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NT Launches Annual Free Outdoor Space Festival

Watch This Space - the National’s annual outdoor summer fiesta of the street theatre, music and entertainment, now in its seventh year - kicks off today (18 June 2004) and continues with free performances six days a week up to 21 August. Over the ten-week festival, there will be over 100 performances given by more than 75 acts hailing from around the world.

International street theatre will be performed in the Theatre Square, at the front of the South Bank complex, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtimes and early evenings.

Highlights include: Sienta la Cabeza, artistic hairdressing from Barcelona; Bedlam Oz’s Slinkie Love (pictured) featuring five tightly choreographed giant slinkies; the Colombian Circo para Todos, the world’s only circus school for street children; the London premiere of Scharlatan Theater’s 2CV or Not 2CV about two French tourists from hell; the world premiere of the National Youth Theatre’s macabre medieval trial, Hanging Around, in association with Kneehigh Theatre; and French troupe Cacahuete’s doubly black offering of Cannibal Cocktail, in which a naked man on a trolley has cold meat and salad gradually eaten off of him by the audience, and Mother’s Funeral, in which a family carry their mother’s casket through the crowd.

In addition to theatre, the Watch This Space programme – sponsored for the fourth year running by Bloomberg - includes live “Music in the Square” events (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday evenings at 6.15pm), DJ’s “Sun Lounges” sessions (Saturday afternoons from 2.15pm), “Waterloo Sunsets” of world music extravaganzas (Saturday nights at 10.30pm from 19 June to 24 July) and, new this year, “Waterloo Cinés”, in which iconic feature films will be projected onto the 23-metre high NT Lyttelton flytower (Saturdays at 10.30pm from 31 July to 21 August).

Another annual fixture, Shell Connections, a celebration of youth theatre now in its 11th year, also culminates at the National with a week of performances at the NT Olivier and Cottesloe from 7 to 13 July 2004. The 2004 portfolio features eight new plays and one new musical by leading writers including Patrick Marber, April de Angelis, Simon Armitage and Snoo Wilson. More than 200 schools and young theatre companies chose one of the selected works to premiere in their home venues, before they were featured in 16 festivals across the UK and Ireland. For further information, visit the Shell Connections website.

- by Terri Paddock

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