Outburst Queer Arts Festival preview (9–18 November) #outburst23

As always at this time of the year, there’s lots to catch your eye in the Outburst festival programme. Previous festivals have gifted audiences with performances like Damage, Scorch, Tactics for Time Travel in a Toilet, There’s a Bishop in my Bedroom, Abomination (originally a concert version that returned with full staging the next year), This Sh*t Happens All The Time (which later returned in a full production), and lots, lots more.

Here’s a few highlights that jumped out of the 40 or so events in the programme:

The Belfast Ensemble is a frequent collaborator with Outburst and artistic director Conor Mitchell has teamed up with Mark Ravenhill to create the music and libretto for an exciting new triptych of short operas: The Headless Soldier [reviewed] from Thursday 9–Saturday 11 in the Lyric Theatre.

The international cinema strand features The Lost Boys/Les Paradis (Sunday 12), Rivière (Tuesday 14), All the Colours of the World are Between Black and White (Wednesday 15) and Orlando, my political biography (Saturday 18).

New for this year is the JUNTES project, a collaboration between a number of organisations to explore new approaches to changing the narratives around gender that has sprung out of a festival in São Paulo earlier this year. JUNTES will include performance (Grace Petric’s Butch Ado About Nothing on Thursday 16 in the Black Box), panel discussion (The Dramaturgy of Politics looking at whether art can really make a difference when it comes to changing hearts and minds on Saturday 18 in the Black Box) and performance (It Was Paradise, Unfortunately [reviewed] examines where and why the idea of theatre began in the Western World and whether theatre has ever changed the world on Saturday 11, Friday 17 and Saturday 18 at Ulster University).

This year, the organisers are conscious of the opportunity – perhaps the imperative – for festival goers to talk, informally before and after events, as well as through organised panel discussions. New dialogue around queer issues is encouraged, lifting heads up from polarisation and disinformation to find hope.

The full festival programme us available on the Outburst Arts website.