NEWS: Voila! Theatre Festival Returns to London – Connecting ‘Border-Busting Theatre’ to ‘Citizens of Everywhere’

Peter Gumbel’s 2020 book Citizens of Everywhere: Searching for Identity in the Age of Brexit first coined the term, in retort to Theresa May’s speech in which she declared “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” Voila! Theatre Festival has co-opted the line for its motto, inviting those who see the world without borders, and perhaps even more importantly, those who don’t, to take in a titanic programme of grassroots Fringe theatre in the next 20 days.

Piloted by the team behind Marylebone’s The Cockpit, the self-described theatrical rendezvous offers up a smorgasbord of multidisciplinary, multilingual & multicultural performance that celebrate British & International emerging artists. Originally founded as a bilingual French-English handshake, in response to Brexit it soon came to encompass work presented in all European languages, and now sees performance from as far as China and Latin America join its ranks.

Among the offerings of this year’s programme, Thessaloniki Fringe Award Winners Dis Èquilibre arrive with Binary Lives –Where fate takes us, a physical theatre piece about two strangers meeting at train station. Ozan Bingöl brings another outing of his unusual theatre experiment TEMPORARY AUTHORIZATION, which Binge Fringe described as “opening up huge questions about collective responsibility, giving voice to the oppressed, and overturning turgid oppressive systems when they exhume the humanity from us” at Thessaloniki Fringe this October.

Speaking of Binge Fringe, our very own writer Romeo Lau brings their Theatre Deli Residency winning piece Blondie Blue Eyes following an Asian woman who so desperately desires to be the epitome of the White ideal that she herself becomes a caricature of it. Also exploring the body, gender and identity, AllouAqui Dance Theatre arrive from across Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the UK to bring KOKONA, set in a world in which bodies are detached from their materiality, to playfully explore how we would experience different norms and constraints if we hadn’t yet embodied them.

French-Tunisian artist and researcher Isadora offers up the experimental piece Huella, meaning ‘imprint’, set at the edge of ecological collapse, unfolding around an ambiguous waterfall carrying the memory of water, within a liminal landscape of ‘technofossils’, somewhere between an altered present and a future archive. Also focused on the environment, Alice Capella writes and directs Le tour de l’arbre, an immersive journey through forests and grief.

There’s plenty more to see, and Voila! Theatre Festival artists have already began sharing their work on Binge Fringe through affordable advertising pitches looking to connect directly with audience members. Read some of their words here.

Voila! Theatre Festival runs until the 22nd November at venues across London. Find out more and book tickets through their Online Programme & Box Office.