August rolls around, and my city becomes an overstimulating playground of thousands of shows, countless posters, and the streets are crowded. Like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun last year and saw waaay too many things, so this year was a real effort in restraint and energy management. While I did still get exhausted from all the socialising, late nights and constant noise, I took in a real variety that was mostly brilliant. So here’s the recap…

Starting with the biggest festival, the Fringe. From circus to stand-up comedy, musical theatre to cabaret, dance to drag and theatre to someone clowning as pickled vegetables, I saw all sorts. I loved the poetic beauty of Wright & Grainger’s gig theatre Orpheus that filled my heart with their colourful descriptions of being in love. I smiled all the way through Sarah Bradley’s Not Like Other Girls in which she does a powerpoint presentation about embracing the beautiful joy of being a girlypop. Michelle Brasier had me laughing and crying in equal measure with her show It’s a Shame We Won’t Be Friends Next Year – chaotic ADHD theatre kid energy celebrating creative safe spaces for the weirdos. Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett rocked with cool Berlin energy, and an incredible line up of acts. It was both fun and fiesty and political and moving.

Among contortionists, drag, fire breathing and singing, there was the most incredible aerialist: Jarred Dewey. I realised that I’d seen him do trapeze a couple years ago in a Kaye Hole show, and I was obviously impressed back then. But since I’ve been training aerial for a year and a half and I have such an appreciation for just how difficult everything they’re doing with apparent ease is. Seeing a whole bunch of circus, aerial and acrobatics again this year was so inspiring, and I can’t wait to get back to class.

As ever, I had the pleasure of seeing friends and loved ones’ shows. It’s a joy to see what everyone has been working on, either from the tech desk, in the director’s seat or singing and dancing their butts off on stage. They worked on shows about empowering older women, celebrating queer joy, and just rocking out. I’m very proud to know so many passionate and talented people.

From the International Festival, all three shows I saw were fantastic and unique. The Dan Daw Show explored all the aspects of kink other than the actual sex, it was a beautiful and artistic demonstration of consent and accessibility and ultimately ended with an emotional reclamation of queer pride. Orpheus and Eurydice was a very unique combination of opera and circus and it was so visually stunning. Using aerial straps and acrobatics to elevate the drama of a journey to hell and back added so much, particularly watching Eurydice decent into hell as she died at the beginning. The orchestra were totally gorgeous too. Finally, Complicité and Nederlands Dans Theater’s Figures in Extinction was a stunning piece of physical theatre in three acts that explored nature, human connection and how we carry our ancestors as we live now. It was visually arresting and compelling.

For the last two weeks, we also had the Book Festival! I was very lucky to listen to several brilliant conversations about love, publishing, activism, cooking, cats and academia. Highlights of the book fest were cheering on my pal Alex Howard on his very own book talk, seeing the lovely Anahit interviewing Munroe Bergdorf, sharing lunch with Julie Lin alongside her Sama Sama cookbook launch at the gorgeous Elliott’s studio and hearing the incomparable genius R.F. Kuang talk about her new novel Katabasis, which I can’t wait to read.

My festival season wrapped up with Palestine: Peace de Resistance which was a genre-blending combination of clowning, sketch, stand-up, music, history and storytelling in equal measure silly and political by a captivating performer. And if that isn’t a perfect end to the festival, I don’t know what is!

I’m looking forward to hibernating through the next month (pretty sure this is what Green Day were singing about). Until next year!