Returning to St Paul’s Church in the heart of Covent Garden, award winning theatre company Iris Theatre will showcase an eclectic line up of live outdoor performance as part of their Summer Festival. A mixture of music, theatre and new work, the festival champions and celebrates performance in a time of uncertainty. Taking part in this summer’s event, writers Asa Haynes and Jesse Bateson will showcase their work in progress Words I’ve Said, a play exploring themes of family and loss. Ahead of the festival, Asa tells us more about his inspirations for the show, writing the show during this unique time and what audiences can expect.

We – the modern human (Homo Sapiens) have embarked on a 12,000 year journey that presently sees us where we are today whereby we’ve created complex civilisations and social structures. Within this time we’ve compiled, measured and collected countless amounts of data documenting our existence, at present the online space the new frontier in terms of the archive of human history it holds. Delving into this facet of human history further are composer Jamie Perera, artistic filmmaker Katherine Round and journalist Leah Borromeo in their audio visual presenting their work Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments playing as part of the Electric Dreams Online Festival.

Overwhelmed by a myriad of images on our timelines constantly, photo sharing has become the norm in terms of how we communicate to others and curate our digital lives. Our accounts serving as digital legacies telling our story how we choose to, each image a gateway to a differing chapter. Delving into this phenomenon in their topical work Rich Kids: A history of shopping malls in Tehran, Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housely craft an early 21st century defining show tying together entitlement and technology to showcase the theatrical within our new normal.

Our relationships and how we interact with others around us help form our realities and perceptions of the world, relationships our foundations for helping us to figure out who we are, but complex in nature. Exploring this notion in their award winning show GRIP, Nothing to Perform showcase an ambitious piece of work cleverly shifting in form. Originally performed as part of the International Youth Arts Festival, and filmed by online streaming service LIVR, GRIP forms part of this year’s Reading Fringe Online Festival.

‘A digital meditation on hearing loss’, Platform 4’s immersive filmic experience Invisible Music places centre the personal experiences of Artistic Director Catherine Church, her mother and voices from the Winchester Lip-Reading Group. The 45 minute piece’s aim to highlight how the sense of sound when altered impacts day to day interactions.

At first impression, Philip Glass might seem to embody all that is intimidating about opera at its most culturally exclusive: shows five hours long (without intermission); obscure, coded symbolism; and plots that are difficult or elusive, if present at all. But for anyone willing to brave shows like Satyagraha, his music is immediately recognisable and redeeming. That’s because Glass has so influentially permeated cultural common – his sound has reached from ground-shaking film scores like Inception, to the finely tuned world of soporific-yet-focussed study music. Listening to any opera by Glass, even for the first time, always feels like re-listening to some extent. That’s also because the composer’s stylistic trademark, minimalism, is all about repetition: music that builds and falls in waves, where the slightest change can have a profoundly moving effect on the audience.

Situated within a Lagos (Nigerian) hospital, filmmaker Jon Krasbe and his team spent a month documenting the pregnancies of six women and four blood delivery drivers across a 1 month time period. Their documentary Blood Ridersbringing to light Joseph and Deborah’s pregnancy journey.

In response to the impact of Covid-19 within the arts’ sector, We Are One Global Film Festival have responded to this by uniting 20 film festivals across the world to showcase a variety of works created by a talented network of filmmakers.

In light of recent events, we’ve collectively witnessed a shift in terms of the awareness brought towards particular societal issues, systemic issues of racial injustice and police brutality stark reminders of a broken system in need of reform.

Courtesy of Paul Kolnik.

New Wave Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist Wilkie Branson opens up the conversation on mental health and loneliness in his bold digital production TOM. A culmination of digital and analogue animation, Branson guides us on a man’s groundhog day journey of monotonous commutes, the relentless rat race and battling with depression. From the vast green expanses of the countryside, to the metallic, futuristic surfaces of our transport system – we as the viewer are constantly reminded of our protagonist’s loneliness – the unspoken emotion more commonly felt than realised.