Fringe Fomo
Not going to make it to Edinburgh for the fringe this year? Don't worry, Lowry's contemporary season will feature some festival favourites alongside thrilling new work right here on your doorstep!
Nuua Circus: Meanwhile
The surrealistic and whimsical Meanwhile examines our experiences on the passage of time and the way it’s used. The modern world’s absurd priorities gain new dimensions, as the work praises things that are societally considered pointless to do. Two jugglers test the spectator’s understanding and the way in which our values might change simply by doing something we feel is unnecessary.
It is a mix of riveting and dramatic atmospheres that combine with minimalistic comedy through juggling, object manipulation, and visual theater. Meanwhile is a multilayered performance where precise and rhythmic object manipulation in a theatrical context produces disarming, suspenseful, entertaining, and thought-provoking experiences.
Age Recommendation: 10+
Runtime: 60 mins
Darkfield: ARCADE
DARKFIELD presents ARCADE: But this isn’t an ordinary arcade and these are not ordinary arcade machines. Every machine offers you the chance to enter the world of the game and choose your own unique journey. As you guide your avatar through a world ravaged by endless war, there are many routes you can take and there are many different outcomes. You can choose a side, win or lose the war, search out a more peaceful route, or join a cult promising a better version of reality. Where will your decisions lead you?
Using the nostalgic aesthetic of 1980’s video games, ARCADE’s interactive narrative explores the evolving relationship between players and avatars. This choose-your-own-path experience will fully immerse players in different environments in a completely dark shipping container, using 360 degree binaural sound, sensory effects and a bespoke DARKFIELD ARCADE machine for each player. Players will be asked deep existential questions about free will and consciousness in a world where some may win and some may lose…
Age recommendation: 16+
How A Spiral Works
In this performance, the artists fight for time to care for themselves, care for each other, even under extreme circumstances. How hard is it to care under tension? In the middle of a whirlwind? At great heights? While feeling pain?
Renowned British circus director Jason Dupree, acclaimed choreographer Alise Bokaldere (LV) and the phenomenal aerialist Izabele Kuzelyte (LT) join forces creating a unique, hypnotic, and powerful contemporary circus performance, blending contemporary dance, hair hanging, aerial rope and reinvented Baltic folk music.
One dancer, one aerialist, and one rope tethered together in their R-evolving relationship.
Runtime: 50 minutes
Disco Queen
Inspired by competitive disco freestyle, a form of dance born out of the iconic 1970s film Saturday Night Fever, this captivating show brings to life the fierce determination, jaw-dropping athleticism, and glittering spectacle of freestyle dance, practised by more that 46,000 young dancers in village halls and studios up and down the country.
Join Ella on a journey of high leg kicks, splits, spins, and gravity defying moves as she revisits her days in a hidden world where fake tan, rhinestones, and raw ambition rule. From smoky community halls to the high-stakes competition circuit, Disco Queen unpacks the highs and lows of striving for perfection in a community of strong young women navigating the realities of working-class Britain - all in the hope of becoming a champion, a legend, an icon... a Disco Queen.
Expect pulsing disco beats, enduring heats, high-energy choreography, and a story that celebrates resilience, community, and the relentless pursuit of passion.
Age Recommendation: 16+
Runtime: 52 mins
A Suffocating Choking Feeling
A subversive interrogation of truth in the age of social media - inspired by Australian wellness influencer and cancer-con Belle Gibson (BBC’s Bad Influencer). Blending live performance with live streaming and interactive social media experiments, Simone Hamilton explores influencer culture and our dangerous obsession with crafting 'authentic' versions of ourselves online.
A Suffocating Choking Feeling plays with the boundaries of truth and ethics, testing audiences’ willingness to believe.
Age Recommendation: 16+
Runtime: 16+
Stuntman
From the creative team behind the five-star, multi-award-winning Jesus, Jane, Mother and Me and LASH, comes a thrilling new drama.
The horrors of World War Two have broken young Wesley, but could the madness he encounters beyond it save or destroy a soldier’s shellshocked mind?
Following a hugely successful sold-out Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Shellshocked is a powerful new play by Leeds-born playwright Philip Stokes, recognised by the British Library as a culturally important playwright of the 21st Century.
Runtime: 65 minutes
Age Recommendation: 14+
Reckless Sleepers: Binary Opposition
On stage there is a large construction that resembles two rooms with identical walls and floors. A dividing wall, with the same configuration of doors and windows.
For Binary Opposition
We will play with entrances and exits, mistaken identities, extend the order of events from the drinking scene in Schrödinger, the mathematical logics of contacts from Negative Space. Spilling from one room into the other. In one side it might snow, in the other it might rain.
In one room with our backs to the audience, the other facing front…
Simple ideas of taking scenarios from our existing work, smashing through from Negative Space into another scene from Schrödinger. There are a myriad of different scenarios that we can play with, and a bank of over 20 years of playing and presenting those ideas.
BLACK POWER DESK
BLACK POWER DESK is a powerful reimagining and exploration of what it means to love and fight for freedom. In an often male-dominated world, two sisters, Celia and Dina – both rooted in self-empowerment and fiercely committed to their community, both loyal and motivated by love – are divided by grief and radical politics.
Inspired by the historic Mangrove Nine and other influential activists and brought to life by an original score performed by a live three-piece band, BLACK POWER DESK is a musical soundtrack charting a fiercely emotive and politically charged era of often overlooked British history for today’s generation. At a time of the rise of British Black Panthers, the onset of the Immigration Act 1971, the emergence of Black business ownership and the hails of a generation living through the racial tensions of Great Britain.
Age recommendation: 14+
curious directive: Black Sheep
It’s Easter weekend on the Carter family’s farm. In the fields, the soil is dying. In the shed, lambing season is in full swing. In the village church, a secret love is blooming. In the front seats of a rusty transit van, a brutal revenge is plotted. And around the kitchen table, the extended Carter family struggle to face the future.
Black Sheep is a contemporary psalm about rural life, a razor-sharp account of the dilemmas facing generations of farming families.
Shellshocked
From the creative team behind the five-star, multi-award-winning Jesus, Jane, Mother and Me and LASH, comes a thrilling new drama.
The horrors of World War Two have broken young Wesley, but could the madness he encounters beyond it save or destroy a soldier’s shellshocked mind?
Following a hugely successful sold-out Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Shellshocked is a powerful new play by Leeds-born playwright Philip Stokes, recognised by the British Library as a culturally important playwright of the 21st Century.
Ontroerend Goed - Handle With Care
Handle with Care is theatre stripped down to its essence. No actors, no technicians. Just a box. And you.
A box is mailed to the theatre. The instructions are clear:
Invite a group of people, on a specific night, at a specific time.
Let the audience take their seats.
Place the box at the centre of the stage.
The audience is waiting.
And then an audience member stands up and opens the box.
The show has started.
Vermin
Their first kiss took place at the scene of a stranger’s suicide attempt - Billy and Rachel’s romance was never destined to be ordinary.
A fast-burning love sees them marry, nest, and prepare for the future. But something is scratching beneath the floorboards.
As their dream home is invaded by rats, the world they've built begins to disintegrate - exposing the rotten foundations beneath.
As their relationship falters and their behaviours grow ever stranger, the fragile line between love and madness is crossed, and the couple embark on a blood-drenched descent through grief, obsession, and compulsion.
Vermin is a pitch-black psychodramedy about what we bury, what claws its way back, and what remains when we’re picked clean to the bone.
Black is the Color of My Voice
Inspired by the life of Nina Simone, and featuring many of her most iconic songs performed live.
Apphia Campbell’s acclaimed play follows a successful singer and civil rights activist as she seeks redemption after the untimely death of her father. She reflects on the journey that took her from a young piano prodigy destined for a life in the service of the church, to a renowned jazz vocalist at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.
The show has toured the UK and Australia to standing ovations and played sell-out seasons in Shanghai, New York, Edinburgh and the West End of London.