The Ganda Boys who were recently featured as The Mutilators on the BBC’s Moses Jones. It begins at 8pm.
And throughout the Summer Festival, the installation Lost Property invites audiences to create a series of narratives around things they have lost during their lifetimes.