Able Magazine is proud to support Unlimited Festival 2018! Unlimited festival returns to Southbank Centre from 5 to 9 September to showcase extraordinary new work by disabled artists. The bi-annual festival brings together music, performance and art across five days at London’s riverside arts centre.

The festival has an abundance of free events, plus relaxed performances and BSL-integrated events, so there’s even more reason to get involved.

Born out of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Southbank Centre’s Unlimited is a biennial festival with further Arts Council funding secured until 2020.

At the heart of the festival is the Unlimited commissions programme delivered by Shape Arts and Artsadmin. Supporting established, emerging and international disabled artists across all artforms, this programme aims to embed work by disabled artists within the cultural sector, reach new audiences and shift perceptions. The programme is funded by Arts Council England, Arts Council of Wales, British Council and Spirit of 2012.

Musical highlights include blind sitar master Baluji Shrivastav and his Inner Vision Orchestra, comprised of 14 blind musicians, joining forces with dancers, storytelling and film in a spectacular performance. The British Paraorchestra team up with Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory for The Nature of Why, a fusion of dance and live music inspired by the unconventional curiosity of Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, in which the audience sit on the stage alongside the performers for an exhilarating experience.

Theatre lovers have a lot to get excited about, including Samuel Beckett’s intense dramatic work Not I performed by Jess Thom (aka Touretteshero), and new writing from playwright Kaite O’Reilly, And Suddenly I Disappear, which examines difference, disability and what it means to be human. Not to be missed, artist Jo Bannon’s new performance We Are F*cked explores the modern feminist experience of personal, psychological and political penetration in a melodramatic opera.

Plus, comedian Laurence Clark shares what it’s really like to be a parent with cerebral palsy in his wry show, An Irresponsible Father’s Guide to Parenting. Award-winning poet, playwright and stand-up comedian Jackie Hagan’s latest show, This Is Not A Safe Space, spotlights the real voices of proper skint disabled people, in a time when benefit cuts are hitting disabled people the hardest.

Strike a pose with Vogue: The Unlimited House of Krip, featuring a free film screening, voguing workshop and vogue ball with Deaf and disabled performers. Delve into two dance works examining identity and disability from performance artists Aby Watson and Dan Daw, who use the body itself to challenge our perception of normal bodies, function and dysfunction.

Tickets on sale now, plus lots of free events.

Find out more here:

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/festivals-series/unlimited