The Norfolk & Norwich Festival has announced its 2021 programme which will see 14 days of productions specially adapted to reflect current times. 

Opening on 17 May and running until 30 May, the festival has been organised and designed to be as accessible as possible, providing employment opportunities for artists, encouraging community spirit, and embracing both in-person and digital performance mediums. The majority of the programme is also running on a ‘pay what you want’ or free of charge basis to maximise accessibility. 

Notably, the Festival Gardens will re-open with live music including the much-missed Festival music weekend which will be run in collaboration with Wild Paths – Garden Sessions, and be headlined by Moses Boyd and Poppy Ajudha. The popular and much-loved garden party will also return over the middle weekend. 

Other musical highlights include I Fagiolini’s Re-Wilding the Waste Land (inspired by T S Eliot’s epic poem), Lotte Betts-Dean, Nabihah Iqbal, Hatis Not and Mahan Esfahani with Manchester Collective. 

The programme also boasts an impressive digital and interactive line-up, part of which has been designed for audiences to take part in alone. American duo, 600 Highwaymen, present a new piece inspired by their desire to create participatory theatre that obeys the rules of social distancing. A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Telephone Call connects audiences to an automated voice that creates a shared experience. Other notable offerings include Javaad Alipoor’s Rich Kids – a stage and social media fusion about wealth and consumption in Iran and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke which predates Covid-19 by more than a decade but uses technology and solo cycling in a way that has never felt more relevant. 

More information about the schedule can be found here.