Theatre News

New interactive theatre piece to take place in Barbican foyer

The public will choose one of six audio tours around the centre which will explore the themes of acceptance, lost friendships and moving on

© Minyung Im

The Barbican has announced five new foyer commissions which will begin this autumn.

Theatre company non zero one will present let's take a walk, a piece devised with members of the public. Six individuals, ranging from students to pensioners, have created audio tours through the Barbican's public spaces. Each individual poses a question at the beginning of the tour, and the public choose which tour they would like to follow based on which question they pick.

The piece explores the themes of acceptance, lost friendships, self-image, moving on, what you pay attention to, and how you spend your time. It will run from 8 October.

Numina by Zarah Hussain will accompany the Barbican's season of ecstatic, hypnotic and psychedelic music, Transcender. The illuminated installation features traditional Islamic geometry which will be projection mapped onto tessellating pyramids. It runs from 14 September until April 2017.

I hope this finds you well is an audio commission by Bedwyr Williams which imagines the internal memos of people who use the Barbican's public space as their personal office. Visitors plug in their own headphones into dummy laptops and touchscreen devices to tune into water cooler conversations of the Barbican. It runs from 29 September until January 2017.

Artist Rosalind Fowler celebrates her recent residency at the William Morris Gallery with NowhereSomewhere, an installation which invites the public to power a two-screen film projection by pedalling bicycles. Inspired by William Morris’s ‘ecotopian’ romance News from Nowhere, the piece portrays similarities between Morris' visions for future London and Organiclea, a food-growing co-operative in the Borough of Waltham Forest. It runs from 8 October.

Omer Arbel's light installation 44 is an intricate light display suspended from the ceiling using 300 free-poured aluminium forms. It will open 14 September.