Details

This performance forms part of BE FESTIVAL: a fortnight-long feast of European culture. Our Wednesday quadruple bill includes an interval like no other, where you can enjoy a drink in our backstage lounge and sit down to dinner in a pop-up dining room on the theatre's main stage! (Click here to pre-book your meal.) From the Waltz to the Mambo - In the hands and in the body of a single performer, a 1960's Hungarian ballroom dance manual becomes a tool for questioning today's dogmas surrounding beauty and education. A disarmingly straightforward, funny, and personal meeting of a vintage text and a contemporary performance language. Radioballet are Hungarian dance artists, Bea Egyed and Milan U?jvari. With cultural differences and shared understanding central to their work, they are particularly looking forward to performing in front of an English-speaking audience (with an English sense of humour!) for the first time at BE FESTIVAL 2014. Plaza Avellaneda - Argentina, 1982. 16 years after they last saw each other, two old best friends meet again under very different circumstances. From a small hospital room, where one lies recovering from a gunshot wound, their shared memories of days growing up together transport them back through the forging of the ideals that would ultimately break them apart. Teatro Secreto tell stories with a refined informality, investigating narrative through a physical approach that invites an audience further into the depths of contemporary texts. Everything We Were (No) Born With - Three dancers wander an unknown yet inevitable path of isolation and connection, cross-fading between childlike curiosity and methodical cruelty. A sparse, forensic examination of the internal and external boundaries of identity and the human body, where our own sense of self is cast in an ongoing conflict with the desires of others. Founded in Lodz in 2010, KIJO Group's collaborative process draws on elements of improvisation, contemporary dance, physical theatre and martial arts practices. Beating McEnroe - Bjorn Borg, the self-controlled tennis champion and epitome of cool, was everything a six-year-old Jamie wanted to be. Then John McEnroe came along? Thirty years of torment and self-questioning later, Jamie is ready to face his greatest opponent. The final point of an epic Wimbledon final relived with the audience as a joyful, cathartic ritual of rivalry, love and moving on. Jamie Wood is a performer and director, whose work reflects a training that combines fine art, theatre, clown and dance.

Cast/Performers

Jamie Wood (UK - Beating McEnroe)

Creatives/Company

Company(s): Radioballet (Hungary - From the Waltz to the Mambo), Teatro Secreto (Spain / Argentina - Plaza Avellaneda), KIJO Group (No) Born With)