YORK Theatre Royal's TakeOver Festival invites you to follow the hour-long promenade piece Boy Meets Girl around York’s cityscape on Saturday morning and afternoon.
The innovative Zest Theatre will take audiences on a journey with Boy and Girl through the highs and lows of falling in love in a multi-media combination of silent disco technology, theatre, music and dance at 11.30am, 1pm and 3.30pm.
Created for public spaces, this interactive performance allows the audience to pursue either Boy or Girl, or both, around the much-loved corners of the city as they listen to the characters' innermost thoughts through wireless headphones, placing you at the centre of the action.
Meanwhile, back inside the Theatre Royal at 2pm on Saturday, The Human Zoo theatre company presents The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Moon, an intimate Tim Burton-style patchwork of puppetry, poetry, movement and live music where Luna's tragic tale unravels for the first time.
This magical piece of devised storytelling is presented by a playful, dynamic, young ensemble that sets out to explore humanity's eternal fascination with the skies through the eyes of the female-led cast.
The Studio also stages Saturday's 8pm show, Jenna May Hobbs's Captured, a 60-minute piece of devised theatre presented by White Slate Theatre Company. Using an innovative series of projections, Captured tells the love story of an artist and a photographer, exploring the complexities of human relationships as past and present collide in a whirlpool of forgotten images and repressed words, blurring perception and reality.
Zest Theatre's Boy Meets Girl. Picture: Electric Egg
The Theatre Royal's remodelled Main House stage plays host to the festival's centrepiece in-house show, Pandora, on Saturday at 8pm. In this raw and honest, newly devised, 70-minute production by TakeOver artistic director Lizzy Whynes, the writer-director explores the depths of her own post-traumatic stress disorder through the narrative performed by a cast of five.
In Pandora, Zeus gives his daughter a box containing all the evil in the world, but she does not want it. Tormented by its contents, Pandora opens the box to find she has been made an accomplice in unleashing a world of horrors.
"Through a blend of dance and devised theatre, this uplifting hybrid between an autobiographical story and ancient myth will show that everyone can find hope in the darkest of places, as hope is the antidote for suffering," says Lizzy.
Cementing its reputation for encouraging community engagement in a festival where 12 to 26 year olds take over running the Theatre Royal for a week, TakeOver welcomes the York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre on Sunday evening. Directed by Charlotte Coles, the young company performs the stage premiere of prolific York playwright Mike Kenny’s new work, The Forgetting.
Utilising cast and crew members ranging in age from eight to 16, it recounts the story of an old man suffering with dementia who wakes up believing that he is a ten-year-old boy. Kenny's touching tale follows him and his fellow residents in Evergreen Care Home, reminding us to live life to the full, no matter how old you are.
Young dramatists aged 14 and over are invited to a four-hour workshop with physical theatre company Frantic Assembly on Sunday from 1pm in the De Grey Rooms Ballroom. "It will leave participants with the skills to develop their own work in a more physically interesting way," they promise.
Full details of the TakeOver Festival programme and booking requirements can be found at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk; box office, 01904 623568.
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