PUSH Festival 2018 at HOME
Kristy Stott, Theatre Editor
There’s absolutely no reason to feel at a loose end in January – theatre in Manchester is positively booming due to PUSH Festival, an annual celebration of the North West’s best-emerging theatre makers and creatives.
Showcasing all of the best shows from the previous year, PUSH Festival gives you the opportunity to revisit your favourite performances again. It also gives you the chance to catch the ones that got away the first time. We’re also quite excited that this year sees the premiere of four brand new theatre pieces, specially commissioned by HOME for the festival.
First up is True Stories – fusing hip-hop, storytelling and instrumentation to present the unique stories of five different artists who have made Manchester their home. Each of the stories, hilarious, unsettling or unbelievable are completely true. Promising to be a captivating performance, True Stories aims to bring people together from different backgrounds who have made a home in Manchester.
Meraki Collective’s Only Speak When Spoken To uses the body as a storytelling device in a fascinating and lively dance piece exploring the funny side of social etiquette and polite behaviour. In contrast, Manchester’s brightest young talent present See Me After – an explosion of dance, sound and spoken word – seeks to explore the frailty of the human condition, our need to interact and where we end up.
Manchester favourites Monkeywood Theatre Company try to investigate what being Mancunian means in their new production, The Manchester Project. The award-winning company have commissioned eighteen new creatives to write eighteen short plays in a bid to examine what it means to be part of the city. In addition to the main performance, one of the tiny plays will be performed before every Theatre 2 show during the festival.
There’s also the opportunity to experience the sharing of work-in-progress performances by local theatre-makers and take part in workshops with industry professionals. We get ridiculously excited about PUSH every year. You might be having a dry January but you can certainly satisfy your creative thirst at HOME.
