Norfolk & Norwich Festival Announces Full Programme

Norfolk & Norwich Festival have announced the full programme for 2023. The Festival will run for 17 days from 12 May - 28 May 2023 with artists from around the world and across the region sharing exceptional arts experiences, exploring the unique physical and cultural identities of the city and county. The 250 year old arts festival makes art which is contemporary, international and audience-centred. Music, performance, literature, and art highlights are below. Tickets go on sale on 1 Mar.

Daniel Brine, Festival Director said, "I am delighted with the variety of this year's Festival. It is an exciting spread - from circus to classical music; from showcasing local musicians, with BBC Introducing, to one of the country's finest orchestras in the Hallé; from work in Norwich but also in North, South, East and West Norfolk. It has only been possible through working collaboratively with a whole range of partners to share venues, programming and ideas. It will make for an exciting experience for audiences in Norwich and across Norfolk."

PERFORMANCE

A weekend of free family fun across Norwich opens this year's Festival. The two day street party Welcome Weekend will include theatre, dance, circus and comedy and on the Saturday night Gorilla Circus will present their aerial circus show Unity featuring dance trapeze and wire walking in the heart of Festival Gardens. Across the weekend, pop-up performances include: ancient dance forms and uplifting song from South Asian dance company Akademi; Avanti Display who have been making outdoor shows for many years all over the world bring their new production Crow featuring live music; Candoco Dance Company and choreographer Jamaal Burkmar present new duet dance performed by disabled and non-disabled dancers; a fun filled interactive game show that uses food to tell cultural histories - The Game Show Part 2; a dance show about the history of tea - Teabreak; In Oh Europa! a motorhome doubles as a recording studio for you to sing love songs in arrives in Norwich; and Working Boys Club serves up brass not beer at their bar in Serving Sounds.- a multi-sensory sound installation.

Circus returns to the Adnams Spiegeltent in Festival Gardens with international troupe Chelsea McGuffin & Co. headlining across ten nights from 17 May with their raucous vaudevillian adventure Le Coup. Audiences can expect sword swallowing, daring aerial feats, tap dancing, and acrobatics, all with a live bluegrass band in this tribute to the travelling showmen and women of yesteryear. Magician and illusionist Vincent Gambini returns to the Festival on 17 May to present his critically acclaimed This Is Not A Magic Show. On 19-20 May Sadiq Ali brings The Chosen Haram, a performance of extraordinary movement on two Chinese Poles, which opened in Edinburgh last year, telling the story of two queer men and their chance meeting through a dating app.

A pub will be popping up inside Festival Gardens as the venue for The Inn Crowd's All Crowd Inn: a programme usually designed to bring artists to rural pubs to reinforce their central and vibrant community roles. For the Festival, a secret venue will pop up in Festival Gardens - the Festival Speak Easy - to host six shows over three days between 23-25 May. Artists on the bill include: Rosa Torr, Jonny Fluffypunk, Brenda Read Brown, Bernadette Russell, Jess Morgan and Luke Wright. Meanwhile, International Artists Jo Fong and George Orange take to the road to present The Rest of Our Lives, a night of dance, circus and games, in Village Halls around East Anglia.

More theatre highlights include multi-award-winners Sh!t Theatre bringing hit musical comedy Evita Too, telling the story of the first ever female president who shares a name with the iconic Eva Peron. Artist-in-residence Zineb Benzekri presents their work in progress La Zanka Cosmic Care exploring the use of water in self care and curing over the opening weekend. Norfolk based sensory theatre makers Frozen Light return on the final weekend for a second Festival run of Fire Songs, their immersive sensory sound experience for audiences with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). Takeshi Matsumoto's magical world of Club Origami creates an immersive and interactive dance show for families where live music meets origami.

Around the county, Jason Parr will present Broken Spoken, a unique Norfolk spoken word night showcasing local talent in Great Yarmouth and Neil Brand will tell the touching story of the world's greatest comedy team in Laurel and Hardy in Diss Corn Hall.

MUSIC

In 2023 the Festival continues to combine a core-classical repertoire with exceptional new commissions and welcomes some of the most exciting and innovative artists reinventing the classical canon. On 19 May, conductor-less string collective 12 Ensemble and piano and percussion pair GBSR Duo join forces to present works by Mica Levi from the 2014 film Under The Skin, electronic and acoustic Flowing Down Too Slow by Fausto Romitelli, the world premiere of TOMB! a Norfolk & Norwich Festival co-commission by Laurence Osborn reinventing the tombeau genre - works written by one composer on the death of another - and Ambient 2, a major work of the ambient genre written by pioneering British artist Brian Eno with Harold Budd. Across the 17 days, the adventurous string ensemble Solem Quartet will be artists-in-residence, presenting three concerts spanning Beethoven, Bartók, Steve Reich, and Kate Bush with world premieres from Bushra El-Turk and Edmund Finnis. The Festival continues its partnership with BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and brings some of the world's promising new talent to Norwich's Octagon Chapel: New Zealand-born violinist Geneva Lewis, Scottish jazz pianist Fergus McCreadie, Glaswegian classical accordionist Ryan Corbett and the Leonkoro Quartet.

The Hallé will return to Norfolk on 27 May for the first time since 1955 with former Chief Conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra and the Bern Opera House Kevin John Edusei and Argentinian pianist Nelson Goerner to perform a programme of Missy Mazzoli's Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) and Dvořák's sunny Eighth Symphony. Festival regulars Britten Sinfonia present Musical Everests on 21 May performing music by Britten, Tippett, Maconchy, and a rare work by Joseph Phibbs from 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and the summitting of Mt Everest, alongside the premiere of brand new work composed Phibbs 70 years later. The BBC Singers are joined by saxophonist and composer Christian Forshaw and conductor Owain Park on 26 May to mark the 400th Anniversary of William Byrd's death with the composer's sacred music. Compline by Candlelight returns on the second Friday of the Festival with Norwich Cathedral Choir singing the ancient monastic office of night prayer in the candlelit surroundings of Norwich Cathedral.

As previously announced, Leeds born virtuoso sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun will perform his debut album Anomaly with a nine musician ensemble including the tabla, santoor, esraj, and mridangam on 18 May at St Peter Mancroft. Country and bluegrass musician Rhiannon Giddens will play her Grammy Award winning album They're Calling Me Home at St. Andrew's Hall on the Festival's opening weekend with Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Turrisi. In the culmination of a three year project with the Festival, on 23 May singer Jessica Walker and composer Luke Styles will be joined by the Chroma Ensemble for a night of contemporary responses to the protest songs of Weill, Eisler, Spoliansky, Hollaender and Brecht in The People's Cabaret.

Music will also fill Festival Gardens where The Adnams Spiegeltent hosts a late night music programme from 17 May: international Jazz ensemble Join The Din; the four-piece, self proclaimed 'Creole Afro-Futurists' collective Dowdelin bring Afro-Caribbean stylings, Creole-language vocals and electronics; Manchester's synth-pop powerhouse W. H. Lung performing their modern dance music album Vanities, an experiment with synthesisers and falling in love with pop music; leading names in Québécois folk music Le Vent du Nord performing a mix of fiddle and foot-tapping, guitar, accordion, piano, bass, hurdy-gurdy and wonderful four-part harmonies; winner of the BBC Radio 2 Horizon Award and the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award Brìghde Chaimbeul playing her hometown style of celtic music from the Isle of Skye; South African afro-psychedelic future pop sextet B.C.U.C. bringing indigenous funk, hip-hop and punk rock energy from Soweto; DJ Paul O'Donnell brings Dia-Beat-es to the tent, exploring his type 1 diabetes with some sweet music. The Bandstand also returns for 2023 in partnership with BBC Introducing Norfolk, bringing the best of the city's new talent to the stage for free (full programme to be announced).

LITERATURE

The City of Literature Weekend returns to the streets, gardens and historic buildings of Norwich for the final weekend of the Festival featuring: Caleb Azowah Nelson, Jyoti Patel, East Anglian Sarah Perry, Amy Key, Dr Roopa Farooki and Raymond Antrobus. This year's Harriet Martineau Lecture will be delivered by award-winning author and arts journalist, Charlotte Higgins on the power of art during difficult times. The lecture celebrates the legacy of a remarkable, pioneering woman discussing their life and work each year. Throughout the weekend, the National Centre for Writing will host book clubs, writing classes, bookmaking workshops, and a literary walking tour of Norwich.

VISUAL ART

The Visual Arts programme sweeps across Norfolk with a range of free shows and exhibitions including: a live art trail in which the audience become pilgrims in Anne Bean's In Search of the Miraculous; the the first solo exhibition by illustrator Gemma Corral I Have No Idea What I'm Doing; Waste Not, an exhibition redefining waste through creative approaches to resource use and resilience at Groundwork Gallery in King's Lynn; new works from Julian Stair OBE in Art, Death and the Afterlife at Sainsbury Centre; Lucy Stein and Sarah Hartnett undertake a pilgrimage along the Mary ley line, using the journey as a feminist quest for producing collaborative work in Ex-Voto at PRIMEYARC in Great Yarmouth.Glen Jamieson and Rob Filby explore Norwich's mediaeval wall in Wall Existing at Norwich Castle Museum and Gallery. On the final weekend of the festival, Barbican Artistic Director and former BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz will be in conversation with London-based artist Rana Begum.

Full information on all Norfolk & Norwich Festival events at nnfestival.org.uk.

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