Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF) London’s leading and longest established free festival of outdoor performance returns to Royal Borough of Greenwich, Newham and the Thamesmead from Friday 22 August to Saturday 6 September. To celebrate 30 years of the award-winning annual festival, 30 companies from across the world will present new work inspired by the theme “Above and Beyond.”
This year’s GDIF opens on Friday 22 August with French company Lézards Bleus whose new production Above and Beyond encompasses this year’s festival theme quite literally, as eight extraordinary parkour performers give a heart-stopping performance across the landmark buildings and recently relandscaped public spaces of Woolwich. This world premiere has been specially commissioned to mark the 30th anniversary of the festival with spectacular formation climbing combined with choreography and music inspired by Woolwich’s rich history of mutuality and shared endeavour. A central collaboration with the locally based Citizens of the World Choir reflects the creativity and stories of local people which have been at the heart of GDIF for the last 30 years.
Spectacular staging is central to The Weight of Water in Thamesmead on 5 – 6 September as Dutch company Panama Pictures use stunning physical theatre to explore the climate crisis. A huge floating structure tips back and forth on water, with nail-biting choreography as dancers fight to cling on. More jaw-dropping outdoor performance is featured in Turning Worlds from 30 – 31 August at Greenwich Peninsula, staged in the Design District’s Rooftop Basketball Court alongside other vibrant destinations. The theme of “Above and Beyond” is explored through trailblazing collaborations between engineering and performance including a fusion of circus and robotics, a production enabling a performer to perform vertically on a wall and a captivating dance and physical theatre performance on a giant, rotating metal spiral.
Another festival highlight will see leading Black British theatre company Talawa (Play On, UK Tour) collaborate with acclaimed Black British dance company Fubunation (The Ruins Series) on the world premiere of Fragments of Us on 4 September in Woolwich. Directed by award-winning artist Sonia Hughes (What is the City but the People? with Jeremy Deller for MIF) this new dance-theatre piece explores black masculinity in a moving testimony to collective history and identity.
The hugely popular “festival within the festival” Dancing City returns this year featuring an exciting new partnership with New York’s iconic Fire Island Dance Festival. Fire Island Dance Festival was established in 1995 as a fundraising event for Dancers Responding to AIDS (DRA) and has become a celebrated annual festival showcasing world-class emerging and established dance. Dancing City will also feature three London premieres from groundbreaking disabled artists and companies, along with a huge variety of work from exceptional homegrown and international artists.
In this landmark 30th year, the much-loved Greenwich Fair returns to its historic nineteenth-century home in Greenwich Park. GDIF’s reinvention of the original fair brings together a packed programme of uplifting, fun and disruptive street theatre, games and family fun to the beautifully relandscaped Wolfe Statue Piazza at the top of Greenwich Park Hill. Amongst the highlights will be extraordinary puppetry in Theatre-Rites and Miguel Altunaga’s Eshu at the Crossroads, Miss High Leg Kick’s camp and playful celebration of ecology Lady Garden and the UK premiere of a breathtaking all-female high wire performance, Epiphytes, from Belgian company Des Chaussons Rouges. Framed by London’s best view, this performance offers new perspectives on our relationship with the natural world and will provide extraordinary images of the festival theme in action.
Bradley Hemmings MBE, GDIF’s Artistic Director introduces this year’s festival: “This year’s theme‘Above and Beyond’ grows out of 30 years of delivering GDIF across Greenwich, East London and the City of London. In that time, we’ve learned that there are no edges or boundaries in outdoor theatre and the usual distinctions between art and the everyday are often miraculously blurred. This year our “stage” stretches out in all directions – across parks, town centres, basketball courts, roofs and a water space, whilst we also invite audiences to look up, both physically and imaginatively.”
For information about the upcoming GDIF 2025 programme, please visit www.festival.org/gdif-2025
