“There is no such thing as dead matter. Its inertia is merely an outward show, behind which, forms of life untold lie hidden. The range of those forms is endless, their shades and nuances inexhaustible.” Bruno Schulz

The Cinnamon Shop is inspired by the short stories of Bruno Schulz, and shines a light on the collection of memories, how these memories are explored and re-experienced by an individual, and how the quality and vibrance of them is subject to degeneration, distortion and change over time. Drawing reference from neurological conditions such as dementia, where the recall experience and retention of memories is challenged and ultimately destroyed, the piece explores our relationship to the memories that define us using a combination of physical performance, music and text.

Originally created as a commission by The Coronet Theatre, The Cinnamon Shop was first performed in an empty shop unit on Portobello Road just as the lockdown restrictions in the UK were easing in 2021.

Tickets: £8 (£6)

Find out a little more about The Cinnamon Shop and Krēan(t)s in this Q&A

An outdoor dance drama for families (ages 3+) that explores people arriving in a new community and humanity’s desire for the ideal society. Audiences will be able to enjoy the show from home through their windows or balconies with the sound and music broadcast over radio.

Devised by a team of East and Southeast Asian artists, the work tells stories about cross-cultural interactions and engages with post-humanist thinking, focusing on questions of home, displacement and memory. It explores humanity’s desire for the ideal society and addresses the most pressing concerns of the contemporary world, including migration and human rights. The story engages with East Asian mythology and conveys cultural significance relating to issues of belief and identity, transcending cultural backgrounds and different communities. The work also deals with issues of identity related to ethnicity, race and gender, and confronts the historical portrayal of those raced and gendered bodies.

FREE – Just turn up

How does a nation tell its history? We are used to traditional, accepted narratives but what happens when you ask the woman in the street -Where did your family come from? What was the key moment of your life that changed you? What is it like being an outsider in England?

A Roma talks of being attacked on the English street.
A French woman remembers stuffing her fists in her mouth, as a baby, as she is hidden from the Nazis.
A white working class northerner remembers being raped at seven years old by her father.
A Kurdish refugee escapes a Turkish jail but finds that her memories follow her to London.
An African asylum- seeker has trouble learning English because of her trauma.
A Chinese woman escapes domestic violence through her love of dance.

Pascal Theatre Company has been interviewing women whose voices are usually not heard. These have been edited to create dynamic short scripts online. Stories will be set to new choreography by students from London Contemporary Dance School, The Place and premiered at Bloomsbury Festival. In exciting performances, taking place in the gardens of St Pancras Church and within the building, audiences will have the opportunity to be thrilled and stimulated by taboo stories and new dance.

Performance time slots: 3pm, 3.30pm, 4pm & 4.30pm

Tickets: FREE – but pre-booking is essential

A new one act play by Bren Gosling, commissioned by The George Lansbury Memorial Trust about The Poplar Councillor’s Revolt of 1921. The Council refused to levy what they viewed as a grossly unjust rate set by London County Council and as a result were held in contempt. Thirty Councillors, including five women were jailed. Minnie Lansbury was one of them. This is the story of her incarceration and appalling treatment in Holloway prison along with heavily pregnant Cllr. Nellie Cressall, and three other women Councillors.

‘Don’t be afraid of the law…Wherever you see injustice make up your mind what you want to do and go for it! Accept no make believe.’

Running time: Approx 70 mins
Suitable for ages 14+

Tickets: £12 (£10)

Shakespeare’s extraordinary poem Venus and Adonis provides the inspiration for a compelling exploration of erotic power in States of Mind – a contemporary reimagining of the poem by Christopher Hunter.

Written during a plague epidemic that shut London’s theatres, Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare’s first published work and an instant bestseller. The vivid language and youthful vibrancy of the poetry make it an exhilarating and accessible ride. But the romanticism of the riveting narrative conceals disturbing themes of desire, rejection, sexual power, resistance and love.

Produced by Extant, the UK’s leading company of visually impaired artists, States of Mind retains all the richness of Shakespeare’s language as it examines the poem through a 21st century lens. By transforming the story into a clinical and highly charged contemporary setting, it reveals how this early work of Shakespeare’s could have been written for audiences today.

Running time: Approx 90 mins
Suitable for ages 16+

Tickets: £12 (£10)

An Anime-inspired physical theatre piece about Kill, a young man who wakes up in Dead Yard and passes through the Nine Nights when his soul is allowed to roam and exact revenge. The piece takes as its starting point the struggle of a young black man trying to maintain mental stability on a chaotic council estate. Created a Monster explore isolations and physical scores, researching how these rhythmic expressions of vitality can express stagnation, pain and the fragmentation of Kill’s body.

This project derives from an inquiry into the lived experience of a young mixed-race man and his mental struggles facing the racial injustices, hypocrisies and complexities that remain unresolved in his own body and the outer world, a story that is cross-sectioned with the highly-polished, maniacal and brutal physical language, conceits and tropes of anime as a framing research: the resonance of anime for black lives existing within stories of the underdog who work and fight to achieve greatness; the escape from seemingly impossible situations; the presence of legacy and the search for justice in an oftentimes unjust world.

Suitable for ages 14+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

A young woman boards a time-traveling train, followed by a mysterious assailant. On her journey to understand her future she must confront her past. This short film was produced by a group of 14-21 year olds on Holborn Community Association’s Summer Film Project 2021 in partnership with London Transport Museum. From June-August, young people learnt from professional filmmakers at HCA to conceptualise, shoot and edit their own short film responding to the theme of ‘Journeys’. The group had exclusive access to film at London Transport Museum’s world renowned depot in Acton, using a collection of original transport artifacts, and stories of the people that have travelled, lived and worked in the city as inspiration for their film.

The event includes a screening of their behind-the-scenes film, a photography exhibition documenting the project, as well as a Q&A with the filmmakers.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

In an era of the so called ‘Great Spreading out’, where everything has fallen apart and keeps spreading, an ever growing distance has been established between people and things. Only water is left in the mid-ground, an ocean of tears, where Alice, a young girl, is floating alone on her mattress, searching for her sister.

FLATLAND, as a parallelism to Alice’s pool of tears (from Alice in Wonderland), works as a metaphor for the emotional flatness and narrow mindedness of the residents of that land. No one is looking up or down, only outwards and onwards, frantically trying to conquest the surrounding void. The lack of multiple dimensions in their everyday lives equals a lack of imagination and memory. Only Alice, led by the love for her sister, is persistently going against the rules of that world, trying to reconnect with her memories and expand her existence by using her imagination.

Drawing on the group’s multicultural identity and inspired in part by Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince, this new devised piece by BUNKUM takes place in a world where the ‘seen’ mingles with the ‘unseen’, giving space not only to what you touch and consume, but also to what you conceive with your mind. Stimulated by the world of Maths and Physics, Alice in Flatland dwells in a place where imaginary numbers and quanta appear to explain what is unperceivable for our senses. Alice, who might not be able to actually see her sister again, will learn to accept her physical absence and fill the gap by changing perspective.

Through the actor’s physicality, the light and projected fragments of memory, the piece tries to access the subconscious of the characters (looking down – into the water, this ‘pool of tears’) and their imagination (looking up – the sky and the stars). It is left to the audience to take a leap of faith and jump into the unknown, discovering a 3^rd dimension in this flat land.

The Bunkum ensemble, consisting of Aliki Stenou, Irina Kurbanova, Jack Parris and Jonny Aubrey-Bentley, is an international theatre collective working between the UK, Germany and Greece. Bunkum was originally formed in London, whilst the ensemble were completing their Master’s at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

Tickets: £8 (£6 concs)

Two friends participate in an experiment that delves deep into their memories. Revelations arise that lead them to see each other, and their own selves, in a new light. A love story.

Tickets: £12 (£10)

From the team that brought you I, Dido a world premiere of a new play by Bloomsbury playwright Non Vaughan-O’Hagan. A comic exploration of the power of words – and how to ride a bicycle.

Set on a sleepless night, A Play Upon Words finds Millie trying to make progress on her essay. But peace and quiet are hard to find as her flat (or is it her mind?) is occupied by the redoubtable Lady Ottoline Morrell, literary hostess of the Bloomsbury Group. Further chaos arises as Peter Mark Roget, creator of the Thesaurus decides to make his presence known. Meanwhile in 10 Gower Street there is an unexpected caller at the door. Is he really a rat catcher or is it a man on a quest to meet his hero?

Running time: Approx 120 mins

PERFORMANCE TIMES:
Wed 20 Oct 7.30pm
Thurs 21 Oct 7.30pm
Fri 22 Oct 7.30pm
Sat 23 Oct 3pm & 7.30pm

Suitable for ages 14+

Tickets: £12 (£10)

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving bodypainting works, live singing, and performance art.

Haunting, beautiful, tragic, mysterious: for centuries, Ophelia’s decline into ‘madness’ and her premature death have inspired countless painters, poets and composers; in this opening concert, Tamar inhabits the iconic character of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in an immersive performance of songs by Brahms, Strauss, Heggie and Gavrillin. The music intertwines with her ethereal paintings that use her own body as a canvas.

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed body-painting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Suitable for ages 16+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

Mario Mieli, author of the influential Elements of a Homosexual Critique, was an Italian activist who joined the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971 before founding the Italian gay liberation movement FUORI!. Undone Theatre’s Gabriele Uboldi has collected testimonies of Mieli’s time with the GLF to create a digital map of queer London, where the personal and the political, the present and the past merge into one.

Inspired by locations that were key to Mieli’s political journey, London/Londra: Invisible City is a collection of site-specific fragments mapping a personal topography of London. In this audio extract, Uboldi reflects on his own experience of migration as a queer Italian, exploring what it means to uncover the signs of an LGBT+ London that is too often made invisible.

Gabriele Uboldi is co-founder and artistic director of Undone Theatre, a London-based theatre company interested in experimenting with different forms of storytelling and undoing classical narratives, with a special focus on queer perspectives.

FREE online event – tune into Bloomsbury Radio

“My children, our generation’s summer of love was the time When the days finally got warmer and the trees began to blossom On empty streets Empty save for our love songs and prayers and spirits spilling out from the windows behind our eyelids, the band is still playing”.

Promised Land is an immersive theatre experience that questions the things we have destroyed and created as a human race, and the things that grow after ruin. Join us for a night of poetry, song, story and catharsis—a contemporary ritual for our times of change. Promised Land is the first live iteration of a piece of digital theatre that was originally created out of the first lockdown, titled Stampin’ in the Graveyard. Stampin’ has been enthusiastically received by critics and audiences as a visceral experience that brought people together during a time of extreme separation in the last theatre still open in this earth, in our collective imagination.

Suitable for ages 14+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

Young Voices is a small curating project programmed by Screen Media with Curating and Film Programming & Curating MA students at Birkbeck, University of London. The programme presents refreshing essayistic work made by young filmmakers (16-22 years old) from the University of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh-London Film Program with Derek Jarman Lab, and essay films made for the Making Images course held at the Phoenix Cinema.

The Young Voices event will present a collection of powerful and unseen essay films exploring every day life and creativity in a post-Covid world. Often finding the beauty in the mundane, the films presented combine the personal with the universal through visual experiments and the use of found footage. The screenings will be followed by a Q+A and discussion with the young filmmakers and there will also be special guests.

The event will be hosted via Birkbeck’s Institute of the Moving Image digital platform.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

A whole four seasons have passed with online resources being our only window to reality. A concert experience with Songeun Choi and Leah Park reflecting on what once would have been our daily life, each piece representing the change through each season. Starting with spring, the memories of going on a picnic, the beach in Summer, listening to the rustling of leaves in Autumn and family gatherings in Winter are now a distant reality which we are longing to bring back. However, there is always light at the end, hope is coming and with the knock of a door, we are opening up to a new beginning of life.

Tickets: £5

Find out more about Songeun Choi and Leah Park, and how they developed this event in this Q&A

Over 2020-21 artist Edwin Mingard and researcher Keren Weitzberg made a collaborative artists film with a network of people who had first hand experience of the UK’s Hostile Environment policies.

Join them, and other participants in the film, for this cast and crew screening where we’ll watch the film and reflect both on issues raised, and the role of art in processes of social change.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving body-painting works, live singing, and performance art.

In this pop-up recital, Die Winterreisse is recrafted as an immersive audio-visual journey. Interweaving moving images and stop-motion animation, body art and singing, Tamar envelops the otherworldly corridors of the Crypt in Schubert’s most melancholic cycle. (The songs will be sung in English and will include highlights from the full cycle – approx. 30min).

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed body-painting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Tickets: £8 (£6)

As a leading global public health institution, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine critically reflects on its own role to affirm its commitment towards fostering an inclusive, anti-racist, and truly diverse community. Light Up LSHTM shines light on the decolonising global public health movement.

Presented by Health Equity Action Lab at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in collaboration with StudioLou

FREE – Just turn up

Image: Kinza Portrait by Louise Gunn ©Studio Lou 

Sage Dance Company, a ballet based company for the over 55s, is joined by: Manifest Nation, a street dance company; Magpie Dance, UK’s leading dance charity for people with learning disabilities; Thomas Page Dances, a contemporary dance company whose work is rooted in socio-political ideas, and dancer /choreographer Fionuala Power to bring you a celebration of the positive power of dance for people of all ages and abilities.

This 45 minute show includes new dance work created during the pandemic plus a Q & A with the choreographers and dancers… and even a chance to try out a few Street Dance moves!

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

Photograph: Sage Dance/Chris Daw

Flow Unlocked is a creative autistic led collaborative project which highlights the importance of relationships to autistic people. The intense sensitivity with which autistic people relate to the world is rarely recognised, let alone celebrated.

The Flow Unlocked collective has been reflecting on personal and sensory relationships that have sustained them during the pandemic, as well as those they have missed. These reflections will be revealed through poetry, photography, drawing and film in this event. The visual art is created by co-artists Jon Adams and Briony Campbell, in collaboration with the Flow Unlocked participants and Georgia Pavlopoulou, UCL psychologist and autism researcher. Her work on autistic mental health and relationships is at the root of Flow Unlocked.

Traditionally, projects are made about autistic people not with them, but Flow Unlocked breaks the mould by redefining autistic narratives from the perspective of lived experience. We invite you to join us in erasing the damaging stereotypes that exist about autistic people, and celebrating their diverse talents and unique perspectives.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

In her multimedia exhibition Serenade on Skin (20 – 23 Oct), Tamar Geist challenges the traditional conventions of both art exhibition and classical-music recital by interweaving body-painting works, live singing, and performance art.

Removing all the masks, on this night Tamar performs in both her Drag King and Queen personas, blurs gender boundaries with paint and chansons. Join her as she bitterly revenges her unattainable loves and laughs at her Jewish biological clock – all taboos are deftly deflowered.

A trained classical-singer and actor, a choir-conductor and a painter, Tamar has always sought innovative practices to merge musical performance with visual-arts. During London’s 2nd lockdown she discovered body-painting and enthusiastically embraced it to her toolkit. The pandemic restrictions were the prompt which drove Tamar to create a one-woman-show from her dorms room, all crafted and executed single-handedly using a smartphone-camera and an iPad. By painting on herself and transforming to various characters from operas, poems, and plays, she was able to tell a multi-layered story using colours, sounds and movement.

This artistic fusion platform is also used by Tamar to further explore her Ph.D topic, which looks into the Jewish-Orthodox ban on female singing. The connecting thread between the displayed artworks in this exhibition are her attempt to find alternative ways to express her voice. This is one of three themed-recitals (which correspond with the displayed bodypainting artworks) in which Tamar will explore stereotypes associated with the female voice, tell the story of silenced or historically neglected female characters, as well as try to challenge gender boundaries, and reclaim classical-music pieces that are traditionally performed by men.

Suitable for ages 18+

Tickets: £8 (£6)

An opportunity to see some of London’s brightest talent creating new theatre as part of their RADA New Wave theatre programme. This show will share innovative performance events from the next generation of theatre makers.

Look out for more details in September.

Booking opens soon

Writers Edie Walwyn, Katherine Edwards, Yifan Wu, Frankie Regalia and India Pope will share extracts from their new writing and plans to develop their theatre scripts into full productions for the Bloomsbury Festival 2022. This event will include interviews with the writers and short scenes from their plays.

This event is presented by Bloomsbury Festival in partnership with the Macready Theatre, Rugby and its sponsor Cemex, and Rugby School Department of Theatre & Performing Arts, and in association with RADA and Bloomsbury Radio (at the Bloomsbury Institute).

Part of Bloomsbury Festival’s New Wave programme, a platform for emerging talent.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

An opportunity to see some of London’s brightest talent creating new theatre as part of their RADA New Wave theatre programme. This show will share innovative performance events from the next generation of theatre makers.

Look out for more details in September.

Booking opens soon