Well, we did it. After months of preparation, days spent transforming the backstage spaces of the REP into our festival hub and five days of performances, workshops, talks, dinners and parties BE FESTIVAL 2015 took just a few hours to dismantle. The REP’s workshop may now be devoid of sofas, cardboard gaming machines, karma desks and festival goers but the memories will last much longer and we’ll all have new experiences to take away with us.
At BE HQ we’ve been tidying away and evaluating. We need to say huge thanks to all of our BE volunteers, who worked very very hard, always in good spirits, to help deliver the festival. We’d also like to thank the staff at Birmingham REP who worked with us in the run-up to and during the festival and embraced the festival spirit. We would like to thank Blanch and Shock for the delicious food we enjoyed on the REP’s main stage during the week. We’d like to thank the Arts Council and all of the very generous supporters and partners who made the festival possible. Of course, we’d also like to thank all of the companies and visual artists whose brilliant work made us laugh, cry, think and question, and our audiences – for turning up and being supportive, for sharing your thoughts and pictures with us on social media, for your feedback and for making the festival so much fun.
On the closing night of the festival we saw four amazing shows: (Don’t) Trust Me by Danielle van Vree, Quintetto by TIDA Théâtre Danse, Grumelot’s #sobrejulieta, and Game by Unstable King, plus BE Next’s performance, Before, which had been developed during the week by our young performance company working with international directors Antonio Tagliarini and Filipe Viegas.
After the final shows we gathered in the festival hub for the BE 2015 Awards. Each year the shows in BE’s competitive programme are judged by a panel of jurors and by the audience. This year’s jury consisted of Claire Verlet, Giorgio Ursini, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Maria Delgado and Mark Yeoman.
In addition to the BE FESTIVAL 1st Prize of £1500 plus a three-week creative residency in Birmingham and the ACT Festival Award, giving the winning performance a chance to be programmed at ACT in Bilbao in 2016, we had a new prize this year: the MESS Festival Award supported by the international theatre festival in Sarajevo.
The winners were:
BE FESTIVAL 1st Prize – TIDA – Théâtre Danse with Quintetto
BE Audience Award – VerTeDance with Correction
ACT Festival Award – InPulse with Tortured Mind
MESS Festival Award – VerTeDance with Correction
We would like to congratulate all of our prize winners and also those who received special mentions from our jury including Margo van de Linde with Translating Lola, Squarehead Productions with The Whistle and Collective Corps Citizen with Mouvma!.
Now to start preparing for next year…