The Greenwich + Docklands International Festival is back, baby! After keeping our spirits buoyed during the pandemic, GDIF will be back into something like a normal groove for 2022 as the spectacular Docklands-based festival of street theatre returns with the most ‘international’ edition it’s been practical to do since 2019.
It doesn't kick off until the end of the summer, but the first programme announcements have just been made today. The highlights are several and varied, but it’s hard not to imagine the most talked about being German artist Stephanie Lüning’s ‘Island of Foam: Version XVIII’, which will see torrents – in fact, we’re told ‘a tsunami’ – of rainbow-coloured foam surge through the streets of the Greenwich Peninsular on September 3 and 4, changing the look of the streets and with audiences free to interact with it.
Also causing a stir will be Peter Hudson’s temporary landmark ‘Charon’, a 32ft high ‘kinetic’ installation originally built for Burning Man – when it comes to life at night, the idea is that it brings a little slice of the iconic desert festival to, uh, Canning Town at a TBC location from September 1 to 10.
There’s plenty of other stuff besides: other likely highlights include House of Suarez’s ‘House of Oak and Iron’ (Old Royal Naval College, Aug 27), a voguing-based contemporary dance response to colonial history, and Fevered Sleep’s ‘The Sky is Filled with Thunder’, a promenade headphone-based show set in a Thamesmead playground at dusk (Aug 27 and 28) designed to take adults into the hopes, fears and dreams of a child.
More announcements will be made in due course, including a ‘spectacular opening event’ due to be unveiled in June. Don’t worry about missing out on anything, though – the shows are all free, and only a handful require any sort of booking: all you have to do is get down to the Docklands.
The Greenwich + Docklands International Festival 2022 runs Aug 26-Sep 11. Find out more here.
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