Freedom Festival: Circus, music & theatre take centre stage for launch weekend

By Simon Bristow

One of the biggest events in Hull’s cultural calendar starts tonight with the launch weekend of the newly extended Freedom Festival.

The city’s longest-running arts festival, which brings world class shows to locations around the city centre, will be held over nine days for the first time this year, and ends on September 4.

Kick-starting the festival with shows on Friday night and Saturday matinee and evening performances is Gravity and Other Myths at Hull New Theatre. Their circus show Backbone has been performed over 300 times at festivals and theatres in 23 countries.

After opening Edinburgh International Festival, they are back in Hull for the first time since 2018, with a show billed as “circus as you’ve never seen it before, pushed to its conceptual and cerebral limits”.

Gravity and Other Myths. Picture by Carnival Cinema

Hull-based theatre company Middle Child are next up with two shows each day on Saturday and Sunday, with their family-friendly musical There Should Be Unicorns being performed at Stage@TheDock. The production also features Beats Bus, as hip-hop, dance, and theatre collide in this “brilliant” outdoor show. No pre-booking required.

The third first-weekend-only performance is RESONANCE by Stewart Baxter, Mark Slater, and Stephanie Halsey. Performing at the Tidal Barrier on Saturday evening, it a musical-audio experience of ambient and meditative soundscapes bringing together sound gathered from around Hull.

The show was premiered at Rooted in Hull in June and features randomly played Hull field recordings alongside pre-recorded piano loops to create “an immersive quad-speaker surround-scape with live guitar, piano and harp improvisation”. RESONANCE does not require tickets but only happens once in the programme.

There Should Be Unicorns. Picture by Tom Arran Commercial Photography for Middle Child

The last show of the bank holiday weekend is Fast Food Megaverse, described as “an epic celebration of young imaginations”. Starting at Princes Quay’s East Arcade and delivered by critically acclaimed local theatre company The Herd, the show is written in collaboration with children from Hull and East Yorkshire Children’s University’s Letterbox Club.

Audiences are invited to “put on headphones, grab a map and join Mo on an adventure through the multiverse”. This show, which carries on throughout the nine days, is free but requires a slot to be reserved with a small refundable deposit due to limited capacity.

The full programme, tickets, and more information is available here.