Shoreditch Town Hall Announces Lineup for Summer in The Ditch 2026

Shoreditch Town Hall announces the return of Summer in The Ditch for 2026. Now a staple of the yearly programme in its third year, the festival will once again transform the venue’s basement space with a high energy home for a camp, queer and experimental line-up of shows that will run throughout July. The venue’s artistic team curates the festival to spotlight London’s most exciting emerging artists, with each evening featuring a double bill of boundary-pushing performances.

Opening the season will be House of Tríus with Kiki with Corí (9th July), an evening of naughty and nude cabaret mayhem, featuring an all Black, all queer neurodiverse cast. Also performing will be award winning ventriloquist and clown Lachlan Werner (WonderTwunk, Soho Theatre) with his latest work-in-progress Sleeper Hit (9th July), a surreal “ventriloquial hypnotherapy session” exploring gay skeletons in closets, subconscious fears and queer absurdity.

Kate Newman presents A Womb of One’s Own (10th July), a furious and funny exploration of PMDD, medical misogyny and late-stage capitalism. Blending punk performance and clowning, her work examines what it means to live inside a body that feels perpetually in rebellion. Simone French & TomYumSim will join her with Trainwreck (10th July), a chaotic satire exploring AI, audience participation and immersive culture gone spectacularly wrong. Inspired by the infamous Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow and the global disaster of Fyre Festival, the show invites audiences aboard the “Trainwreck Express” for a delirious journey through karaoke and algorithm driven disasters.

Combining crowd work and cabaret, Booted Rivalry (11th July) offers the butch 4 butch jock romance audiences have been waiting for. The show celebrates local butches, studs and mascs in a stage collaboration between the internationally celebrated queer diner parody Booters and multi award winning drag king Fabio Lezonli. On Our Backs (WIP) (15th July) is a cabaret fever dream inspired by the radical 1980s lesbian magazine of the same name. One half of Queer Noise, Grace Quigley will draw upon archival research and live confessionals, to explore queer longing, desire, motherhood and the logistics of being looked at. Award-winning clown and theatre maker Riss Obolensky (Healing King Herod, Soho Theatre) returns to Shoreditch Town Hall with Stinky Little Pilgrim (WIP) (16th July), a meditation on crisis and getting gloriously lost.

Blending classically trained vocals with theatrical séance chaos, Operotica: Lovers in Every Lifetime (17th July), promises a gothic journey through reincarnation, opera and queer love after death. Pteridomania (17th July) is a queer love story set against the backdrop of the 19th century fern hunting craze. Created by a collective of queer and gender non-conforming artists, the opera reimagines the form, while uncovering hidden histories of queerness, obsession and survival.

Closing the festival will be collaborators and sisters Tallulah and Mirabelle Haddon as they present Open your mouth, it’s snowing (18th July), a multisensory work exploring risk, desire and dehydration through expanded cinema and live image making. Following the story of an injured mermaid discovering human community, the performances touches on themes of intimacy and transformation.

Summer in The Ditch continues Shoreditch Town Hall’s commitment to artistic development, building on its wider work through STAMP (Supporting Theatre Artists and Makers of Performance). Through artist residencies, rehearsal support and development opportunities, the venue continues to champion independent performance and create space for artists to experiment, develop new ideas and connect with audiences. As part of the opening week celebrations, Shoreditch Town Hall will also host an Open Mic Night on Saturday 11th July, inviting creatives to test out new material in the venue bar hosted by Helen Highwater.

Ellie Browning Head of Cultural Programme comments, We’re very excited to announce the 2026 Summer in The Ditch programme. Shaped inherently by the artists who apply to take part, this year’s line-up features a butch Heated Rivalry night, punk-inspired performance art exploring medical misogyny, satirical responses to commercial immersive experiences and the rise of AI, and an experimental queer opera double bill.

Now in its third year, the programme has continued to build momentum, with more than double the number of applications than last year. In response we’ve expanded the programme to include a new Open Mic event, so that anyone who wants to try out material in front of an audience has the opportunity to. We’re looking forward to the return of artists from previous years trying new material and the new partnerships we’re building with this programme.

Summer in the Ditch has become not only a platform for supporting new experimental performance, but with two projects, Queer Noise and DYKE Systems Ltd., going on to be presented in our main spaces with guaranteed artist fees attached, its proof that the platform is a productive way for us to meet a wider group of artists, performance and ideas to continue to support and present as part of our curated programme. For audiences, Summer in the Ditch is an invitation to take a chance on new and experimental work, and we hope you’ll embrace that sense of risk and discovery alongside us. We can’t wait to welcome you!

Previous performers from Summer in the Ditch 2024, theatre company Fag Packet comment, The best thing about performing at Summer in the Ditch was the level of support that you receive from Shoreditch Town Hall. It was a really great opportunity for us to put something on its feet and having support from a venue, not just in terms of space but in terms of tech support, marketing support, support from producers and getting people through the door, really enabled our work to be seen for the first time – which was amazing!

Since performing at Summer in the Ditch, we have taken our show to the Edinburgh Fringe and are currently on our UK tour which is really exciting! It was from having spaces like Summer in the Ditch that gave us that initial platform to test stuff out.

Main Photo: Georgia Tasda at Bushwig 2019 (Photo credit Sean Sullivan)

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