Orbit Festival collage

23 November – 4 December, 2021


HOME, Manchester’s centre for international contemporary culture, is once again playing host to the award-winning Orbit Festival which celebrates extraordinary, award-winning, international artists.


One of Manchester’s most exciting theatre festivals, this year’s shows will combine live and digital work, with an online performance of Figs in Wigs’ Astrology Bingo as well as live performances from the theatre including Two Destination Language’s beautiful, flower-filled storm of emotion Near Gone, Xavier De Sousa’s durational performance REGNANT and Sleepwalk Collective and Christopher Brett Bailey’s Psychodrama. 


Near Gone
 

Tue 23 Nov – Thu 25 Nov 2021 

In Near Gone, two performers have a difficult story to tell. They come on stage and launch themselves into an hour-long attempt to put into words the unspeakable.  

Delivered in English and Bulgarian, with pounding Roma-inspired music, this beautiful performance fills an empty space with two performers, 400 fresh flowers and a storm of emotion. Having already achieved a number of four and five star reviews and described by The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner as ‘gorgeous and wild’, this is a performance piece that packs a punch – transforming your very sense of what it is to be a mother, a father, a child. And you’ll leave more fully alive than ever. 


Figs in Wigs for Astrology Bingo
 

Online Event Fri 26 Nov 2021 

Join your favourite galactic gal pals Figs in Wigs for Astrology Bingo – the world’s first ever cosmic game show for astrology lovers, bingo wingers and their sceptic friends. 

Ahead of the online event, each player will be sent a unique tailor-made bingo card generated from their personal natal horoscope, all you need to provide is your birth date, time and location. You’ll then need to listen closely for your ‘Scorpio Moon’ or your ‘Capricorn Rising’ sign to be called before you can dab dab dab your pain away. 

With some incredible prizes to be won, and what with the current state of the world you’ve got nothing left to lose – and everything to win! 


REGNANT
 

Sat 27 Nov 2021 

This is a new durational play and dinner party experience where guests dive into human interaction, within the context of migration and belonging. You’ll be invited to join the dinner table, get merry, make friends and explore structures of power within local communities and how they shape our collective future. 

Developed and performed by Xavier de Sousa with André Neely, Yas Clarke, Jade Monserrat, Saad Said, Deborah Pearson and Lewis Church, this performance will include a variety of local guests and co-performers and over 500 pieces of ceramics handmade by Sousa. 


Psychodrama
 

Fri 3 Dec– Sat 4 Dec 2021 

Racing across the savage inner-landscape of the human mind, two unlikely (anti) heroes pursue a nightmare vision of freedom through spiralling episodes of intense sensuality and phantasmagoric violence. Psychodrama is a gooey, drippy dream of a show, a pop-cultural exorcism, a runaway train riding a burnt synapse through the centre of your skull. A celebration of the corrosive power of storytelling that asks who are all those voices inside your head? How did they get there? And if you could silence those voices, would you? 

Psychodrama is a new show created and performed by writer, performer and musician Christopher Brett Bailey and UK/Spanish experimental theatre group Sleepwalk Collective. 

  

Full details of the festival can be found here: https://homemcr.org/event/orbit-festival-2021/