NT Watch This Space Returns for 2011 Festival

The National Theatre’s fifteenth annual outdoor Watch This Space festival begins on 1 July 2011 in the National’s Theatre Square. This year’s event promises to celebrate outdoor theatre, circus, dance, acrobatics, juggling, hula-hooping, music, comedy, workshops, installations, storytelling, fire, water, and film.

The 11-week event, which runs through to 11 September 2011, will also dedicate a week of activities to two to six-year old children from 25 to 31 July.

The festival commences with I, Culture, a weekend of Polish events running 1 to 3 July including Teatr Biuro Podró¿y, Urban Brew and Monika Jakubiak, Gaba Kulka and Marta Carillon.

Billed as Family Fun Week from 25 to 31 July, the National offers young theatregoers Circo Ripololo’s miniature circus, Gypsy jazz, interactive games and a murder mystery from Bootworks Theatre.

The Gandinis come back to the Square for a week of innovative juggling from 1 to 7 August with the Pina Bausch-inspired Smashed and their new, National Theatre-commissioned Blotched.

Cie Bilbobasso present a passionate, incendiary tango, amidst fire and smoke as a couple dance their hearts out engulfed by flames. It forms part of a week of dance, presented from 15 to 21 August.

Home Live Art return, presenting The Alternative Village Fete for the Bank Holiday weekend, which will also include camping in Theatre Square for The Big Sleepover allowing people to toast marshmallows and tell stories around the campfire right on the South Bank.

Chilean clowns Murmuyo y Metrayeta will present their anarchic, totally unpredictable and terrifyingly funny show. We also host the outdoor performances for the Liberty Festival, London’s annual disability arts festival and during

Closing this year’s festival and coinciding with the Mayor’s Thames Festival weekend from 5 to 11 September, Watch This Space will have over twenty-five shows culminating in a massive all-singing, all-dancing painting created in the Square in Page Blanche created by Compagnie Luc Amoros.

Full listings and more information for all of this year’s free events can be found at www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/wts.