Push Festival 2021

Push is HOME’s annual celebration of the North West’s creative talents, and this year has been reimagined to become a strand across the whole year, allowing work to be seen both live and digitally, despite the coronavirus pandemic.

From September, Push will return to the HOME building, with a combination of live and digital works.

Emmanuel Bajiiji’s Candy Floss (30 September – 2 October) is a charming storytelling piece charting one man’s journey as he reflects on life in Oldham, his new town, in a new country, on a new continent. In Jenni Jackson’s multidisciplinary Endurance (7 – 9 October), the artist explores how we can observe a woman wilfully push herself to the limit, how complicit the audience is with that experience, and how this destruction of the female body echoes through time. Both works are new commissions by HOME.

On 27 October, Kani Kamil and Sherko Abbas’ Brouhaha uses chaotic noise to reflect on social agitation, displacement and the experience of being an Iraqi artist living in the diaspora, and on 29 October, join storyteller and musician Emmanuela Yogolelo for an afternoon exploring the traditions of songs, harmonies, and storytelling of the people living in the Congo basin in Tales from the Congo Basin.

On 6 November, First Dibs: The Assembly is the culmination of award-winning LGBTQ+ led theatre company Dibby Theatre’s first ever First Dibs course, a radical new play-making school led by LGBTQ+ artists, for LGBTQ+ artists.  Then on 9 and 10 November, Remi Adefeyisan’s You, Us and Them is a physical theatre and rap production that journeys through the life of two people whose emotions, personalities, and their relationship are constantly being moulded and shaped by the world around them.

Ugly Bucket return to HOME following their incredibly popular Homemakers commissions ABC (Anything But Covid) with Good Grief (11 – 13 November), a high energy maelstrom of clowning, movement, verbatim and thumping techno tracks – that is also a show about death. Then on 16 and 17 November, Susanna Amato’s Landfill of Memories is an autobiographical production, about our relationship with holding onto things and the subsequent place it takes up in our heads, our hearts and our houses.

And on 20 November, Box of Tricks return to HOME with the PlayMakers Takeover, bringing together Northern playwrights and theatremakers to connect, collaborate and create. The day will culminate with a cinema screening of Box of Tricks’ acclaimed stage production SparkPlug (filmed at HOME in 2019) followed by a Q&A with playwright/performer David Judge, last seen in Manchester as Lysander in HOME and Filter Theatre’s outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Thrilling and challenging, HOME’s annual festival is a glimmering reminder that new performance continues to be developed, despite ‘you-know-what’.” – Creative Tourist