Make. Discover. Dream. Play.

DARE Festival, a three-day extravaganza of inventive, unexpected, challenging and ground-breaking new work is back for its fourth year in Shoreditch Town Hall’s ditch. Selling-out for three consecutive years, DARE is curated by critically-acclaimed arts innovators Upstart Theatre and brings audiences from across London together for three days of performance, installations and panel discussions. 

DARE is an opportunity to see new work in its earliest stages and gives artists vital audience feedback which can inform the next stage of the work’s development.

This year Upstart have commissioned 12 artists to create a new piece of work that responds to the theme of ‘MONEY’. The festival line-up includes: very very serious performance artists Tylor and Vincent with TYLOR AND VINCENT'S PUSSY AND MONEY BY TYLOR AND VINCENT; Deborah Vogt and Connor Roff’s new folk musical BUSK; A new work about the gentrification of Hackney, OUTGROWN by Hackney local Beth Timson and self-described gentrifier Zoë Guzy-Sprague; award-winning theatre company Écoute Theatre with TAKE CARE, a new verbatim play about the care system; East-Asian theatre collective Cheeky Chin’s interactive show MONEY FUNNY SUNNY, which explores the financial concerns of artists; Outside Edge Theatre Company’s new play A VERY HAPPY SCRAPPY SACKLER FAMILY THANKSGIVING which brings together a cast of performers in recovery from substance misuse and addiction to speak dialogue taken directly from testimony given in civil lawsuits against the billionaire pharmaceutical family, the Sacklers; ENCORE, a story about two up and coming rappers going through the hardships of the music industry and the struggles that come along with it, created by London artists Nathan Ihedioha, Duramaney Kamara, Joel Osei and Segan Yosef; CUTE by Luca Rutherford, a new one-woman show about not being silenced, especially when you’re scared to make noise; THE HOUSE NEVER WINS by Kill the Cat Theatre Company, a game-based experience tackling eco-anxiety and human inaction in the face of a climate emergency; CLUMSY BOD(Y DOUBLES) by Clumsy Bodies imagines what happens when two trans and disabled performers hire two cis body doubles to represent them in life; Simon Carroll-Jones show brings a skatepark into a theatre space in The Local: A Skatepark Project; and Jennifer Jackson’s new work ENDURANCE is about women, sport and the punishing demands made by the health and diet industries. 

The festival will also host a number of panel discussions and an installation piece about women in politics by social change theatre collective Change of Art.