Origins Festival: Celebrating New Work launched at Birmingham Hippodrome last week, bringing vibrant performances, workshops and artistic collaboration to the city.

Curated by Birmingham Hippodrome’s New Work & Artist Development department, the week-long programme showcased new work from eight Birmingham-based artists who were part of the Hippodrome’s 18-month Origins residency programme.

Across the week, audiences experienced a wide mix of theatre, presented on a pay what you can basis, with all proceeds reinvested into supporting the Hippodrome’s development of new work.

Origins Festival also featured free workshops and discussions from leading organisations, including In Good Company and Paines Plough, alongside a scratch night where artists shared works-in-progress. Creative director Corey Campbell and director, dramaturg and writer Daniel Bailey also led hands-on workshops.

The performance programme kicked-off on Wednesday 13 May with Grace Barrington’s Money for Nothing which explored the struggles of a working men’s club in Yardley during early-2010s and Amerah Saleh’s Untitled which followed Layla, who is trying to write a play about her mother’s passing and perfectly express her grief and joy, without interference from her three aunties.

On Thursday, Nathan Sebastian Lafayette presented As Poetic as it Sounds, a dance-theatre piece exploring what it means to be an artist, from the comic to the infuriating, alongside Louis Wharton’s  Hurts So Good which examined queer legacy and ethical dilemmas through research into Operation Spanner.

Friday saw Zakariye’s Pretend Like It's Calm, a poetic exploration of grief, family and unlikely friendships and Tina Hofman’s The Body I See Is Also Mine, a journey through memory, rave and connection where new writing, movement and images collide in a bass-driven search for what is real.

The festival came to a close on Saturday with Elizabeth O'Connor’s Earth Secrets which followed the dispute of two neighbouring families over a bordering fence, a rose bush, and a lost dog, all while birds fall out of the sky, and Jaz Morrison’s MID, a near-future story in Birmingham where Dee and Haddy fight to save their local community centre while challenging the Poet Laureate’s attempts to artwash its demolition.

Origins Festival: Celebrating New Work was produced by Birmingham Hippodrome.