The countdown has begun for Oxford's annual theatre festival, Offbeat! This year, the festival platforms innovative and exciting new work from an array of local artists.

Offbeat is Oxford’s very own fringe festival with quirky new shows, local performers and a whole host of artistic talent. This year, the week-long event takes place from Monday 9 to Sunday 15 September and offers a host of new drama, dance, spoken word, sound art and creative workshops.

With events across the city, there’s something for everyone. Highlights of the festival include stories of whimsical fantasy, slapstick comedy, and musical love matches, as well as bold and challenging work on knife crime, neurodiversity, chronic pain, migration, and coming out.

Taking place at the Old Fire Station, Oxford Playhouse, New Theatre and on Gloucester Green, there are lots of ways to get involved and join in the fun!

Eight reasons to come to Offbeat

You don't have to spend a penny!

Offbeat has plenty of free stuff going on during the week, including The Trap, a madcap open-air slapstick performance for all the family, and a host of late-night gigs including a comedy scratch night, poetry slam night, as well as a listening party platforming Oxford artists. There’s also a wonderful array of creative workshops - try making clay lamps, visit the poetry pharmacy or print, paint and collage a picture.

Along with all that, Offbeat offers the chance to join a free day-long music facilitation training event and get involved in a festival performance by learning a song to sing on stage as part of Starling Session’s exuberant festival closer.

The festival supports local artists telling local stories

Offbeat works hard to support local artists, with almost all of our acts coming from the local area. Offbeat supports artists as they take their first steps to the stage, and this year, 10 of its 30 events are Offbeat Supported Artists. These artists have received funding to develop and stage their shows as well as mentoring, space to rehearse and access to a series of skill-building workshops. With devastating cuts and underfunding seen across the arts, Offbeat is a crucial first step for many early career performers.

Local spoken word artist RAWZ from the Leys brings an exploration of the duality that defines Oxford in Portals and Parallels: Oxford’s Hidden Worlds, deaf Rose Hill artist Kulsima Monica Khatoon explores what it means to be seen in a mind-bending exhibition of augmented-reality artworks in Camouflage, while Troika Theatre’s Recollections is a documentary celebrating the incontrovertible power theatre has to bring people together.

You'll see shows for the very first time

Offbeat is delighted to introduce new talent and help support artists looking to develop their ideas for a new show ready for the stage. One such show is Motherhood, which examines the impact of knife crime and social exclusion. Another is written by attendees of a playwriting course at the Old Fire Station, exploring the story of a real-life fall from a carousel at St Giles Fair in 1892 and its modern-day repercussions in The Untold Story of Alice Breakspear. From the attached artists of Oxford Playhouse, the Playhouse Playmaker Showcase will present six script-in-hand extracts from their plays for the first time.

There are classic tales told from new perspectives

Offbeat hosts the ultra-contemporary new drama Electra Untitled at the Old Fire Station, a Physical Theatre adaptation of the Greek Tragedy by Sophocles. A commentary on society today, the piece spotlights women who provoke change in times of hostility. Dance, puppetry and visual storytelling reconstruct her story, which she owns and rewrites through the lens of the female gaze.

There are family-friendly shows

Along with an open-air performance of The Trap by Oxford-based, internationally acclaimed physical theatre artist, Joe Dieffenbacher, the Oxford duo WhatNot Theatre are back at Offbeat with their new show The Witch Without a Wand, a BSL witchy mystical mayhem of an adventure.

Offbeat aims to include the whole community

This year, the festival funded two community projects, including one with KEEN Oxford, a charity running social, sporting and creative activities for disabled young people in the city. They have been working with musician Easy Chalmers to write original songs, produce a music video and document their creative process.

The festival also works with the global folk community orchestra Starling Sessions. Through the people of Oxford, they have been exploring traditional music from around the world, with each band member bringing a song to share to assemble a musical mosaic of Oxford.

There's no shying away from difficult themes

Along with loads of fun stuff, Offbeat encourages artists to tackle serious issues in original ways. This year’s programme includes shows that explore managing a cancer diagnosis in your twenties in Cancer B*tch! , violence against women and cancel culture in She Vanishes in the Air, neurodiversity and its impacts inHEAD, an exploration of EU migration, Catholic families, and the courage to come out in the musical Have you met Stan?, and a piece of magical realism about the things we lose and how we grieve them in Deluge,

There's no shortage of fun stuff either!

It is a festival after all, and fun is at the heart of it all! You’re bound to love shows such as the weird, wonderful and downright hilarious Live & Peculiar, the suspension of real life in I’ll be Back where a Terminator rebuilt with Windows 95 returns to the past to discover what it means to be human, and a woman's surreal journey as she receives daily aerial deliveries in Pigeons in Transit.

There’s also an exciting dance event featuring three different performances: Anthology of Touches, a dance duet exploring memories and lived experience of touching and being touched, Don't Tell Me What Bharatanatyam Is, an experimental performance that will challenge your perceptions of Indian classical dance, and Renegade Master, a vibrant celebration of Queerness woven with a critique on privilege and societal politics.

Join Offbeat for the festival launch at the Old Fire Station Cafe on Monday 9 September at 6.30pm for a preview of the festival lineup.