Bradley Hemmings’ London Cultural Diary

The Greenwich and Docklands International Festival is a showcase for the world's most thrilling outdoor art events – and Bradley Hemmings is in charge

Bradley Hemmings has been running the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival , where he is artistic director, since 1996. In recent years the festival has carved out a reputation for staging large-scale, superbly theatrical outdoor events. London has never seen elsewhere such a combination of crowd-pleasing spectacle, pyrotechnics, lighting and aerial performance with artistic content of huge depth and subtlety. Certainly an innovator in the long list of London summer festivals. 

The opening night

2012’s Prometheus Awakes, an 8-metre tall puppet lit from within and created by the Graeae Theatre Company, stunned audiences; this year’s opening night performance comes from Argentinean company Voalá. With their show Muaré, audiences are promised ‘a psychedelic world in which aerialists descend from giant revolving “optical art” suspended 30 metres above the audience’. But then, Bradley Hemmings and Jenny Sealey of Graeae co-directed the London 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony, so they know a thing or two about big openers. 

Why outdoor art?

‘I’m hoping Muaré will be an exemplar of the way we like to bring surprising transformations to spaces people think they know well,’ Hemmings tells CW. ‘When people think of street theatre they tend to imagine buskers or the people performing in front of St Paul’s Covent Garden. That is a rich and wonderful tradition, but we are trying to go further, and imagine an outdoor theatre world which is worthy of the critical attention you would give to a building-based play. 

‘These are incredibly purposeful works of art, which can combine large-scale spectacle, structures that move through an audience, huge casts, great music, pyrotechnics and performance poetry.  They bring the political tradition of street performance into a stadium-type event, and tell a story not through text, but through movement, the transformation of objects, choreographic effects and new sound worlds. And because they are outdoors, you can see the people you are experiencing the show with. Visitors often tell us how much they enjoy the sense of being part of an audience.'

Bradley's picks of theatre inside and out

Outdoor theatre: Kadogo, Child Soldier , La Patriótico Interesante, Monday 23 – Friday 27 June 14, 9.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, E20. Free   

This is a quite a political piece about child soldiering, which is enormously engaging and also contains moments of heartbreaking beauty. It comes from a Chilean company and is part of the GDIF, some of it which is staged in the Olympic Park.

Outdoor theatre:  One Million , Tangled Feet, Brighton Festival, Friday 23 and Saturday 24 May 14, 9.45pm. Free

This show combines music, poetry, acrobatics and a huge cast of young people to look at the problem of youth unemployment, which has now reached the 1,000,000 of the title. 

Theatre: Charles III , the Almeida, until 31 May 14

I love Mike Bartlett’s work – there’s some extraordinary new writing in theatre going on in general in London at the moment. In this play, which imagines the queen has died and Charles has ascended to the throne, I gather there are some quite Shakespearean areas of darkness about how to rule.  

Theatre: Incognito , the Bush, until 21 June 14

This is a new piece by Nick Payne which features three interwoven stories dealing with neurosciences. Theatre writing now deals with such a vast range of materials and ideas and issues – it’s tremendously exciting. 

Outdoor theatre: The Roof , Requardt & Rosenberg, Lift Festival, South Bank, 30 May – 28 June

Staged in a car park behind the National Theatre, the Roof incorporates free running and an immersive set and is inspired by gaming. [This piece is part of the London International Festival of Theatre, which was established in 1981 to ‘throw open a window to the world’ and ‘bring global stories to London’].

Bradley Hemmings' Greenwich+Docklands Festival programme is free to audiences, and runs from Friday 20 June to Saturday 28 June. Visit the website for details. 

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