Do you enjoy innovative theatre? Do you want to experience something different, presented by exciting new artists? For six days from July 13-18, Flare15 will be showcasing new theatre and emerging international artists to audiences in Manchester.
The festival will feature 23 performances by artists from ten countries, and will take place at four venues in the city - Martin Harris Centre, Royal Exchange Studio, Contact and Z-arts.
'Flare Festival feels right at home in Manchester,' says Neil Mackenzie, Flare15's artistic director. 'Alongside the Manchester International Festival and building on Manchester’s reputation for ground-breaking across the arts and culture, Flare is about bringing to the city some of the best and most distinctive cutting edge theatre by new artists from across this country, the rest of Europe and beyond.'
Here's just five of the highlights:
Figs In Wigs (UK) - 'Dance Peas'
Dance Peas is half dance piece, half world record attempt. One by one, Figs in Wigs try to break the record for eating the most peas with a cocktail stick in three minutes. One pea at a time - no multiple stabs. They don't have a stopwatch - but they do have a three-minute dance routine.
Manuel Vason
Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol (Spain) - '#losmicrófonos'
Two grown men play increasingly physical games with nothing more than the words and tunes from popular culture. It's serious and deadpan, and has gone down a storm across Europe and South America.
Thomas Martin (UK) - 'Professional Supervision'
A beautiful piece of story-telling performance with live music, where the performance is as revealing as the stories themselves. It's a VAULT Festival 2015 Pick of the Week award winner, where it was nominated for Best Debut and Pick of the Year.
Andy Smith (UK) - 'The Preston Bill'
Award-winning theatre maker Andy Smith presents a work-in-progress showing of a new piece of theatre telling a story from the North. It's a tale that considers some of the social-political shifts that have taken place over the past 80 years, and marks a real shift in gear for one of our most reflective and conceptual theatre makers.
Hof Van Eede (Belgium) - 'Where the world is going, that’s where we are going'
The first, award-winning show by theatre company Hof van Eede. Sisters Louise Van den Eede and Ans Van den Eede took Diderot's novel as a starting point, and ended up embracing the vulnerability of language in a deliciously whimsical conversation between a man and a woman, 'who need to go somewhere else, urgently'.
The Flare International Festival of New Theatre, July 13-18, various venues.
See more things to do in Manchester from Time Out.