Watch This Space Festival 2010
The National Theatre’s annual Watch This Space Festival runs from 23 June until 26 September and features an exciting range of free outdoor theatre, dance, circus and music events for all ages.
Download this year's programme to see what we have coming up. The full website will be coming soon - watch this space...
Some of this year's highlights include: Floten Tecles (The Floating Keyboard) by Catalonia’s David Moreno, who plays and sings at a vertical grand piano six metres in the air, World Cup-themed fun with leading Asian dance company Srishti’s show Bend It and The Alternative Village Fete - an urban twist on traditional village fetes.
The NT's late night bar opens 4 June
The Green Room, the National Theatre's late night bar, is open Fridays and Saturdays from 4 June through to September for music, cold beer, cocktails and games! The Green Room is open until 1am and entry is FREE. Join the Green Room group on Facebook.
To get to the Green Room follow the ducks up the green stairs (next to the entrance to the National Theatre) to the NT's Terrace Bar and Food.
At the same time as Watch This Space we also have a programme of international theatre in Square²; our outdoor theatre space located on the riverside next to the National Theatre's Stage Door.
Between 23 June - 8 August you will be able to see a series of intriguing and unexpected outdoor theatre performances by exciting companies that have been hand picked by the Watch This Space team!
Within a mobile internet café, this unique show takes place simultaneously in London and Sri Lanka; the audience connects directly with the performers in Hikkaduwa, learning about the experience of the tsunami and the subsequent complexities of international aid – as the light, sound and smell of Sri Lanka begin to permeate the café…
Capacity 20; seated in a mobile café; in English; 70 mins. www.liftfestival.com
Life Streaming is presented by LIFT in association with the National Theatre
After taking Square² by storm last year, the high-energy of coalminers Carbón Club is back. From deep within the mines of the Basque Country the miners come back to life in an exuberant cabaret where we hear their tales of unrequited bisexual love, lonely life in the pit and the sorrows of the women they leave behind – not forgetting miners disco-dancing with pick axes!
Capacity 350; promenade performance; in English; 50 mins
One of Poland’s leading theatre companies returns to the National with its most celebrated production – an electrifying and startling theatrical experience using fire, stilts and dramatic visual images to depict the terrible nature and impact of war. Based on the stories of refugees from the Bosnian conflict, this is outdoor theatre at its most powerful, and its themes are, unfortunately, timeless.
Capacity 350; seated on mats and benches; with English voice-over; 50 mins
Carmen Funebre is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA! YEAR www.PolskaYear.pl
POLSKA! YEAR is a cultural programme coordinated by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, comprising over 200 projects that present the most interesting achievements of Polish culture to the British public in the fields of visual arts, theatre, music, film and literature.
Through a set of headphones a series of questions are posed; responding as a group, the audience become pawns in a lifesize board game. Factions come together and break apart in a complex narrative journey. Roger Bernat is a celebrated theatre-maker based in Barcelona and Domini Públic is his largest and most ambitious piece to date.
Capacity 150; promenade performance; in English; 1hr gatetheatre.co.uk
Domini Públic is presented by Gate Theatre in association with the National Theatre
A theatrical fantasy for a retired railwayman and 55 pressure cookers. ‘Cocotte’ invites you to his hissing world of gas flames, boiling kettles and airborne potatoes. A close relative of the Heath Robinson school of engineering, this National Theatre debut is French steam-powered theatre at its most explosive.
Capacity 200; grandstand seating; in French with some translation; 1hr
Fourteen people enter fourteen boxes, each packed with three minutes of far-fetched fabrications and unflinching honesty. Metro-boulot-dodo have collaborated with musicians, dancers and digital artists to ask the question: why do we lie? Innovative, insightful and utterly unique, FIB is a big, bold eclectic mix of contemporary art forms.
Capacity 14; promenade, moving between all 14 boxes; in English; 1hr