The Bristol Shakespeare Festival (BSF) is a not for profit organisation run by a team of dedicated volunteers passionate about bringing the freshest, most exciting productions of Shakespeare’s plays to some of Bristol’s most beautiful and unusual spaces every summer during the month of July. We are passionate about bringing Shakespeare’s timeless stories to life in ways, which are accessible to and enjoyable for a new generation of audiences.

This year aims to be the biggest and best yet and with a diverse programme of performance, education events, projects, public lectures and engagement.

As a part of our exciting programme, the BSF, in partnership with Colston Hall, will showcase a live art platform event for UK-based artists from a range of different arts backgrounds.

We are giving you the challenge of presenting a 15-20 minute performance/ presentation based on any of Shakespeare’s works in order to explore the concept of “Shakespeare’s timelessness”. If you have any experimental ideas that you would like to develop we would like to invite you to develop something during June 2012 for presentation on the 7 July as a part of the festival at Colston Hall. It could be a short performance, a durational piece or intervention, a performance to video, a piece of dance or even a piece of cartoon animation.

The aim will be to see how Shakespeare’s ideas, words and texts can strongly engage with topical issues and how something written and performed 400 years ago can continue to collide with our society today.