Contact: Flying Solo Festival

Flying Solo, Contact's annual festival celebrating radical solo performance, returns to Manchester for its seventh year from Friday 27 October 2017 to Saturday 11 November 2017, with a programme featuring local and international artists who are shaking things up in the name of politics, gender, race and the body.

Contact is renowned for its work with the young people of Greater Manchester and with local, national and international artists – fostering new talent, building skills and ambition – and creating new productions that tour nationally, many of which started out as Flying Solo commissions.

This year Contact is working with Flying Solo partners including The Lowry, Black Theatre Live, Right About Now, TransCreative, Unlimited, Full Circle Arts and Word of Warning.

Flying Solo highlights include Jackie Hagan’s new show This is Not a Safe Space which takes on class, disability and austerity.  In You’ve Changed transgender activist and performer Kate O’Donnell asks how much society has really changed since she transitioned fourteen years ago, whilst Afreena Islam conjures up her father through food and storytelling in Daughters of the Curry Revolution. Highrise Theatre’s Big Foot explores masculinity and responsibility via Guyanese folk and UK grime; Demi Nandhra unpacks the relationship between mental health and religion across three generations of women in the Flying Solo commission Oil and Water; American rising comedy star Desiree Burch’s This is Evolution skewers relationships, sex and race; Paul O’Donnell's We’ve Got Each Other attempts to recreate the full glory of a Bon Jovi gig with only himself and a lighting rig; and Sarah Blanc recalls her first true love in It Started with Jason Donovan.

There will also be new work in development from Sheyda Darab, Elmi Ali and a host of Contact supported artists.

Visit contactmcr.com for full listings.

Categories: Featured Activity

Date Posted: 24 October 2017