Stream 6 Short Films For Free

With the wet weather seemingly settling in for the next few days are you looking for a theatre fix without needing to get wet? Luckily The Sydney Opera House and The British Council have just the offering for you with six  cutting-edge digital performance works by artists from across the UK.

These works all draw on hip-hop, dance and drama to explore the contemporary British experience from many perspectives, through themes of community, identity, gender and the body, as artists explore the question ‘Who Are We Now?’. Audiences everywhere can access these powerful new works for free on Stream, the Sydney Opera House’s dedicated arts streaming platform.

• Battersea Arts Centre Beatbox Academy’s hit show, the hip-hop inspired Frankenstein: How to Make A Monster reinterprets Shelley’s classic fable about the monsters society creates with a dazzling array of vocal talents including rap, beatboxing and song from the perspective of young people growing up in 21^st century Britain – 200 years after the 18-year-old Mary Shelley wrote the text.
• Here/Not Here is an acclaimed crossover hip-hop drama short that combines elements of dance, Krump and hip hop, with football, BSL and Visual Vernacular, to explore how we all try to find our place where different groups compete for use of urban space. Directed by independent filmmaker Bim Ajadi, led by disabled artists, and written by Britain’s foremost advocate for Hip Hop, Jonzi D.
• UK-based, Canadian-born dance maker Laila Diallo’s 1:1 is a short dance film made to the scale of our kitchen, exploring notions of impermanence, of our perception of the passing of time, and of how we negotiate togetherness.
• Made in 2021 amidst a world ‘working from home’, Kitchen Alba places the miraculous in the most mundane of spaces: a domestic kitchen. Artist Jo Bannon’s riff on religious iconography, white goods, family and faith, is informed by her identity as a disabled woman with albinism.
• Billy Boyd Cape is a director of music videos, commercials and short films who has collaborated with artists such as FKA Twigs and Pussy Riot. In the emotional and award-winning short film REACH he collaborates with Olivier Award winning dance artist, choreographer and director Botis Seva and his hip hop theatre collective, Far From The Norm, to explore the themes of love, abandonment and fatherhood.
• Contemporary performance maker and choreographer Dan Canham’s Still House: In The Letting Go is a physical excavation of patriarchy, vulnerability, intimacy, care-giving, playfulness and love, and an unburdening, a way forward towards new models for masculinity.