What makes Catalan performing arts so special? Dorothy Max Prior reflects on the rich tradition of circus, outdoor arts, and site-responsive performance by artists from Catalonia I’m trying to remember the first time I saw – or consciously recognised that I was seeing – work by a Catalan company. I think it must have been […]

The streets are alive and kicking! Dorothy Max Prior is out and about in Great Yarmouth, for the Out There Festival of Circus and Street Theatre 2019 An experimental circus show in a secret garden with pink-lit trees, from which a woman hangs by her hair. Gaming arcades outwitted by an Actual Reality Arcade, in […]

  Nowadays, Outdoor Arts are taken seriously as an artform – funded and programmed within festivals, with risk assessments and audience evaluations to the fore. Which is all well and good – but what happened to the anarchic immediacy of traditional Street Theatre? Oh hang on – it does still happen! Horta Moreton reports on the […]

Stockton International Riverside Festival 2019 struck me as a festival in two parts. During the day and into early evening, the high street is a ringing, singing carnival of overlapping shows – static, circle, promenade. All very different propositions: from traditional street theatre, to tea dances, to acrobatics, to anarchic audience interactions… Edward Taylor paints […]

Edward Taylor takes a psychedelic trip to the Stockton International Riverside Festival to encounter, amongst other delights, rainbow-coloured cars pegged out to dry, and sci-fi globules that sing sad tunes when taken the wrong way Stockton-on-Tees is a most unlikely venue for a major international street theatre festival – but the event has been running […]